Magin_Edward-thesis

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EM: We talked about five different names for your types of poems. We say theme
in English…subjects. What are the Kurdish words for those classifications? For example,
patriotic. 212
BS: We say niştimanî, hozana niştimanî. It means the poems that describe
patriotic feeling.
EM: Eulogy
BS: zêmar, hozana zêmarî –And zêmar itself means a sort of crying―when you
are alone and lose something, some valuable thing, especially when we lose one of our
relatives or somebody close to us. He travelled away and never returned or passed away.
So, this sort of crying or this sort of sadness we call zêmar, which is different from the
word girîyan. The word girîyan means ‘crying.’ This is near to the English word, girîyan
and crying. But girian is the crying when everywhere you can cry, like outside the home
or at home. People can hear you when you cry. This is crying. But zêmar is when you cry
in your loneliness, and you are alone and you cry for some personal thing. So, we call it
zêmar.
EM: We had the subject of love or a romantic poem. Do you have two words to
describe those two, or is there just one word?
BS: In Kurdish we use the word evîn and evînî―the same thing. We use it for the
meaning of ‘love.’ We don’t use ‘romantic’ because romantic is not in the Kurdish
language. But I think there is a difference between romantic poems and love poems,
although we don’t have this sort of classification, or these two words like you have. You
have love and romantic love, and you can use both of them for the same meaning, maybe.
But I think, I prefer to use the word romantic for poems―for my poems―because I
212 During my initial conversation with Sindî, which was not recorded, he shared the Kurdish names of the
themes he writes in. I had taken down some notes, to which I was referring during the interview. Sindî
agreed with my English translations of his Kurdish terms as we talked about them during this original
discussion.