Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A photograph was shared online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, 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 lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.