The Kurdish Ulysses

An essay for The Dial Magazine, half a year in the making…

Dear readers,

Apologies for the second newsletter today, but an essay I’ve been working on since early summer is out this afternoon, and I want to share it with you.

My profile of Kawa Nemir, published today in The Dial, has transformed my life in numerous ways. I pondered the importance of writing in one’s “mother tongue” while documenting Nemir’s passionate struggle to transform James Joyce’s Ulysses into Kurdish over the course of a decade.

His story also brought back memories of Amsterdam, where I lived in the mid-2000s while doing my graduate studies. Nemir took refuge in Amsterdam, and I first learned about his story in Translating Ulysses, a terrific documentary directed by two friends, fellow Amsterdam’er, Aylin Kuryel, and Fırat Yücel, a friend of many decades and my editor while I was writing a monthly column for Altyazı magazine in the 2000s.

So I highly recommend their film, our profile at The Dial, and Nemir’s Kurdish translation of Ulysses!