Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

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

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: swift dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into lines, mourning into search.

Translation as Persistence

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 heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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

I gazed upon 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.