Within those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed building, a particular sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A picture spread on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into verse, mourning into longing.

The Work as Defiance

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 recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to vanish.