{"id":30077,"date":"2023-11-28T10:06:53","date_gmt":"2023-11-28T08:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=30077"},"modified":"2023-11-28T10:50:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T08:50:36","slug":"on-the-herculean-task-of-translating-joyces-ulysses-into-kurdish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/on-the-herculean-task-of-translating-joyces-ulysses-into-kurdish\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Herculean Task of Translating Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> into Kurdish"},"content":{"rendered":"
Kaya Gen\u00e7 on the arduous<\/span> journey of translator Kawa Nemir.<\/span><\/h5>\n
Co-publishing with The Dial<\/a> (Paris)<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ulysses<\/span><\/i>, a novel by James Joyce<\/span>
\nTranslated to Kurdish by Kawa Nemir<\/span>
\nAvesta<\/a> 2023<\/span>
\nISBN: 9786258383416<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kaya Gen\u00e7<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

On June 15, 2012, at the age of 38, Kawa Nemir visited his family home in Istanbul, lay on his childhood bed and began translating the following sentence into his native tongue: \u201cStately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.\u201d The next afternoon, Nemir took the notebook with him, flew to Diyarbak\u0131r in eastern Turkey and continued translating the rest of James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> into Kurdish. It did not escape his attention that it was June 16, Bloomsday, the day during which Ulysses<\/em>, set in 1904, takes place.<\/p>\n

Nemir, a chain-smoking poet with intense eyes and a romantic bent, had spent a decade translating Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets into Kurdish. In Turkey \u2014 and increasingly in Europe, where many Kurds live in diaspora \u2014 bookworms have grown up on his translations of Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale and Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n

For Nemir, translating Ulysses<\/em> into Kurdish was a way to draw attention to a language that had been the victim of nationalist politics in Turkey. Kurdish, thought to be spoken by between 40 and 60 million people, is a West Iranian language from the Indo-Iranian language family. Inside Turkey, where the teaching of Turkish as a first language is mandatory, Kurdish faces a number of problems. Students at public schools can take Kurdish only as an elective, and there is a shortage of Kurdish language instructors because the government refuses to hire and appoint teachers who speak Kurdish at public schools. If, despite all these problems, a translator from Turkey who learned his native tongue on his own could translate Ulysses<\/em> into Kurdish, this would set an example for aspiring Kurdish writers and translators. It would also show Turks the breadth and wealth of the language that some of them had dismissed and belittled over the past century.<\/p>\n

The elder son of an affluent Kurdish family, Nemir was born in 1974. His own linguistic history mirrored that of many of his generation: While he spoke Kurdish at home, his school lessons were in Turkish and English. By the time he became a teenager, Nemir had forgotten Kurdish. Between 1990 and 1992, while studying at a high school in Istanbul, he devoted his time to regaining his Kurdish by studying the language each day. He decided to stop writing in Turkish, except for works of criticism.<\/p>\n

Nemir took to working in Kurdish instead. After graduating from college with a degree in English literature, he found work at Jiyana Rew\u015fen<\/em>, a Kurdish literary magazine, in 1997 and became its chief editor, encouraging contributors and readers to open their eyes to world literature and become more cosmopolitan. In the meantime, he began to translate works by Shakespeare and William Blake into Kurdish.<\/p>\n

The Kurdish artist and author \u015eener \u00d6zmen, a good friend of Nemir\u2019s, said that Nemir\u2019s translations of English classics, particularly his renditions of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets, gave \u00d6zmen himself the confidence to write in Kurdish. \u201cI used to write in Turkish but switched to Kurdish, partly thanks to [Nemir’s] passion for languages,\u201d he said. \u201cVery few people wrote in Kurdish in Diyarbak\u0131r, where I lived.\u201d Most Kurds didn\u2019t in fact know the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of Kurdish well enough to write in it, and chose to articulate the Kurdish experience in Turkish-language essays, poems and books instead. Nemir\u2019s work sought to change that. As an editor, he published \u00d6zmen\u2019s novella Rojniv\u00eeska Spinoza<\/em> (Spinoza\u2019s diary) alongside a Kurdish translation of William Blake\u2019s poem \u201cThe Tyger.\u201d This was an era of growing interest in, and partial political relaxation for, the Kurdish language. In 2009, the government lifted the ban on Kurdish television and radio broadcasting (Kurdish private broadcasting had been banned for decades). A Kurdish channel of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), the public broadcaster, launched that same year. In 2011, Mardin Artuklu University began offering a Kurdish literature major to undergraduates \u2014 a first in the history of Turkey. A year later, Kurdish entered the school curriculum as an elective. \u201cKurdish books became easier to reach,\u201d \u00d6zmen said. \u201cWe could go to a bookstore and see which new Kurdish titles were there. And the most exciting new voice was Kawa Nemir.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the poems from his first collection, 2003\u2019s Selpakfiro\u015f<\/em> (Handkerchief seller), Nemir plays with the anxiety of influence that comes from encountering such a range of authors. \u201cWild parsley \u2013 you don\u2019t know \u2013 has left its hue on the language,\u201d he writes in \u201cAfter the Rain\u201d (translated by Patrick Lewis):<\/p>\n

on the outskirts of the city the bogs bellow gently as water
\nthe radiant, alluring, wide-eyed reeds recite.<\/p>\n

Nemir encountered Ulysses<\/em> in high school English class. As he gained more experience as a translator and poet, he felt very strongly that this could be the text whose translation would reveal the extensive vocabulary and elaborate syntax of the Kurdish language, which had been subjected to centuries of assimilation.<\/p>\n

To translate Ulysses<\/em> into a language that few Turks could learn, Nemir thought, would silence those who mocked Kurds by saying they didn\u2019t even have a language. According to the Turkish state\u2019s official history, after all, Kurds were simply Turkish mountain people whose name arose from the \u201ckart-k\u00fcrt\u201d sound their boots made while walking in the snow. Nemir felt that Ulysses<\/em> was the text that gave English literature its prestige, with its structural, aesthetic and literary complexity. Nemir figured that if he could replicate Joyce\u2019s linguistic feat in Kurdish, with all its grammatical and historical texture, then nobody would be able to dismiss it as an inferior language.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The Kurdish edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses<\/em> translated to Kurdish by Kawa Nemir.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ulysses<\/em> begins early in the morning on June 16, 1904, at the top of a Martello tower along the water in Dublin, where the 22-year-old Stephen Dedalus is staying with the medical student Buck Mulligan. In translating the opening chapter into Kurdish, Nemir picked the word Til<\/em> to describe the Martello tower. For Nemir, the defensive forts of Ireland resembled watchtowers, or \u201cTils,\u201d in Mesopotamia \u2014 similar to those he saw in Diyarbak\u0131r, where many Kurdish citizens of Turkey live. He spent time in Birca \u015eems, one of the local towers, climbing to its top many times at the crack of dawn, when no one was around, to read and write. The Dublin Bay reminded him of the Tigris River and its valley.<\/p>\n

Nemir felt he had been preparing to undertake this translation his whole life, having filled dozens of notebooks with Kurdish words and expressions in his 20s. He kept Ferhenga Biw\u00eajan a mezin<\/em> (The Grand Dictionary), a dictionary of Kurdish idioms collected by the writer D\u00eelawer Zeraq, by his side. Zeraq had spent 20 years preparing this 2,000-page work, which contains 18,000 entries of idioms in Kurmanji, the most widely spoken form of Kurdish, which is often written in Latin script. But it was Nemir\u2019s own notebooks, filled with Kurdish idioms he overheard in conversation, that helped him the most.<\/p>\n

A notebook he kept during his 1998 visit to \u015e\u0131rnak, a village with rivers and forests, featured names of numerous freshwater creatures that later appeared in his translation of Ulysses<\/em>. In other sections of the novel, he struggled with matching Joyce\u2019s large vocabulary about the sea. After all, Nemir noted, Kurdistan is one of the most mountainous regions in the world, and Kurds never expanded far from the mountains. For the translator, the problem was finding Kurdish words for sea creatures that Kurdish writers had not mentioned in their works \u2014 and that thereby remained unnamed in the Kurdish language. He studied various genera of fish, trying to locate words used in Kurdish texts, turning to his notebooks. In 1994, Nemir had scribbled the word \u201cwhale-path\u201d in a notebook while studying Beowulf<\/em> in college. He knew that Kurds called whales neheng<\/em>, so he wrote in his notebook: \u201cwhale-path: r\u00eaka nehengan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kurdish poet Ehmed\u00ea Xan\u00ee\u2019s 17th-century epic Mem \u00fb Z\u00een<\/em>, a mystical romance about two star-crossed lovers, was among Nemir\u2019s main sources. He extracted names of ships from it: Xan\u00ee describes zenber\u00ees<\/em>, small vessels, sailing from Diyarbak\u0131r to the Persian Gulf. That came in handy when Nemir was working on \u201cCyclops,\u201d the 12th chapter of Ulysses<\/em>. If he couldn\u2019t find anything in Kurdish sources or his notebooks, Nemir coined words himself, basing them in Latin and Greek.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, he modeled his syntax off of Kurdish poetry. To translate \u201cOxen of the Sun,\u201d the 14th chapter of Ulysses<\/em>, which takes place in a maternity hospital during the birth of a son and surveils the beginnings and development of the English language, he drew upon Kurdish classical literature, and transposed the verse into the chapter\u2019s prose. Translating the chapter took him four years, as he pondered individual words for many months.<\/p>\n

Another notebook was just a dictionary of words Nemir had gathered from conversations with Kurdish convicts, words describing details about drinking alcohol, playing card games and having sex. For example, b\u00fbye<\/em> pilot<\/em>, an expression Nemir had heard from a convict while staying at a prison in Mardin, describes \u201csomeone ready for action in all hours of the day.\u201d But the word, which has a double meaning, can suggest both courage and drink. When describing Bob Doran, a character who suffers from a bad marriage in Ulysses<\/em> and attempts to escape it through an extravagant alcoholic binge, he wrote, \u201cH\u00ea di sa\u2018et p\u00eanca da b\u00fbye pilot<\/em>\u201d: \u201cBoozed at five o\u2019clock.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 30 of Nemir\u2019s notebooks comprised words he learned from his mother, who had a deep sense of the Kurdish language. \u201cI used all of those in Ulysses,\u201d he said. Among the words, proverbs, expressions and idioms his mother dictated to him were cagar\u00ea lih\u00eaf\u00ea<\/em> (\u201cquilt\u201d), \u2018ilm\u00ea s\u00eenemdeftera<\/em> (\u201clore\u201d) and ziman\u00ea maran li ber min qetand<\/em> (\u201cby your kind solicitations\u201d). \u201cI didn\u2019t know any of these words he used, and they were all Kurdish,\u201d \u00d6zmen recalled. Nemir said he considered those words, idioms, proverbs, metaphors and slang terms as \u201csaved from death because they found their place in Ulysses<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Fifteen million Kurds live in Turkey, but many Turks are unaware of the Kurdish language\u2019s deep historic roots and richness. Before 2002, Turkish authorities refused to acknowledge Kurdish as a distinct language spoken within Turkey\u2019s borders. Their policy was rooted in the Turkish nationalist project of forging a culturally and linguistically homogeneous nation. After the foundation of the republic in 1923, Turkish became the only official language, and this policy expanded to the ban of Kurdish names (names containing the letters X<\/em>, W<\/em>, Q<\/em>, \u00ce<\/em>, \u00db<\/em> and \u00ca<\/em>, which are not considered part of the Turkish language, were banned between 1928 and 2013) and a resettlement of populations aimed at weakening the demographic dominance of Kurmanji.<\/p>\n

Some bans were relaxed in the 2000s and the early 2010s, as part of the Turkish government\u2019s \u201cKurdish opening,\u201d and more Turks, not just Kurds, began to learn Kurdish. But in the last few years, after the government\u2019s democratic initiative on Kurdish rights came to a close, there have been growing tensions around Kurdish politics in Turkey. Meanwhile, despite growing interest in Kurdish, learning the language inside Turkey\u2019s borders is not a universal demand among Kurdish families. In 2019, a Kurdish research center in Diyarbak\u0131r conducted a survey of 600 Kurds between the ages of 18 and 30 in southern Turkey. Forty-four percent said they could speak their mother tongue, and only 18 percent said they could read and write it as well. When nine Kurdish parties established a \u201cKurdish language platform\u201d in 2018 to promote the use of Kurdish, they found that in numerous municipalities held by the pro-Kurdish HDP party, Kurdish-language signs had been taken down by government appointees. For Kurdish activists and intellectuals, this was further proof that the assault on their language remained unwavering.<\/p>\n

In translating Ulysses<\/em> into a language that, as he put it, \u201cmiraculously survived the hellish conditions of the Middle East for one thousand years,\u201d Nemir had one advantage: Kurdish, he found, is very close to Old English, as the syntaxes of Kurdish and English are quite similar. In Kurdish, which belongs to the same eastern branch of the Indo-European language group as English, the sentence order consists of the subject, the verb and the object, which is very similar to that of English. The linguists Robinson Paulmony and Shivan Mawlood Hussein point to how \u201cin English as well as Kurdish languages, simple, perfect and progressive aspects are distinguished.\u201d The sentence order is largely the same, so it\u2019s easier to create rhyming.<\/p>\n

\n

From 2012 to 2015, Nemir finished half of his translation of Ulysses<\/em> in Diyarbak\u0131r. But in 2014, months into this work, a chain of geopolitical events intervened in his life and the lives of his fellow Kurds. Across the Syrian border, the Islamic State group undertook genocidal acts against Syria\u2019s Kurdish-speaking Yazidi communities, exiling and executing men and forcing women and girls into sexual slavery. As its militants enslaved, tortured and executed Yazidis, the Islamic State group was finalizing its advance on the Kurdish town of Koban\u00ee in northern Syria. By September 2014, with 200,000 Syrians seeking refuge in Turkey, Kurdish volunteers from Turkey demanded to cross the border to defend Koban\u00ee. But the Turkish state didn\u2019t allow their passage and refused to intervene in the city\u2019s defense. This led to pro-Koban\u00ee demonstrations across Turkey. Protests in Mardin, Van, Bing\u00f6l and Diyarbak\u0131r resulted in curfews. By Oct. 8, 2014, 19 people had died in Kurdish demonstrations, and a week later, the death toll reached 31: at least one protester died by police fire; killers of some found shot on the streets couldn\u2019t be identified. In November, 15,000 Kurds marched in Diyarbak\u0131r, where Nemir was increasingly derailed from his Ulysses<\/em> translation.<\/p>\n

The first barricades for the Koban\u00ee protests were erected outside Nemir\u2019s apartment. Between focused bouts of translation, he would witness violent clashes on the street below his study\u2019s window and watch others on social media. After finishing a chapter, he would spend the night watching the aerial bombing of nearby cities Nusaybin and Cizre.<\/p>\n

But staying in Diyarbak\u0131r became too dangerous. In mid-2015, Nemir decided to resettle in Mardin, a city farther south, thinking that it would be calmer. He formed a group of proofreaders, mostly Kurdish literature students from the Mardin Artuklu University. Because each member came from a different background, they all brought new words to Joyce\u2019s text, calling the elders of their families in Hakkari, Van and Ad\u0131yaman to excavate words and then notifying Nemir of their findings.<\/p>\n

While looking at the translation of \u201cScylla and Charybdis,\u201d the ninth chapter of Ulysses<\/em>, for example, the group tried to come up with the meaning of the word \u201cjobber,\u201d Joyce\u2019s word for a black marketeer. One participant located the Kurdish equivalent, malgir<\/em>, in a phrase they encountered in the city of Hakkari, named after the Kurdish tribe Hakkar. There was also the Kurdish word for \u201cdiver\u201d \u2014 during a conversation in Mardin, Nemir learned that it meant xozneber<\/em> in Kurdish, a word used by elders during the 1980s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nemir spent 2015 and 2016 revising his Ulysses<\/em> with their input. His linguist friend Ergin Opengin, from the American University of Kurdistan, devoted hours to the project. Nemir\u2019s friend \u00d6zmen, meanwhile, worked on the designs of the paperback and hardcover editions of the book, and tried to keep up the translator\u2019s spirits by bringing him various copies of Ulysses<\/em> from London, Brussels, New York and Paris.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of 2017, Nemir saw that his activist, artist and journalist friends were leaving Turkey. On March 1, 2018, he went to the airport, taking a handbag, a coat, underwear, a pair of trousers, his Ulysses<\/em> notebooks and the Gabler edition of Ulysses<\/em>. He took a KLM flight to Amsterdam, leaving behind the Joyce archive he had collected for 27 years in Turkey, and arrived at Schiphol Airport at 10 p.m. The Dutch Foundation for Literature had accepted Nemir as a resident in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Around this time, Nemir met Aylin Kuryel and F\u0131rat Y\u00fccel, a couple from Turkey who would later direct Translating Ulysses<\/em>, a documentary about Nemir. Their film weaves the proofreading process of Ulysses<\/em> into Nemir\u2019s struggle to find an apartment during the housing crisis in Amsterdam. In Turkey, the International Istanbul Film Festival refused to screen Translating Ulysses<\/em>, which features footage of the violent suppression of the 2014 Koban\u00ee protests. Kuryel, the filmmaker, jokingly described Translating Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0as a \u201ccensored documentary about the translation of a book censored for its obscenity into a language that remains banned a century later.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nemir is most interested in what Kurdish authors will make of his translation. \u00d6zlem Bel\u00e7im Galip, a scholar of Kurdish literature at the University of Oxford, said she believes Nemir is \u201cone of the translators who see the Kurdish language as an ocean of flexibility and creativity where there is no limit.\u201d According to \u00d6zmen, the Kurdish Ulysses<\/em> marks a \u201cstarting point for all Kurdish writers, novelists and short story writers.\u201d<\/p>\n