Screening: Translating Ulysses
Join us on the evening of August 29th for an exclusive screening of Translating Ulysses (2023) with a special introduction by directors Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel.
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About Translating Ulysses:
Kawa Nemir is like a walking dictionary of Kurdish language. Whenever he hears a new word or an idiom, he records it and he never forgets. Considering the Kurdish language his home, he wanders from one exile to another. But how to transfer this collective memory into paper? With its vast, infinite range of words, symbols and anti-colonial resonance, James Joyce’s Ulysses becomes an obsession for him. He want to create a translation that encapsulates all the Kurdish words and idioms he collected throughout the years. Exhausted from political prosecutions and language ban, he flees Turkey and takes refuge at Anne Frank’s former house in Amsterdam, now serving as residence for exiled writers. Will he be able to finish the translation of Ulysses and publish it?
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Directors’ Statement:
Following Kawa’s process of translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Kurdish, the documentary attempts to capture how history becomes a nightmare (as Joyce himself would say). It is an experiment on thinking about language and politics through the translation of Joyce's novel into a language that is repressed. Kurdish is a language that has a long history, yet so many words and idioms only exist in the minds of Kurdish people. Kawa attempts to redeem the collective memory of the Kurdish language, as Kurdish is still a censored and persecuted language in Turkey, despite its long history there. The translation of Ulysses, one of the hallmarks of modernist literature, serves as a dictionary of the everyday life of Kurdish people. The documentary, Translating Ulysses, also takes the shape of a dictionary through an episodic/multi-lingual/intertextual narration. It uses different forms and materials: found footage, archival footage, Youtube clips, Newspaper clips, documentary quotations and the footage we collected from Kurdish grassroots resistance, blending together in a collage-like documentary about “the thing that goes through everything” – language.
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Screening starts at 7PM sharp, no late entry (Door closes 15 minutes after screening starts).