I Wish I Were a Dog

On April 18, 2019, the poet Qubadi Jali Zadeh recited his poem “I Wish I Were a Dog” at the annual Galwezh Festival of Literature in Sulaimani, Kurdistan. With a number of prominent social and political figures in the front rows of the audience, including the governor and deputy prime minister, he began by saying the poem’s title aloud in several language—twice each in Arabic, then Farsi, then English—before launching into his reading of the Kurdish-language text. In the context of socially conservative contemporary Kurdistan, Jali Zadeh’s poem stands out as a radical cry for freedom from social and religious convention, and its performance on such a highly respected stage and before such an important audience immediately courted controversy. In an Islamic culture that typically considers the dog to be an unclean animal, the poem’s central metaphor immediately scandalized many of the listeners at its premiere. Dozens of recordings of Jali Zadeh’s performance were uploaded to the internet and shared; one popular version quickly amassed over 158,000 views. Luqman Barzinji, another contemporary Kurdish writer, explains, “I consider this poem to open a new path in Kurdish poetry widening the sphere of discussion. It is rebellious in nature and form, representing not a life in the mountains but the Kurdistan of the post-revolution era.”

In English, we sought to reproduce the conversational tone of “I Wish I Were a Dog,” which employs a more colloquial Kurdish than many contemporary poems, reflecting its narrator’s wish for a simpler, freer life. The poem ends with its titular refrain’s repetition in Persian and then Arabic, two languages commonly spoken throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, and while we considered translating these into languages with a closer cultural relationship to English, we ultimately decided to retain the originals, prioritizing the sociolinguistic context of the poem over any attempt to replicate the effect achieved with repetition of a phrase in a recognizable language whose listeners might understand with various degrees of fluency. Considering the religious skepticism expressed in “I Wish I Were a Dog,” the inclusion of the Arabic-language refrain strikes us as especially important. Because of right aligned text’s tendency to be overlooked by readers of left-aligned poems we did decide to position both languages’ texts immediately below the English, though they still read right to left.