Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into art, death into verse, mourning into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.