The Iterative, Even Infinite

Abstract

The modes of creation and preservation of nineteenth-century Kurdish poetry reveal the fallacy and short-sightedness of the definitive and the singular. No text is static. Each text is many. Each text contains and requires communities. I have come to think of this as a terrific metaphor for the subtle truth of all text, even where a poet’s handwriting exists, and contemporary readers contend that they can verify the poet’s intent. If as translators, we treat each text, no matter its point of origin or host language, as dynamic rather than static, we humble ourselves about any one translation we may make. We open ourselves and our translations up to the strengths and contributions of others. Co-translation can continue becoming a practice born not of what we lack, but of what we are curious we can make when a translation begins in multiple perspectives. We help ourselves and our readers remember why the proliferation of translations for any one text remains continually necessary and exciting. Translators—all readers—can let go of the definitive in favor of the iterative, even infinite, process that is understanding. Over the last ten years, more than forty cotranslators and I have published over sixty poems, short stories, interviews, and book-length collections of Kurdish literature in English-language translation. Many of the authors we worked with had never before been translated into English. We collaborated because we both wanted and needed to work together: poetry—and all Kurdish literature, from horoscopes to theology, was poetry until the early twentieth century—demanded translators of various specialties working together. A single poem often included up to four languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish), with at least three different dialects of Kurdish (Kurmanji, Sorani, and Gorani) that have since diverged into distinct, at times mutually unintelligible, entities. Beyond that, these historical poets grew up in the Islamic educational system (at the time, the only one), so they drew heavily on the Islamic sciences, Islamic numerology, and nowobscure theology. To even begin to understand these poems was already a process of translation that took place between Kurdish speakers who had grown up in various dialects, with varying levels of Islamic education and varying understandings of the Kurdish, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary traditions. To bring these poems into English was yet another translation. And that specific act of translation, from Kurdish to English, even now has very few dictionaries or thesauruses. Each word we couldn’t find in a dictionary required we create a community that could agree on its meaning/s. For each poem, we built out an individuated glossary and integrated comments from multiple expert readers. Community was where we began. Community was where any attempt at translation had to begin. Each translation team thought through how much cultural translation they wanted to do, how many references they found themselves willing to let fade in favor of musicality or sense, how much sense they could let slide before losing an Englishlanguage reader who was likely unfamiliar with the poem’s context and, at worst, might hold severe prejudices against the poem’s originating context. Each team answered these questions differently and translated differently. We embraced what we called “dissenting translations,” which were the translations a team member might make completely on their own to show what they thought possible or what they would have wanted to do differently. Dissensus is community, not its antithesis. It never occurred to us to privilege any one cotranslator over another, as many translators have done over generations. There was no one “real” translator and certainly no collaborator who could be relegated to the role of uncredited “dictionary with legs.” Everyone was essential. TRANSLATION REVIEW 2023, VOL. 115, NO. 1, 23–34 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2023.2179314