A Book Talk with Kareem Abdulrahman: "Politics of Literature and Translation: A Kurdish Translator’s Journey"

Abstract: After being held in a desert prison for 21 years, Muzafar-i Subhdan, a Kurdish peshmerga fighter in Iraq, desperately searches for his son, setting off on a quest guided by memory and myth in The Last Pomegranate Tree (Archipelago Books; 2023), by prominent Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. Set in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict, Ali’s magical realist novel – a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory – translated by Kareem Abdulrahman, reflects on the origins and reverberations of atrocity, probing fatherhood and the failure of revolutionaries when they come to power. 
 
Politics has at least two faces in the works of Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership and violence. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? 
 
Yet another face is the politics of literature: the Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the translator appears as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? What does it mean to translate from a language that still lacks reliable and authoritative resources, including dictionaries? 

Mr. Abdulrahman will discuss the challenges and the joys of translating from Kurdish into English. Effective translators do much more than spend hours at their desk racking their brains for the “perfect” word or phrase. Mr. Abdulrahman will describe some of these activities and tasks, and also the role of translators as a bridge between cultures. In a world where some politicians focus on short-sighted nationalism and building walls, what does it mean to be a literary translator and what does it entail?

Speaker: 

Kareem Abdulrahman: a translator and Kurdish affairs analyst. From 2006 to 2014, Kareem Abdulrahman worked as a Kurdish media and political analyst for the BBC, where translation was part of his job. He translated Bachtyar Ali’s I Stared at the Night of the City into English (UK; Periscope; 2016), making it the first Kurdish novel to be translated into English. His second translation, The Last Pomegranate Tree, also by Ali, came out in January 2023 (Archipelago Books). He is also the Head of Editorial at Insight Iraq, a political analysis service focusing on Iraq and Kurdish affairs. He lives in London.
 
Bachtyar Ali (who will not be present at this event) is one of the most prominent contemporary intellectuals from Iraqi Kurdistan. His novels have been translated into Persian, Arabic, Turkish, German, Italian, French and English, a renown very few authors writing in the Kurdish language enjoy. He has written nearly 40 books, including 12 novels, as well as a number of essay books and collections of poetry. In 2017, he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize in Germany, joining past recipients such as Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood and Javier Marías. He is the first author writing in a non-European language to do so. He lives in Cologne, Germany.

Moderators:

Kelda Jamison, PhD (University of Chicago), is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist. Her research and writing focus on the politics of language in Kurdish Turkey. She is Fellowship Program Manager at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Hevin Karakurt, Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature Stanford , is currently researching Kurdish literature in its multilingual and stateless context. She has previously translated poems from Kurmancî-Kurdish to German for Meral Şimşek and Sultan Yaray.”

This event is hosted by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford and Stanford Humanities Center.