Kareem Abdulrahman, Translator
Kareem Abdulrahman lives in London, where he is editorial head of Insight, a monitoring and analysis service focusing on Kurdish and Iraqi affairs. Originally from Silêmanî in South Kurdistan, he is also a prominent literary translator from Sorani to English. He has translated and published two novels by the author Bachtyar Ali: I Stared at the Night of the City (Periscope, 2016) and The Last Pomegranate Tree (Archipelago, 2023).
At our November 4, 2023, meeting, the Kurdish Book Club hosted Kareem Abdulrahman. We had read and discussed The Last Pomegranate Tree several months earlier and admired the translation. So we were eager to talk to him about his work. Here is a summary of his remarks, arising from our questions, edited for clarity and length.
We began by asking him how and why he decided to become a literary translator:
I was always interested in literature, and at University of Silêmanî, I studied English and literature. But after I graduated in 1998, there were more jobs in journalism and translating than in creative writing, so in Silêmanî my career panned out a different way.
Then in 2004 I got a scholarship to study journalism in London. Two years later a job came up at the BBC unit called BBC Monitoring. They monitor local media around the world, print, broadcast, radio, and social media. Media specialists who work there, called Monitoring Journalists at the time, need to speak at least one other language fluently, which I did. I worked there as a Kurdish media and political analyst from 2006 until 2014.
But translation was only a small part of that job. I also had to be a journalist, writing reports based on what I’d monitored and was relevant to our customers, like a demonstration in Silemani. Or I’d write analysis of an election coming up in Bashur, Iraqi Kurdistan, pointing out the major players, discussing the campaigns, etc., like this one. Sometimes I would translate a whole speech, so that BBC journalists and others who received our material could pull out quotes for their reporting. Other times I’d paraphrase a speech in my own words.
In any case, I’ve been writing in English on a daily basis since 2004. We were always checked by an editor, or we’d check each other’s reports. It was an excellent way to improve my English.
Ali’s 2008 Novel
In 2008 Bachtyar Ali’s novel Ẍezelnus u baẍekanî xeyal (Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination) was published. It’s a complex philosophical novel, with many subplots, many layers, and multiple narrators. There’s a lot of wonderful magic in the novel, and Sufism, and ideas about love and revolution—it’s very philosophical.
Its publication was a phenomenon. Most Kurdish authors in the Middle East are just glad to have their book published at all—they don’t get paid any royalties or are paid a very small amount, and the print runs are small, maybe only 2,500 copies. But Bachtyar had been an established writer since the 1990s, with his own following. For this novel, his publisher paid him a huge advance ($25,000) and gave the book a large print run (10,000 copies).
I contacted the BBC News website and pitched them a story about Kurdish novels and this remarkable publishing deal. Would they want to run it as a cultural item, instead of the usual stories about wars from that part of the world? They said yes. So I read the novel, interviewed Bachtyar, and wrote a report for the BBC site.
Then I thought, maybe I should write a review of the book in English, so more people can know about it. I pitched the story to The Times Literary Supplement. They accepted it and in fact made it a cover story, which was great for a book that was not yet available in English. A BBC radio program called The Strand interviewed me, and I thought my role would end there.
A Literary Translation?
One day a New York literary agent wrote to me, saying he was fascinated by the book and wanted to get it translated and published in English. Did I know any professional Kurdish-English literary translators? I said no—no Kurdish novels had been translated into English, so there were no professional, prose translators. But I’d been translating nonfiction as a journalist for a long time, and I was a student of literature, and I’d be happy to try it.
The agent asked me to translate 15,000 words as a sample, the opening 40 pages. I’ll try to find a publisher, the agent said, but I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to. If we do find one, they’ll discuss terms and such, and your sample will become part of the book. But if we fail, you’ll not be paid for your work. That’s how it goes, especially with translated fiction.
You have to understand that the Anglophone publishing world is very different from that of the Middle East. In the Middle East publishing houses are more like printers. They will print a book with little editorial oversight and little planning, and give you little payment. In the US and UK, there’s lots of editing and planning.
Writing the Sample
At that time I was working full time at my day job just outside London. I worked on the sample on weekends, and while commuting on the train.
I’d never done this before and wanted feedback on the sample, so I spoke to a couple of contacts who had translated into or written in English. A few people at BBC also helped, but mostly it was Melanie Moore who helped me. She is English, and translates from French, Russian, and Greek and is very well read, and an excellent reader. She went over my sample pro bono, as her contribution to Kurdish literature.
Six months later, I went back to the agent and gave him what I had.
By this time it was post-2008, the financial crisis had happened, and the world of culture had taken a hit. Things are riskier now, the literary agent explained to me, and I don’t think I can find a publisher for your book anymore. Kurdish literature is unknown, he said. You speak highly of Bachtyar Ali, but there’s almost nothing about him or Kurdish literature on the internet. I didn’t blame him because he couldn’t even find two articles on why Bachtyar Ali’s books deserved to be published in English, and why he should take a risk. But then he also said: There is a publisher for this book, and if you are willing to look long enough, you will find them. And that was that.
“Very little has been written about Kurdish literature. I tell you, here is one of the most important things you can do. If you are an academic, write a paper about a Kurdish novel, and make a case for why it’s good. One day, if a publisher is trying to decide whether to publish an English translation of that book, they will look for voices like yours that make the case for it. Do your Ph.D. on a certain writer, and explain what themes he or she deals with, and why they are relevant.”
—Kareem
So I started looking for publishing houses in the United States and the UK. I started with university presses, because I was told they might be more interested. I initially had five, six encouraging responses but they didn’t lead anywhere. Then 20 or 30 rejection letters and a year later, I found a UK publisher, Periscope, an imprint of Garnet Publishing. We made a deal. Their terms were very basic, but I agreed to translate the rest of the book, and they would publish it.
The Translation Process
The Sorani title of Bachtyar’s book is “Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination,” but the publisher decided that that wouldn’t work in English. English speakers can’t even pronounce the sound of the first word (the gh in Ghazalnus)! Also, the word garden makes them think of fantasy books, which would be misleading. We looked at different options for a new title and finally decided to use the title of one of the book’s chapters, I Stared at the Night of the City.
I had a close collaborative translation process with Bachtyar Ali. He was open and available to discuss anything. If something didn’t make sense to me, I would make a note of it, then raise it with him. We’d go through each chapter, as I asked, “Why this word? Do you mean this, or do you mean this?” Then I’d incorporate his answers.
For example, the word xeyal in Sorani can mean either “imaginative” or “imaginary.” The book’s language is poetic, and in some sense either could have worked. But in English, they’re two very different things, and Bachtyar himself meant one or the other. So I sat down with him and went through every single instance of that word and asked which meaning he intended each time, and made changes accordingly.
Another example is the word rastî, which sometimes means “truth” and sometimes means “reality” or “realistic.” Sometimes those words are interchangeable, but usually they’re not, so again I had to go through the whole book and discuss what he meant in each instance, sometimes “truth,” sometimes “reality.”
When Bachtyar and I were finished, I turned the whole translation over to Melanie, who then went through it, jotting down her own questions. Then I’d go back to Bachtyar so he could answer her. We translated the whole book this way.
Dictionaries
A big problem I found was, we don’t have many good Sorani-English dictionaries and similar resources. The best one dates from 1960s [by C. J. Edmonds and Tofiq Wahbi], but Sorani has changed a lot since then. Also this dictionary is only around 250 pages long—what can you do with such a limited dictionary, with [the expansive vocabulary in] this novel?
Other Sorani-English dictionaries will just give a definition of the word, not the word in English. For example, for the name of a certain flower, they will describe it, not translate it.
Arabic and Farsi have better English dictionaries. I speak Arabic, and Farsi is close to Sorani. So sometimes if I couldn’t find the word in Sorani, I’d look it up in a Farsi- or Arabic-English dictionary. Or Bachytar and I would look it up in German, because he knows German from living in Germany. Sometimes we’d find an image of the thing on Google Images and ask people what it was.
People say writing is a lonely job, but being a Kurdish translator beats that, because you have to collaborate!
But that’s another problem. I had collaborators but no predecessors who had done literary translation of fiction from Kurdish to English. Sure, there are Kurds who speak good English, and there are some translators of Kurdish poetry, but it’s not the same as someone who has translated novels.
I have friends who translate from other languages, and when they have a problem, they take their question to an online forum and ask the members, how would you render this in English? They’ll get 10 great choices within 24 hours. If I do that, I’ll get a few answers, and all will be guesses.
I’m translating from a language that doesn’t have resources, including human resources.
Melanie turned out to be my sounding board. I’d tell her the context in the novel, like: “In this scene a man is talking to woman, and he’s heartbroken, and he uses this expression. In Kurdish it means this, but it can also mean this. My instinct is to put it this way, but how would you put it in English?” She would think about it and make suggestions, I’d research it and pick the best answer.
Publication
All this time, I was working on the translation part time, due to my day job. So it took me around 3 years to finish. Bear in mind we are talking about a tome of around 250K words—it’s over 600 pages long. But by then the publisher had internal problems and was restructuring—the whole editorial staff changed over, with new editors.
They were supposed to publish it within a year of receiving the manuscript, but instead it took them another two or three years. The editors at Periscope did a great job and returned the manuscript with a number of amendments and suggestions. It was finally published in 2016.
I promised myself I’d never go through this again. The publishing side of things is too hard. You have so many queries and rejections, contradictory messages, constant postponements. In one case, I asked a question, and somebody got back to me 18 months later.
Then out of nowhere I got an email from Archipelago Books in New York City. They said, we read your first translation of Bachtyar Ali’s novel, and we love it. Would you be willing to translate this other one, The Last Pomegranate Tree?
I told them I’m not a full-time literary translator—I have a day job. I would need time. They said fine, we’ll give you as much time as you want.
I followed the same process as before, working with both Bachtyar and Melanie. It took me two years, because I had to do it in bits and pieces. Then COVID hit, and Trump got elected, and a lot of government funding stopped. It affected Archipelago. They kept delaying publication. The book finally came out in January 2023. I Stared at the Night of the City was the first Kurdish novel to be translated into English.
The “Perfect” Translation
When I started translating back in my thirties, my idea was that for any given book, there was one perfect translation. But I’ve learned over the years that that is an illusion. All processes of translation involve an element of interpretation, whether you like it or not.
The English I speak comes from the places I’ve lived, the books I’ve read—from my context. If all of us tomorrow were to translate the same book, our English would affect how our translations come out. It’s like a play staged by different theater directors. Hamlet has been staged thousands of times, and every production uses the same words, but each one is different. As a translator, you and your culture and preferences will go into the translation you produce.
There’s no such thing as the perfect translation. It’s a creative process. Even the Kareem who translated that first novel is different from the Kareem of today. Looking back, I realize I would do certain things differently.
Sorani has its own rules and systems, and so does English, so of course the English version will be different from the original. Here’s one important example: in Sorani, it’s normal to have very long sentences. But English doesn’t generally like long sentences. One of Melanie’s first comments was that the sentences were too long.
I had to figure out what to do: should I keep the long sentences, or break them up? One editor gave me amazing advice. Think of it this way, she said. Is the writer using a long sentence in order to produce a particular effect? Maybe a character talks too much, or he is trying to make us feel that we are out of breath. If so, then yes, you have to reproduce the long sentence in English, or re-create a similar effect. If there’s a reason for the length, you have to imitate the original.
But if a sentence is long just because long sentences are normal in the original language, that’s a different story. You really can break up a sentence that’s half a page long. Or, if the writer does have a certain effect in mind, you might be able to produce it a different way in English. This is where creativity comes into play.
“Flavor”
In terms of the flavor of the original, some translators think they have to keep it exactly as it is; keep everything foreign. Other say, no everything has to be Anglicized. They’ll even change dinar to dollars because we want anglophones to understand it. So two extremes: keep it foreign, or keep it local. I’m in the middle of that spectrum. You can’t keep everything foreign, or you’ll lose your audience.
In a couple of places, I felt an explanatory footnote was necessary. For example, in one of the novels, the original said “after the uprising.” Every Sorani reader would know that that means 1991. For the English, I wanted to add a footnote, but publishers don’t like footnotes in fiction. So as long as I was 100 percent sure, I would change it to “after the 1991 uprising.”
Another case: when the original in some places refer to “the dictator,” every Sorani reader knows that that means Saddam. But In English I had to expand it to “the dictator Saddam Hussein.”
Bachtyar gives his characters names that have meaning. In some cases, when I felt he had done so deliberately, I translated the names, like Muhammad the Glass-Hearted. But for minor characters, I drew the line and didn’t translate the name. Most names have meaning anyway. Hiwa means “hope.” If the name’s meaning is relevant, I’ll translate it, otherwise I won’t. It’s a balancing game.
How to Support Translation Projects
We need creative ways to support Kurdish translation projects. Some cultures, like Sweden and Estonia, give grants to translators. They pay the translators, and then they also pay the publishers to bring the book to light. They even promote the work including through hosting book launches and the like.
We don’t have a Kurdish state to do that. The KRG hasn’t put its heart in the right place. Everything is too mired in KDP-or-PUK politics. Also it’s a small entity.
So maybe one day we’ll have a Kurdish organization in the diaspora that can fundraise to support Kurdish culture projects.
Plenty of Kurdish novels deserve to be translated into English, but English publishers need to have a way of finding out about them. A Kurdish cultural organization could choose 20 or 30 Kurdish novels that are worth translating into English. You could set up a website that summarizes their content, explains their themes and their relevance, and recommend them.
Kareem, thank you for your contributions to Kurdish culture.
I thank you for reading and for listening. I’m a big believer that all of us can contribute in different ways. We have different ways of doing it. One of the best ways is to introduce Kurdish culture and literature and to show people how we live and what we aspire to do.
