Tehran translator finds his book amid rubble after missile strikes

A Tehran translator discovered a copy of a book he had translated lying amid the rubble of a collapsed apartment block after missiles struck the city.

Two days earlier, on 13 June 2025, the translator says missiles from Israel began striking Tehran. The internet was cut off, printing houses and bookstores closed, and the bombardment disrupted his work; at the start of the strikes he had been translating Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others. He and his family sought shelter in a basement beneath a parking garage and he feared for the survival of his library and the bookshelves that had been his lifework.

The translator describes seeing a photograph of the ruined building that showed one of his old translations, scarred but intact, with his name printed on the cover. A circulated image also showed a copy of Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, translated by Amir Mehdi Haghighat, among the rubble in Tehran.

Confronted with the image, he wrote that he felt the full weight of translation as a political act and an act of resistance: translating, even under bombardment, was to say “this voice mattered” and to refuse to disappear. He had not known, during the attacks, whether he, his family or his library would survive.

Key Topics

World, Tehran, Missile Strikes, Israel, Translation, Jhumpa Lahiri