We speak here about the practice and politics of Kurdish translation, female representation in Kurdish literature, and the future of Kurdish literary works, culture, and understandings through digital archival projects.
Holly Mason Badra: Can you talk about the project and translation process for Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry?
Farangis Ghaderi: Women’s Voices from Kurdistan was the result of a collective initiative with my colleagues Clémence Scalbert Yucel and Yaser Hassan Ali. The idea behind it was that, as scholars and researchers of Kurdish literature, we were very aware of the invisibility of Kurdish literature in the world literary arena. The translation of Kurdish literature is emerging but still not comparable with other Middle Eastern languages. At Exeter, there were a number of Ph.D. students and researchers working specifically on Kurdish literature and we had been engaged in translation as part of our research, but these translations often remained unpublished (in theses or dissertations). Occasionally, some translations were published in scholarly publications, but they were only excerpts of the literary pieces and not the entire work. At the time, none of us considered ourselves literary translators.
We also thought about how works published in academic outlets don’t reach a larger public audience. Reflecting on these issues and realizing our potentials, we hosted a translation workshop in 2017 that was led by Dr. Yucel and made possible by an outreach grant (by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq; BISI), where Ph.D. students working on Kurdish literature came together with researchers at the Center for Kurdish Studies at Exeter and colleagues in translation studies. Each participant had their own selections, but the overall theme was gender, with preference for female poets. Together, we practiced translation and held discussions for two days. After this workshop, Clémence, Yaser, and I continued to meet, discuss, and work on the translations and polish them. We presented our translations in a number of festivals in the UK and began thinking about publishing them. We then approached Transnational Press London about publishing the collection, and they were very enthusiastic about it.
It was important for us to publish in an outlet that allows the publication of the original Kurdish language as well as the English translation. The collection includes poems from the nineteenth century to contemporary female poetry, written in various Kurdish dialects (Gorani, Kurmanji, Badini, Sorani) and in Arabic.
HMB: When did you first start working in translation and what has that journey been like for you?
FG: I started translating into English while pursuing my Ph.D. My research was on the emergence of modern Kurdish poetry. I had to translate classical and modern poetry in three dialects (Kurmanji, Sorani, Gorani) as part of literary analysis. The workshop I described above was foundational for me as a translator—following the workshop, Dr. Yucel and I conducted a research project on English translations of Kurdish literature which is now published. Both the workshop and the research project helped me to become aware of trends in English translations of Kurdish literature—the biases that translation can produce or reproduce and the politics of translation itself. I became more aware of the question of access and the politics of access. How a certain group of translators—in our case, a group of mostly Kurdish researchers at Exeter—were not thinking of ourselves as translators even though we were translating. Translation was part of our job. I began thinking about questions of confidence, exclusions, access (which is limited for Kurdish scholars). The journey has been one of gaining confidence and understanding what translation involves. It has been an educational process, too.
HMB: Why is it important to you to translate Kurdish writers and specifically to highlight Kurdish female voices?
FG: Kurdish literature is a very rich literature with a long history. Why is it not widely translated? Why is it not visible? Part of it is the position of the Kurdish language as a minoritized language. However, it’s really important to remember that the minority position has been imposed on Kurds and the Kurdish language—there are 30-40 million Kurdish speakers. It has a much larger number of speakers than some European languages that are not classified as minority languages. The minority position is a political, cultural, and social designation, which has to be challenged.
Translation makes literature visible. It offers the visibility of world languages. For me, translation is a commitment—a way of illustrating my commitment to making Kurdish literature known. To make this incredible literary heritage heard. It deserves to be heard. And it can be. Translation is a way of resistance—resisting the political suppressions that the Kurdish language has faced. The bans in its homeland. Translation can challenge that exclusion. I talk about the exclusion of the Kurdish language in the world literary arena, but within Kurdish literature, it’s important to realize Kurdish is a multi-dialectal language and even within the language we have certain exclusions and hierarchies. It’s important for me to be aware of that as a scholar—to make sure the linguistic minorities and less prioritized dialects are heard, too. In my study with Dr. Yucel, we demonstrated that Sorani is the dominant literary dialect that has been translated. Gorani and Zazaki are almost nonexistent in translation. Notably, Gorani was the lingua franca of Kurdish literature and Kurds until the nineteenth century. When you exclude such an important dialect, you’re excluding the heritage of many centuries.
The hierarchy is not only in the dialects though. If you look at Kurdish literary historiography and anthologies in English translation, women are extremely marginalized. So, for me, it is important to challenge these layers of exclusion.
HMB: Can you talk more about your continued work to uncover female voices in Kurdish poetry and literature?
FG: This is the project I am working on now. If you look at the history and image of Kurdish literature, it’s a very male-dominated image. If you look at classical literature, you only see a few women. This male-centered, male-dominated image continued until the 1980s when the existence of literary women was acknowledged. Even since then, the image of a male-dominated Kurdish literature is one that has been reinforced in academic research and studies, in translation, and in anthologies.
For example, one of the most comprehensive accounts of Kurdish literature (a Kurdish literary history of seven volumes, from medieval times to 1975, the result of decades of work), has over 160 entries, and only two women are represented. Volumes five, six, and seven, covering the twentieth century, include a hundred entries, and there is not a single woman listed. The problem is that this has become a primary source for teaching and research in Kurdish literature—a primary source taught at universities. So, this sends the message that there are no women in Kurdish literature historically. It gives the idea that it is only recent phenomena that Kurdish women began writing, as if there was no noticeable literature by Kurdish women before the 1980s.
But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation. I am currently working on translations of Kiche Kurd. When you look at early Kurdish periodicals, you come across other writers writing under pen names like Kiche Kurd, such as Xoshke Kurd (“Kurdish sister”)—there are clearly female writers yet to be discovered. Looking at archives, I see that some female writers started their career with pen names that were male or gender-neutral. For example, contemporary writer and poet Samia Shaker wrote and published her first collection under the pen name Meshxel, which means “torch” and is a gender-neutral name. It’s only through archival research that we can uncover these female voices.
As another example, in classical literature in the Gorani dialect, one prominent female name is Mastoura Ardalan. A manuscript was discovered in a Berlin library that contains Gorani poetry, including her writing as well as a poem by a poet called Sultan Xanim (under the pen name Ezet), who was the sister-in-law of Mastoura and sister of Mastoura’s husband Khosro Khan Ardalan, the governor of Ardalan Principality. Reading Mastoura’s poetry, we find that she addressed her sister-in-law in her writing, and she also wrote a poignant elegy for her death. It’s likely they had poetic conversations with each other. We haven’t yet uncovered much more of Ezet’s poetry, but if one poem has made it into an anthology, she must have been a recognized voice and must have more work out there.
HMB: You talk about perceptions and assumptions around women writers in general but especially in lesser translated dialects, like Bahdinan. Can you speak to the work you are engaged in to highlight women writers of non-prominent dialects? And overall your desire to translate and highlight work of dialects and writers who are not necessarily well-known?
FG: Even in contemporary writing, the dismissive notion of a lack of women’s voices still persists. In 2019, Clémence, Yaser, and I conducted research looking at women’s voices in contemporary Iraq and started research in Bahdinan, where a variety of Kurmanji is spoken (Sorani is the dominant dialect in Iraqi Kurdistan/Southern Kurdistan). When I told a male colleague that the purpose of our research trip was to interview female Bahdinani writers, he suggested that I was wasting my time—he said, there are no women writers there. They urged me to go to Suleymaniyah (known as the cultural capital). You see, the hierarchies of dialects and political fragmentation in Kurdistan is a reality. It also means that women face double marginalization, or in this case triple marginalization, given that Bahdinani is a minority Kurdish dialect and is not prioritized.
There is not enough awareness of the amazing work that these women writers are producing. Many are not aware of them because of these assumptions that there aren’t women writing in Bahdinan. However, we met many fantastic writers there, novelists and poets. In a recent visit to Kurdistan, I met the poet Jiyan Refiq Hilmi, in her late seventies, who has written in Arabic and Kurdish but is not noted in any anthologies of contemporary poetry. Her poetry collection in Arabic was published only in 2021. I would like to add that her eldest sister, Dr. Pakize Refiq Hilmi, founded the first Kurdish language and literature program in Iraq at Baghdad University. Nonetheless, Pakize Refiq Hilmi’s name is erased in Kurdish literary historiography. She published her memoir but it is not accessible, due to its very limited distribution, and I only received a copy of it from Jiyan herself.
Side-lining and demoting women’s creative writing is not exclusive to Kurdish women, but the multiplicity of forces affecting them makes things more complicated. As well as patriarchy, a complex web of exclusions—statelessness, cultural and linguistic suppression, the hegemony of the state languages, Kurdish geographical, political, and linguistic fragmentation, the power relationship between the Kurdish dialects and the marginalization of small dialect groups—have compounded upon their dominated status.
HMB: What are some of the difficulties or hurdles you face in translating from Kurdish dialects into English? What are some of the most joyful moments?
FG: There are many challenges. For me, the most challenging is translating classical poetry, because the language in classical poetry is highly elaborate and multi-layered. There are many allusions which, together with the highly figurative language produce layers of meaning, and I have found it’s impossible to convey that layering. It’s impossible to convey all the layers of meaning in the Kurdish language when translating it into English; some are lost inevitably in the translation. In Kurdish classical poetry, there are many references to mythology, to Persian lit, Arabic lit, Kurdish myth, Iranian myth. What do you do with all these allusions? You have one word in the poem, but it’s an allusion to an entire myth—do you add a footnote which then stops the flow of reading? And then the footnote takes up so much of the page. We had this conversation when publishing Women’s Voices From Kurdistan—in the end, we decided not to include footnotes to avoid distraction. The question is: How do you translate so you minimize the loss? It’s inevitable, of course, but I try to figure out in the translation process how to minimize this loss.
For example, looking at a poem from Mahwi that my friend Raha Rafii and I translated—there is one line from the ghazal with a direct translation of “If like Shaykh I do not choose the religion of Tersa what am I to do.” This is a reference to a Sufi story in the famous book The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, and on top of that, varieties of this story exist throughout Kurdish literature and folklore. Shaykh San’an was a renowned Sufi scholar and religious leader, and he fell in love with a Christian girl. She gave the condition that she would only be with him if he renounces Islam, and he does so—he renounces his religion. The poet, Mahwi, is getting at the idea of . . . if I don’t follow the path of love, what am I to do?
So, how to translate this? This allusion is very significant because it connects to the rest of the lines in the poem and the poem’s main theme of the need for self-loss on the path of love, of being lost in order to follow love . . . So, in the end, we translated it to: “If I do not choose Shaykh Sanʿan’s path of heresy for love, what am I to do?” We added the ‘path of heresy for love’ to give the context, hoping that a curious reader might search and find the story’s variations. Still, you can’t really convey all the layers that exist in that line.
The final translation (including the original script and the transliterated Latin alphabet):
لەگەڵ دەستی مەلا ڕێ ناکەوێ زونناری زوڵفی یار
وەکوو «شێخ» ئیختیاری مەزهەبی تەرسا نەکەم، چ بکەمLe geł destî mela rênakewê zunnarî zułfî yar
Wekû Şêx îxtîyarî mezhebî Tersa nekem çi bikemThe mullah cannot touch the Beloved’s sacred braid
If I do not choose Shaykh Sanʿan’s path of heresy for love, what am I to do?
Another challenge in classical poetry, specifically, is when the poem is multilingual. The classical poets were writing easily in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Kurdish. It was a common practice. Because of this, you find many Arabic and Persian words even when poets were writing in Kurdish. This isn’t because of an absence of Kurdish words; it’s done innovatively and playfully. This becomes a challenge . . . How to translate that playfulness and ingenuity in the translation? The multilingual references are somewhat lost in the English translation.
As for the joys in translation! It’s when a piece is circulated. When a translation is circulated, and it attracts attention, and people are excited to read it! That’s the joy of it! After the publication of Women’s Voices from Kurdistan, a few people got in touch and wanted to know more about certain poets in the book. I was really pleased that this translation had instigated an interest and curiosity for research and further study of these previously unknown voices.
HMB: I would love to hear more about the Kurdish Digital Archival project you are working on.
FG: The Digital Kurdish Archive is the Kurdish component of the Digital Archives of Middle East Project (DAME) at the University of Exeter. The goal is to create an open-access digital archive of Kurdish materials—historical, cultural, and political materials of Kurdistan. It is significant because these materials are scarce, and there is the challenge of accessibility due to geographical distance and other barriers, for instance political, to accessing such documents and materials. It’s important to note that displacement, war, the banning of the Kurdish language, and the denial of Kurdish identity has endangered the existence of Kurdish heritage. What is significant about the archives in Kurdistan is that they bring to light many neglected and forgotten sources, documents, and materials.
Making these resources available for researchers across the globe will transform the understanding of Kurdistan and Kurdish history and culture. This visibility will drive new ways of thinking about Kurdistan. It will drive new research and scholarship. This will be a more inclusive approach to the study of Kurdish history, politics, and culture, because it recognizes Kurdish knowledge production and takes into consideration Kurdish documents and knowledge. It will be transformative for the field of Kurdish studies.
I just spent six weeks in Iraqi Kurdistan looking through Kurdish archives—private and public. There’s an assumption that Kurdish heritage is lost, which is unfortunately true in some ways, but what I discovered in this research trip is that a significant portion has been preserved. This has to be celebrated and brought to light. Studying these resources will transform our understanding of the past and present, and digitization is essential for our endangered archives. It ensures preservation and dissemination, which will protect cultural diversity of the region and inspire new research.
HMB: Is there a poet you’re currently translating that you are particularly excited about? Can you give us a snippet from one of those translations?
FG: Mahwi. I have a couple translations of his work recently published in Circumference Magazine. I really love these couplets from “Untitled Ghazal”—
I turned myself to dust under the Beloved’s feet, yet I was
rebuffed
If I do not place a world of grief on my shoulders, what am I
to do?The once-bustling city of love is somber and silent
If I do not rebel by pen, as madness dictates, what am I to do?
Dr. Farangis Ghaderi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She is currently principal investigator of the Kurdish section of the Digital Archives of the Middle East (DAME) at the University of Exeter. She is the co-editor of Women’s Voices from Kurdistan (2021) and author of several peer-reviewed articles on Kurdish poetry and Kurdish literary history. She is also a translator and has translated Kurdish Sorani and Gorani poetry into English. Dr. Ghaderi has worked in Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, and the United Kingdom. She is associate editor of the Kurdish Studies Journal and co-editor of the Kurdish peer-reviewed journal, Derwaze.
Holly Mason Badra received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University where she is currently associate director of the Women and Gender Studies program. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews appear in The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, UA Poetry Center Blog, CALYX, So to Speak, and elsewhere. She has been a panelist for OutWrite, RAWIFest, and DC’s Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here events as a Kurdish-American poet. Holly is currently on the staff of Poetry Daily and lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and dog.
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