Among the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into image, loss into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined rejection to be silenced.