the past and the present of book publishing in kurdish language in ...

As far as I have managed to find out, a considerable number of the writerscomes from the cities of Mardin and Diyarbekir.Quite a few of the Kurdish writers living in Turkey are teachers andclergymen (mela). Teachers especially play an important role among modernKurdish men of literature. Many try to teach and write at the same time.There are also those who write in prison. The Kurdish writers writing intheir mother tongue in prison experience additional problems in that theprison administration requires a Turkish translation of each work. Otherwisethe permission to send it to the publisher is not given. The imprisoned writerwho has already written a Kurdish book does not take it onto himself to dothe translation as well and gives up publishing his book.1.2 TranslatorsI have found 67 translations among the Kurdish books published inTurkey (10,2 %). At least half of them have been translated from Turkish andthe rest – from English, Arabic and Persian. There are also a few bookstranslated from Southern Kurdish (Soran dialect) to the Kurmanci dialect.There are translations of Moliere, Ernest Hemingway, Che Guevara,Alexander Soljenitsin, Victor Hugo, Т. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound,Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Harold Pinter.Besides the translations from other languages, there are new editions ofKurdish books previously written in the Arabic or the Cirillic alphabettranscribed into the Latin alphabet. There were numerous Kurdish workswritten in the Arabic alphabet all over Kurdistan during the Ottoman periodand at present there are such works in Southern and Eastern Kurdistan. Ifall the hand-written and printed Kurdish works written in the Arabic scriptin the past is taken into consideration, the importance of this historicheritage will be understood better. It is very important to transcribe theseinto the Latin alphabet in order to make them available for the newgenerations. The same applies to transcribing the hundreds of books writtenin the Cyrillic alphabet and published in Armenia.Publishers usually pay the translators with books instead of money.Among the translators to Kurdish one may name Yakup Karademir, KawaNemir, Mazlûm Doğan, Selîm Temo and Osman Mehmed. According to theinformation given by Osman Mehmed (34), if translators are paid, they arepaid much less than the translators to other languages in Turkey. What ismore, the honorariums are often delayed and in general, translators intoKurdish are not taken very seriously by publishers. Osman Mehmed wholived for some time in Southern Kurdistan and was a translator there, saysthat translation honorariums there are two times higher than in Turkey.14