In the rubble of a collapsed apartment building, one image stayed with me: a book I had translated from English into 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 June 13, 2025, missiles from Israel began striking Tehran. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. 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 move words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of speaking in another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, quietly, for the endurance of meaning.
Everything stopped. A book my publisher was about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran downstairs to 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 life’s work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
My partner left with her parents for what they thought were safer towns—places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city with her mother. As her train pulled away, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. The people closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.
During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment shattered my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation requires.
Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at my cousin’s house, every pane was shattered, the furniture damaged, broken household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.
A photograph circulated on social media of Parnia Abbasi: a 23-year-old poet killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image: I will end / I burn / I’ll be that extinguished star.
On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbors said she had lost a son in the Iran-Iraq war over 30 years ago, and now, with Alzheimer’s, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home—in any language.
We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, death into verse, grief into search.
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating Many Moons—James Thurber’s children’s tale of a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it held profound meaning for me then. Thurber himself, who gradually lost his sight after a childhood accident yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for—seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights of bombardment, I understood translation as something more than a literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.
One day, in broad daylight, explosions hit Evin prison in Tehran; in those same hours, I was translating Lahiri’s passages about the one-time leader ofAntonio Gramsci of the Italian Communist Party, writing from his prison cell, requested more dictionaries and insisted that studying language become his “predominant activity.” For Gramsci, translation was—as Lahiri describes it—”a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once. He once remarked that even if he were to be executed, he would spend the night before calmly studying Chinese.
Then I saw the photograph. It appeared on a news site, showing the ruins of another apartment building. There, among the debris, lay one of my old translations—scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, yet it felt black and white, lifeless amid the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as translators often are. But here was my work, made visible—damaged, yet enduring.
I stared at the image for a long time. Lahiri writes that “all translation is a political act,” but I had never felt the full weight of those words until that moment. To translate, even under bombardment, was to declare: “this voice mattered.” It will not be erased. Translation is not merely carrying stories across languages; it is helping them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the topic A moment that changed me in the bombedout ruins of an apartment block I saw a book I had translated
General Understanding
Q What is this story about
A Its a personal essay about an authortranslator who while visiting the ruins of a building destroyed in a war finds a copy of a book they had translated This unexpected discovery leads to a profound moment of reflection on connection loss and the power of words
Q Is this a true story
A The piece is presented as a personal narrative or memoir so it is based on a real lived experience of the author
Q Where did this happen
A The specific location is often not named in the title but the setting is explicitly a war zonethe bombedout ruins of an apartment block The context suggests it could be from conflicts in places like Ukraine Syria or others
Themes and Meaning
Q Why was finding the book such a powerful moment
A It created a stark personal collision between two worlds the abstract work of translation and the brutal reality of war where that work physically ended up It made the translators work viscerally real and connected them directly to the victims
Q What are the main themes of this story
A Key themes include the fragility of life and civilization the enduring power of art and literature even in destruction the unexpected connections created by translation survivors guilt and finding meaning in chaos
Q What does the book symbolize in the ruins
A The book often symbolizes resilience memory and human continuity Its a tangible piece of culture and normal life that survived the destruction representing hope and the idea that stories outlast violence
About Translation and the Authors Role
Q Why does the author being the translator matter
A It adds a deep layer of personal responsibility and intimacy They didnt just find any book they found a piece of their own labor their intellectual and emotional contribution now lying in rubble It forces them to question the purpose and reach of their work
Q What kind of book was it likely to be
A While not specified given the context it was likely
