{"id":8028,"date":"2023-11-12T22:17:42","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T03:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/?p=8028"},"modified":"2025-02-15T17:35:45","modified_gmt":"2025-02-15T22:35:45","slug":"sherko-bekas-poet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/sherko-bekas-poet\/","title":{"rendered":"Sherko Bekas, poet"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

Sherko Bekas, poet<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Sherko Bekas<\/strong> (Kurdish: \u015e\u00earko B\u00eakes\u200e) (May 2, 1940 \u2013 August 4, 2013) co-founded contemporary Kurdish poetry and is widely regarded as the greatest Kurdish national poet of the 20th century. His writings r\"Sherkoesonate with themes of love, and nature, and freedom, even as, according to his translator Choman Hardi, he\u201cestablished himself as the poet of resistance and became the face of the liberation movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early life<\/h2>\n

He was born on May 2, 1940, in Sil\u00eaman\u00ee, Ba\u015f\u00fbr (South Kurdistan). As a child, his mother would tell him Kurdish stories, while his father, Fayak B\u00eakes, a pioneer Sorani poet in his own right, influenced his life choice. Bekas would later say, \u201cMy father<\/a> left a profound psychological motivation for me, inciting me to write and excel, especially because I was welcomed into society as a poet\u2019s son.\u201d  But when he was eight, his father died, and Bekas fell into extreme poverty. Only with difficulty did he complete high school.  <\/p>\n

At seventeen, he published his first poem in Zhin<\/em> newspaper. Its editor, the prominent modernist Kurdish poet Abdulla Goran<\/a>, seems to have mentored Bekas, imparting ideas of stylistic freedom, literary boldness, and social commitment.<\/p>\n

 In 1965, at twenty-five, Bekas joined the Kurdish liberation movement. He  worked for the radio station Deng\u00ea \u015eore\u015f\u00ea, whose name means \u201cVoice of the Revolution.\u201d He joined the Peshmerga and fought in the mountains. Writing poems about labor, enlightenment and hope, he described himself as \u201ca poet of resistance.\u201d  He developed into a nationalist poet, writing about Kurdish values, identity, history, and struggles.  But his poetry often reflected the daily experiences of the Kurdish people, including romantic love.<\/p>\n

Early publications<\/h2>\n

In 1968, he published the first collection of poems, Tir\u00eefey Helbest<\/em> (Moonlight Poems), still in a traditional style that relied heavily on strict rules of rhyme and meter. But by 1971 he broke with tradition in both form and content as he introduced the \u201cR\u00fbwange\u201d (vision) element into Kurdish poetry, which, according to his translators Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, and Sherzad Hassan, \u201callows<\/a> the poet to let his fantasies soar and even overcome the boundaries of language. The poet has nothing more than words to illustrate his philosophy. The same words must lend a melody to his thoughts, because \u2018a poem without music is like a bird without song\u2019, says Bekas. . . . A poet can open windows to the spring of life for us so that we can flee the chains of the present moment to those special moments of eternity, moments full of inspiration, which may even be beyond our imagination.\u201d With such an approach, Bekas infused \u201ctales<\/a> of heartache, and struggle with the fervor and fire of life and a revolutionary vision, a vision that he deemed essential for poetic sensibility and aesthetic transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four years later, in 1975, Bekas introduced the \u201cposter poem,\u201d a concept that has its origins in sculpture and painting. Poster poems<\/a> are micro-poems, brief in length but concentrated in focus; they are based on small or seemingly insignificant trivial or mundane objects, whose hidden realities are revealed through surprising and sometimes shocking twists, rendered in visually rich imagery.  They were published in 1975 in a collection that would be translated, in the 1990s, by Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, and Renate Saljoghi as The Secret Diary of a Rose <\/em>in 1975,<\/p>\n

Exile in Sweden<\/h2>\n

In the mid-1980s the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, impressed by Bekas\u2019s work, asked<\/a> him to write an epic that praised him\u2014he offered Bekas an award if he did. But the poet refused, and he had to flee, ending up in Sweden in 1986. There he lived in exile for years. In 1987 the Stockholm PEN Club awarded him  the Tucholsky Scholarship, and this award he accepted, as he also accepted the Freedom award of the City of Florence.<\/p>\n

Still, missing his homeland, Bekas told an audience,  \u201cI love<\/a> Sulaimaniya, my birthplace, I will never stop loving Mehabad, Diyarbakir (Amed)\u2026 I consider myself the poet of all Kurdish nation, the poet of revolution and Peshmergas, flowers, Kurmanji children of the South and North, I consider myself the mother poet of Kurdistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the following years he published books of poetry in Sweden, including Awena buchkalakan<\/em> (Small Mirrors, 1988). This collection of poems, writes one critic, voices \u201cdespair and struggle in a desolate and depleted yet hopeful world.\u201d Here \u201cthe poet confronts a barbarous world of oppression and boldly and vividly represents the natural geography of plants, people, and places he has left behind. He is uprooted from his land, but his senses are deeply rooted in the memories of its landscape and the struggle and songs of freedom he composes for and as a Peshmerga<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

Butterfly Valley<\/em><\/h2>\n

In 1988 the Saddam regime mounted more than 40 chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurdistan. The Anfal campaign destroyed 3,000 Kurdish villages and killed 100,000 Kurdish people. Hundreds more died later of exposure to chemical weapons. The attack on the town of Halabja instantly killed over 5000 people.<\/p>\n

Bekas, in Swedish exile, was stunned by the atrocities\u2014and by the world’s silence. In response, he wrote a long epic poem Derbend\u00ee Pep\u00fble (Butterfly Valley)<\/em>; it was published in 1991. In this book-length poem, he longs to go home and mourn the victims. He laments the repetitive cycles of upsurge and repression in Kurdish history, and in his despair invokes other exiled Kurdish poets from the past. The poet draws his homeland \u2014 mountains and forests, rivers and villages, meadows and flowers \u2013 juxtaposing them with scenes of death, destruction and suffering. He \u201cuses<\/a> repetition, a dense layering of metaphors, and a circling around the issues, as if he cannot settle or come to terms with events,\u201d writes reviewer Katrina Naomi.<\/p>\n

In 2018 the poem was translated into English, in abridged form, by Choman Hardi as Butterfly Valley<\/a> (Arc, 2018). It was published in a bilingual Kurdish-English edition. It is the most extensive example of Bekas\u2019s writing in English.<\/p>\n

In 1991, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq was established. So the following year returned to Basur and was hired as the KRG\u2019s first culture minister. But with his progressive ideas about freedom and human rights, he soon clashed with the new government. His poems were censored again, and a newspaper he worked for, Welat<\/em>, was shut down for terrorist propaganda. In 1993 Bekas resigned as minister, saying he would \u201cnot<\/a> exchange a single line from my poems for 30 ministries.\u201d He returned to Sweden.<\/p>\n

A Man of the World<\/h2>\n

Sherko Bekas held poetry readings in Italy, Russia, the UK, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland, among others. He was made an honorary citizen of the city of Milan. His works have been translated into Arabic, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, French, and English. Bekas also worked as a translator himself, translating, among other things, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea<\/em> and Garc\u00eda Lorca’s Blood Wedding<\/em> into Kurdish.<\/p>\n

From 1990 to 1995 Bekas\u2019s collected works were published in Sweden, in three volumes of almost 1000 pages each. Published under the title D\u00eewan\u00ee \u015e\u00earko B\u00eakes<\/em> (Sherko Bekas\u2019s Diwan), they contain his poetic works up to 1995, in Kurdish. Here, as one critic described the oeuvre, \u201cone see his gigantic endeavor to capture the entire history, epic heritage and struggle, and life of his people whose tragic fate and rich literature and culture, was disgracefully ignored by most Middle Eastern and Western intellectuals and authors, an issue that tormented the poet\u2019s mind for whom \u2018poetry could not be detached from humanity.\u2019 However, he knew that in the name of Kurds, with the elegance and nuance of his verse and vision, he would make the world see the splendor and power of the language in the midst of holocausts of Anfal and Halabja<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2011 Bekas was awarded the P\u00eer\u00eam\u00eard Gold Prize, given out by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The award is named after Pir\u00eam\u00eard, another famous  poet from the Sil\u00eaman\u00ee region.<\/p>\n

Sherko Bekas died of cancer in Stockholm, Sweden on August 4, 2013.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Books of Poetry<\/h2>\n

Titles of Bekas\u2019s books in Sorani orthography are listed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tir\u00eefey Helbest<\/em> (Moonlight Poems) (Iraq: Salman al-Azami, 1968)<\/p>\n

Qasida Koch<\/em> (The Ode of Migration) (1970)<\/p>\n

Kawey Asinger: Dastan\u00eak\u00ee honraway\u00ee sar shanoye le no tabloda<\/em> (Mahabad: Saydiyan, 1971).<\/p>\n

The Secret Diary of a Rose<\/em> (1975), translated into English  in 1997.<\/p>\n

Mar\u00e2y\u00e2 sagh\u00edrah<\/em> (Damascus: Al-ah\u00e2li, 1988).<\/p>\n

Dall: \u00e7\u00eerok\u00ee \u015f\u00ea’r<\/em> (Stockholm: Apec, 1989).<\/p>\n

Awena buchkalakan (1988) (Small Mirrors)<\/p>\n

Sm\u00e5 speglar: dikter 1978\u20131989<\/em>  (Small Mirrors: Poems, Swedish translation) (Norsborg: Pub. House of Kurdistan, 1989).<\/p>\n

Derbend\u00ee Pep\u00fble<\/em> (Butterfly Valley) (Stockholm: Apec, 1991)<\/p>\n

Les petits miroirs : po\u00e8mes<\/em> (Small Mirrors: Poems), trans. into French by Kamal Maarof (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995).<\/p>\n

D\u00eewan\u00ee \u015e\u00earko B\u00eakes<\/em> (Collected Poems), 3 vols. (Stockholm: Sara, 1990-95).<\/p>\n

Gulbij\u00earek ji helbest\u00ean<\/em> (Selected Poems) (Stockholm: Apec, 1991).<\/p>\n

Geheimnisse der Nacht pfl\u00fccken : Gedichte <\/em>(Picking Secrets of the Night), trans. into German by Reingard Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, und Renate Saljoghi (Z\u00fcrich: Unionsverlag, 1993) (available here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

M\u00earg\u00ee zam-, m\u00earg\u00ee hetaw<\/em> (Stockholm: Kurdistans folkf\u00f6rb., 1996).<\/p>\n

Xa\u00e7 \u00fb mar \u00fb roj-jim\u00ear\u00ee \u015fa’\u00ear\u00ea<\/em> (Stockholm: Apec, 1997.<\/p>\n

The Secret Diary of a Rose: A Journey Through Poetic Kurdistan,<\/em> trans. into English by Reingard  Mirza, Shirwan Mirza, and Renate Saljoghi (Ashti Bibani, 1997).<\/p>\n

Bonname : \u015e\u00ea’r. Binkey Edeb \u00fb R\u00fbnakb\u00eer\u00ee Gelaw\u00eaj<\/em> (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee, 1998).<\/p>\n

\u00c7irakan\u00ee ser helem\u00fbt : pex\u015fan<\/em> (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee: Sardam, 1999.<\/p>\n

Piyaw\u00ee la-darsew : \u015e\u00ea’r<\/em> (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee, 2000.<\/p>\n

Qes\u00eedey Rengdan<\/em> (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee,  Xak, 2001)<\/p>\n

Ezm\u00fbn: 1985\u20132000,<\/em> ed. Yasin Umar (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee,  Sardam, 2001).<\/p>\n

J\u00een \u00fb Baran<\/em> (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee Library, 2001).<\/p>\n

Ji Nav \u015e\u00ear\u00ean Min<\/em> (From My Poetry), trans. into Kurmanci (Istanbul: Avesta, 2001).<\/p>\n

Xom ew water balindem!<\/em> (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee, Sardam, 2002)<\/p>\n

Kukux\u00eetya biz\u00eaweke<\/em> (children’s poetry) (Sil\u00eaman\u00ee: Sardam, 2003)<\/p>\n

Easta kechek nishteman mena<\/em> (My Homeland is Now a Girl) (2011)<\/p>\n

Poems online in English<\/h2>\n

These websites contain some of Bekas\u2019s poems in English:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnswer, \u201cGods,\u201d and \u201cClothes,\u201d World Literature Today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cButterfly Valley\u201d (excerpts), Katrina Naomi, \u201cWhat Generous Pain,\u201d Modern Poetry in Translation<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

\u201cCounting,\u201d \u201cSoil,\u201d \u201cSeparation,\u201d \u201cThe Wind,\u201d \u201cNow My Girl Is a Homeland,\u201d \u201cLast Testament,\u201d in Dr. Amir Sharifi and Ali Ashouri, \u201cA Tribute to Sherko Bekas, the Kurdish Poet of the Century,\u201d Rudaw<\/a>, November 12, 2013,<\/p>\n

\u201cCounting,\u201d \u201cSoil,\u201d \u201cTunnel,\u201d \u201cDifferent,\u201d \u201cSeparation,\u201d \u201cLove,\u201d \u201cHope,\u201d poems from Secret Diary of a Rose,<\/em>translated into English by Reingard Mirza und Shirwan Mirza and discussed by Hawzhin Azeez, Kurdish Center for Studies<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFrom now on I am Halabja,\u201d trans. Choman Hardi, Daily Poetry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cLove,\u201d \u201cEuphrates,\u201d \u201cVisit,\u201d \u201cDesire,\u201d \u201cButterfly,\u201d \u201cFlag,\u201d \u201cIn My Homeland,\u201d \u201cRain,\u201d \u201cFestival,\u201d \u201cNovel, \u201cMeasurement,\u201d  \u201cMother,\u201d translated into English by Ednan Bedreddin, Medium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Break My Thirst with Flame,\u201d Asymptote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeds,\u201d \u201cStatue,\u201d \u201cStorm Tde,\u201d Poem Hunter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeparation\u201d and \u201cStorm Tide,\u201d Kurdish Institute<\/a>, Belgium..<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sherko Bekas, poet Sherko Bekas (Kurdish: \u015e\u00earko B\u00eakes\u200e) (May 2, 1940 \u2013 August 4, 2013) co-founded contemporary Kurdish poetry and is widely regarded as the greatest Kurdish national poet of the 20th century. His writings resonate with themes of love, and nature, and freedom, even as, according to his translator Choman Hardi, he\u201cestablished himself as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8029,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[171],"class_list":["post-8028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-sherko-bekas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8028"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8165,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8028\/revisions\/8165"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}