In the dust and debris of a collapsed apartment block in Tehran, a single, scarred object told a story of survival. It was a book, translated from English to Persian by Amir Mehdi Haghighat, its pages singed but its words still legible. This poignant discovery, amidst the devastation of missile strikes, crystallised a profound truth for the translator: the act of moving stories between languages is a vital form of resistance, ensuring meaning endures when everything else can fall away.
The Night the Bombs Fell
On 13 June 2025, missiles from Israel began striking Iran's capital. There was no warning siren, only the sudden, violent shock of explosions. The city's internet was severed completely. Haghighat was in his apartment at the time, immersed in translating Jhumpa Lahiri's Translating Myself and Others, a meta-text on the very craft he was practising. As buildings crumbled around him, he worked on a manuscript arguing for the endurance of meaning—a stark contrast to the chaos outside.
His professional life ground to an abrupt halt. A book ready for print was stranded at a shuttered printing house. Bookstores closed. The threat became so immediate one night that he and his family were forced to flee to a basement car park for shelter. Lying there, his mind turned to his personal library—a lifetime's collection of dictionaries, rare volumes, and every book he had ever translated. "That library was my lifework," he reflected, "and I didn't know if I, or it, would survive the night."
Translating Destruction into Meaning
The bombardment fractured daily life and severed connections. His partner and daughter left for what they believed were safer towns, only for those places to be hit later. The emotional state of the city shifted like unpredictable weather, cycling through fear, outrage, and numbness. Practically, the loss of electricity and internet crippled his work, removing the instant searches and references that are the translator's essential tools.
Yet, everywhere he looked, people were engaged in a form of translation. He witnessed a woman painting at an easel before her ruined home, refusing to let silence win. The death of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi saw her final poem—"I will end / I burn / I’ll be that extinguished star"—go viral alongside her image. An elderly woman with Alzheimer's, confused by the blasts, wandered the streets calling for a son lost decades prior in the Iran-Iraq war, tragically translating present trauma into a search for a past loss.
The Scarred Book and a Quiet Defiance
Amidst this, Haghighat continued to translate. He worked on James Thurber's Many Moons, a children's story about reaching for the impossible, which felt like a metaphor for an elusive peace. He translated Lahiri's passages about Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who, from his prison cell, demanded more dictionaries and made language study his "predominant activity". For Gramsci, translation was "a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor" all at once.
Then, he saw the photograph. On a news site, amid the ruins of another apartment, lay one of his old translations. The book was battered and ash-stained, but intact, his name visible on the cover. For a translator, a profession of deliberate invisibility, this was his work made starkly, painfully visible. "I stared at the image for a long time," he wrote.
In that moment, Lahiri's assertion that "all translation is a political act" took on its full weight. The scarred book in the rubble was testament to a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear. To translate under bombardment is to insist that a voice matters and will not be erased. It is not merely about carrying stories across linguistic borders, but about anchoring them firmly so they remain standing when the structures around them have turned to dust.
