Among the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Converting Pain

A picture circulated on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.