On “From my first lessons”

Not twenty years before Hamdi was born, the Ottoman and Persian empires undermined and destroyed the last vestiges of independent Kurdish governance; as a young man, he witnessed the division of Kurdistan, his ancestral lands, into four nation states: what was to Kurds the cruelest outcome of WWI. In a world that considered his literature poor, perhaps even nonexistent, he saw poetry as a way to build and strengthen his community. We initially fell in love with the takhmis because the form put poets in direct conversation. The takhmis formalized the popular concept of correspondence poems. Hamdi founded his early twentieth century poem, “From my first lessons,” on a poem of Mahwi’s, “Love’s hermitage,” written in the mid-nineteenth century; each stanza has the same structure: three opening lines from Hamdi concluded by two of Mahwi’s. By the end of Hamdi’s poem, he has quoted, in their original order, every line of Mahwi’s original poem. 

The form further fascinated us when we realized that Kurdish poets employed the form so much differently than any other linguistic or ethnic group around them. The takhmis descended from the musammat, a stanzic form that Islam’s devout community used for exegesis, rendering the form, in most scholastic opinion, theoretically interesting and artistically dead. Kurdish poets working within a persecuted language use the form instead to celebrate and skewer each other’s work, to reinvent the literature they inherit from the more dominant surrounding languages. Originating from a persecuted language, these poems have yet to join the global conversation on the form and its myriad secular applications. 

We translated Mahwi’s “Love’s hermitage” before we approached Hamdi’s “From my first lessons.” In the new context of Hamdi’s poem, Mahwi’s seemed to demand retranslation. As translators, though, this caused us to question ourselves; Hamdi had not changed Mahwi’s original text at all, so why did we feel such difference in Mahwi’s words? The correspondence between the voices, as when two people sing harmony, seemed to transform both. But then, as longtime co-translators, collaborators, and friends, we have seen and loved how our conversation changes us. How will new voices enter into this form and the conversation it encourages?