Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A selection of Kurdish Poetry

With this book, it is hoped to raise awareness of Kurdish poetry and its diverse voices within world literary circles. This work will encourage Kurdish speakers to develop confidence engaging in translation practices and perhaps even to consider becoming professional literary translators. It can reproduce the situation of language domination and create a hierarchy between actors involved in the process; in blurring the roles, it often minimises, and even erases, the contribution of the native speaker. The widespread emphasis on fluency and readability that haunts literary translations knocks the confidence of the native Kurdish speaker. Therefore, the version they produce might be considered too ‘literal’ and would need to be polished and embellished by English native speakers and/or poets who are often credited as the translators. In this volume, editors have been mindful of these issues when presenting the roles of translators, co-translators (when all parties have access to both source and target languages), and translation editor (with whom translators have had in-depth discussions on the best way of rendering the poems). Conscious of the various forms and practices of invisibilisation of the Kurdish language through time, it was important to give space to the original languages in this volume, hence the choice of a bilingual publication. While this work is the first step, it is hoped that it will inspire critical discussions, engagement, and maybe new forms and practices of translation for Kurdish literature.