Within the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move language across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image was shared on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, death into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name displayed 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to be silenced.