‘My library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night’
Photo created by Kkonda via Shutterstock/Nautilus Magazine
‘A moment that changed me: in the bombed-out ruins of an apartment block, I saw a book I’d translated’
‘The sight of my work, torn and singed but still legible, made me realise the importance of translating and protecting stories – so they remain when everything else falls away.’-Amir Mehdi Haghighat
‘In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.
Two days earlier, on 13 June 2025, missiles from Israel began striking Tehran. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Translating Myself and Others” – a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.
‘My library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night’
Amir Mehdi Haghighat pictured in Tehran, 2024 Photograph: Shabnam Gharebeglou/via the Guardian
‘Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to send to the press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement beneath the parking garage. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night…’- Continue to read
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