Within those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a particular vision remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into lines, mourning into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to disappear.