Magin_Edward-thesis

1. Introduction
1.1 General
The purpose of this thesis was to gather and analyze a corpus of Northern Kurdish
poetry, discuss its poetic features, and apply what was learned to poetic translation. To
date very little has been written about Kurdish poetry. This survey and analysis helps to
fill the gap of knowledge about one literary art form of the Kurdish people and their rich
cultural heritage.
The corpus I collected primarily consists of poems written during the last sixty
years 1 in the Northern Kurdish-speaking area of Northern Iraq. The language of this area
is often referred to as Bahdini, 2 which comes from the name of the region where its
speakers dwell, Badinan. One poet from the Kurdish area of Syria, Cegerxwîn, is also
included because of his renown in Iraq and abroad. Translations are presented in
Appendix A and interlinear translations, parsed according to Leipzig Glossing Rules
(Bickel, Comrie and Haspelmath 2008), are provided wherever useful in the analysis.
Chapter 2 surveys what has already been written on Kurdish and Kurdish-related
poetry. It also discusses what scholars have written about the matter of translating poetry.
Chapter 3 contains information gleaned from interviews about Kurdish poetry and the
history surrounding its development. To help the reader delve into the language and the
1 Some of Ahmed Nalbend’s poems are likely older. They were not formally published until 1998.
2 I use the term Bahdini in this paper when I am distinguishing how a certain aspect of the spoken variety of
Northern Kurdish in northern Iraq is or may be different from other varieties of Northern Kurdish. The
language varies greatly over a large region and some speakers have difficulty understanding one another.
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