Date:
Location:
The Mahindra Re-thinking Translation seminar presents
Politics of Fiction and Translation: The Last Pomegranate Tree - A conversation with Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali, his translator Kareem Abdulrahman
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). Set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict, Ali’s realist magical novel – a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory - reflects on the origins and reverberations of atrocity, probing fatherhood and the corrupt world created by the Kurdish political class.
Abstract: Politics has at least two faces in Ali’s works. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. Why does their salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, lliterary 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.
Bachtyar Ali 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.
Kareem Abdulrahman is a translator and Kurdish affairs analyst. From 2006 to 2014, he 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.
Co-sponsors: Mahindra Re-thinking Translation seminar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Contact: Liz Flanagan