Among the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – 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 perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to vanish.