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Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Three Very Short Kurmanji Stories
They’re below the fold, each no more than 80 words long, and I think they’re lovely. But before we get to that, some context: on a whim I bought a copy of E B Soane’s Elementary Kurmanji Grammar (1919) from the Oxfam in High Wycombe for 59p. Kurmanji is a main Kurdish language; and this little orange-bound book is, according to its preface ‘intended primarily for the use of officers and others whose duties leads them to the southern districts of Kurdistan.’ The British military presence in Iraq, 1919—one year before the official establishment of the British Mandate of Mesopotamia—is one of those ghosts of history still very actively haunting the present. And what a weirdly vivid through-the-chinks portrait this book provides of the sort of world a British officer stepped into (or expected to step into) amongst the Kurds. By way of ‘common idiomatic phrases’ and verb tables Soane offers us not pens of aunts or postillions lightning-struck, but rather:
akuzhim it I will kill you.
(but) dabe bikuzhim it I shall (probably) kill you.diz le kewda hatin a khwarawa Thieves came down from the hills.
rutit akam I strip thee
rutim akai Thou strippest me
rutian akan They strip melai imda I strike
lai imda I struck him
laim ida He struck me
la’ian manda We struck him
laiman ianda They struck us
Of course it’s amongst other things a way of interpellating a whole country, a whole people, as violent and barbaric. In that respect it feels, oh I don’t know, rather modern; as a primer in the ways in which Western Europe continues ideologically to construct a notion of meso-oriental existence. Laiman ianda, indeed.
Best of all are the translation exercises that come at the end of each chapter. The idea is that the reader translates the phrases sentence by sentence; but to read these little paragraphs as mini-stories is to enter a modish, almost postmodern narrative world of oblique and strangely touching expression. Some examples:
TRANSLATION EXERCISE 5: Last year the Persians sold their women for money. Who bought? I know not, but I know that the man who bought a woman bought also sickness. The animal tax of the Jaf will be much this year. The mare which Hama bought he did not buy with his own money. This year grazing was scarce in the warm country and everyone sold his own sheep cheap. I do not know my own mind, what can I say?
Haunting, no? We discover a fair bit about Hama.
TRANSLATION EXERCISE 2: The girls of the Jaf are not pretty, pretty girls are in Sulaimania. Hama’s wife was a girl from the Jaf. Take the horses out to grazing. He was from Sulaimania and went to Bana. Bring that big horse here and give it to Muhammad. Kill that cat. I am from Erbil. Where is the son of that woman? In the house of the horsemen.
What had the cat done wrong, we wonder? I daresay say it has something to do with Hama’s bitterness at his grinding life and unpretty wife. Finally, this one:
TRANSLATION EXERCISE 7: The Persians are cowardly, they were not formerly so, their work is evil, and their mind is black, so they became cowards and are still cowards. Had they been manly, they would not be wretched today. The Hamawand used to be robbers, now they are ploughmen and labourers and soldiers. The Turks would have been here now if they had been wiser. If in youth I had been lucky, I should never have been here. May he become blind! Would that I were in London now!
It’s the twist at the end that makes this one; a soldier’s lament on a distant, hostile and thankless posting. If my creative writing students wrote stories half as affecting I’d be a happy teacher.
Comments
Indeed, strip these of their headings, and put them one after another with a discreet “***” between, and you’d have a real winner.
I do not know my own mind, what can I say?
More odd grammar, this time from the Turkish: “I am (often) on the point of kicking”; “the (present state of) having (already) kicked”; “I must (then) have (already) kicked (before)”; “ever since — became a constant kicker”; “I ought to have been a constant kicker”; “kick thou (habitually)”, usw.
And even more odd grammar from the ME: See W. Wright’s A Grammar of the Arabic Language (second ed. 1874), a monumental piece of Orientalist scholarship. One of the first things he notes in the verb section is how the Arab grammarians use the root f-’-l (from which the word ‘verb’ itself is derived) as a paradigm root for illustrating various verbal forms, and then he uses it like that several times himself. But 200 pages later, when he provides a list of verb conjugations and forms, the paradigm word/root he uses is q-t-l (to kill), so there are whole lists of variations on he killed, she killed, you killed, they killed, etc. It’s a jarring choice (aside from the obvious reasons) because that word/root does not exist in all the forms he lists, so in terms of meaning, much of the table is just nonsense, which Wright himself undoubtedly knew. This would seem to apply to the Turkish example above as well--did any Turk ever actually use in a sentence “I ought to have been a constant kicker”?
On the accidental poetry of antique language guides: From a slim pamphlet, Language Guide to North Africa, produced for military personnel by the US Dept. of War in 1943. After a brief introduction and a few pages of word lists, it concludes with a page of useful phrases. Though it doesn’t have any of the surreal beauty of the translation exercises you cite, I love reading that list as a different kind of poetry, like lyrics to a jangly 1980s pop song. The end of the list goes like this (also in convenient paragraph form):
Watch out! Wait a minute! I want a place to sleep. I haven’t any money. I have cigarettes. I am sick. I am an American. I am your friend.
From the translation exercises at the end of an 1870 Ottoman Turkish grammar I’ve been using, a particularly transparent example:
“This note has been written and despatched to request you to send two boxes of Aleppo pistachio nuts.”
“People of taste run away from your disgusting voice.”
or, at the other extreme,
“When I am apparently asleep, my world-seeing eye being closed to the visible world, my true eye being open to the higher world, I see all kinds of examples and secrets full of wisdom.”
Countless more.
And about Turkish grammar, it is actually a simple and common construction to say “I ought to have been a constant ****” I would have translated it as “I should have been kicking.”
“People of taste run away from your disgusting voice.”
This sentence is simply glorious. Thank you, CG, for enriching my life with it.