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2/23/10
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Books Of fate and a people
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Maria Eliadesreviews the curiously obscure Kurdish Romeo and Juliet Salah Saadalla's translation of Mem and Zin by Ahmed Khani is a lyrical read but a fizzle as a translation. At the center of the 17th century Kurdish love epic is Khani's wellcrafted story of a doomed romantic relationship between a man and a princess. At the edges, however, is Saadalla's lack of intuition for the needs of his audience, which in time eats at the painful pleasures of Mem and Zin. Readers familiar with the format of Western epics like The Odyssey and The Aeneid will be at home in Khani's tale, which begins with an invocation not to the Muses but to God and to Mohammed. Khani, after all, is not pagan but Muslim. Within these prayers, the reader's troubles from Saadalla's slips begin when told, “The pen was the first to come into creation/...then the soul and the mind.” Of course one can't know how significant this is to Islamic culture unless one has a footnote, the Internet or an extensive knowledge of Islamic culture handy, but the weight of the idea still sounds nice without knowing what it means. Luckily there are moments, as with the poem's own rosy fingered Dawn in “The horizon, like the hem of a bride /Blushed then turned golden with the rising sun,” where there is an immediate link. In those moments the universality of the writing comes through and the sense of a shared tradition of living stretches out to us. Likewise the story itself, a story of human and spiritual love, needs no explanation. Mem and Zin, our man and princess, fall in love on Newroz, the Kurdish New Year while accompanied by Tajdin, Mem's close friend, and Siti, Zin's sister. Both couples are disguised as the opposite sex and are immediately enamored in the chaos and color of the holiday. The meeting is transformative. Neither Mem nor Tajdin recognize one another, lovesick and unlike themselves without knowing who their mystery men were. Zin and Siti are quieter in their reactions but are equally altered. Both pairs set about finding
58 Time Out Istanbul March 2010
and marrying the other. Unfortunately for Mem, these girls are princesses. The elder, Siti, is readily given to Tajdin but the younger, more lovesick Zin, is suddenly forbidden to marry any man by her brother, Prince Zeynedin, angered by the words of Bekir, the conniving retainer who seems to exist only to create misrule. “Anyone who is bored with his head. / Here is Zin!” the prince says. As in this declaration, one anticipates and receives no less than the flinging out of arms with every character's entrance onto the poem's stage. Yet, when one remembers that dramatics are the medium of the epic, the reader waits to swallow the larger moral and philosophical sustenance that comes in almost unheard lines and character behavior. Mem and Zin does have its quiet moments which, amidst dramatics and protagonists, which are never defined as their own unique people but as the archetypal lovers, rustle the lines into something rippling and alive. Zin, Mem's houri, is nourished by tears but still has enough energy to speak to what cannot speak back sorrow, a moth, a candle: “She entrusted her secrets only to those tongueless.” Mem, in an equal par, calls to what cannot listen and in him we see the fury of love, the intensity of desire which thrusts the lover out of himself and often erases the lover's being. This suffering is mitigated because of another wrench of the plot, in which all men but Mem due to his sorrow, are out hunting with the prince. Thus Mem and Zin's one chaste but passionate union in the prince's garden is all the happiness they will be allowed to have, separated once again by what is made out to be fate. For all its physical wrenchings, Mem and Zin isn't a poem to be disliked. It is rather one that should be held next to The Aeneid because it is of the same ilk: a nation-building mythology which rends the people and the events as ideal depictions of what the culture admired and aspired to be. The societal structure Khani presents in Mem and Zin is an icon of a time when the Kurdish tribes were ruled over by princes in a feudal system and one in which Khani points to the disaster befalling his protagonists as one that might be remedied by
As readers, we are given quite a gift with Saadalah's translation, which is only the second translation into English. Unfortunately, we are robbed somewhat of that gift when the world of the poem is not explained centralized rule. If we are to take Khani's depiction of that society and its deeds, philosophy and rhythms one step further, the significance of his choice to write the epic in Kurdish arises. At the time of Mem and Zin, Kurdish was not considered to be up to the rigor of literature. Khani used the language deliberately to prove that it was as worthy and capable of expressive thought as Persian or Arabic and to define the Kurdish people, who were
then as they are now, divided. That Mem and Zin is the first literary work in Kurdish should pull the work up to a canonical status. As readers, we are given quite a gift with Saadalah's translation, which is only the second translation into English. Unfortunately, we are robbed somewhat of that gift when the world of the poem is not explained. Those well-read in Western literature will understand the tropes and leaps of speech but will not be able to juice the full symbolism or meaning of the lines. The poem can serve as a gateway to Islamic philosophy and Kurdish history, but these matters and their relation to art are only properly passed through when the translator or editor guides the reader. So much time has passed that human actions can be understood but abstract thought becomes unreadable. Like Khani's pen, which is set “moaning and groaning/ Blowing pain[ing the]... heart,” the reader is driven to a similar madness when initiated into the story but left forever tantalized, never fully relieved of the curiosity and the burn to know the beloved story fully. Mem and Zin, printed by Avesta in 2008, can be purchased at avestakitap.com.