Abstract
The chapter offers analysis of the nineteenth-century translations of the Bible into the Kurdish language, undertaken by missionaries from various organisations including the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Basel Mission and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. By adopting the postcolonial approach, the chapter proves the need for a new reading of the missionary narratives and archives to identify and describe the nets of dependencies which the Bible as a printed text created in the mostly oral societies of Kurdistan (Kurdish, Armenian, Assyrian). It reveals the ‘hybrid’ nature of the ‘Kurdish Bible’ as a powerful and hegemonic instrument in the hand of a missionary and, on the other hand, as an emancipating text as it was used by the Kurdish-speaking communities.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
The phenomenon of the translated literature is that it is treated by many as their own cultural tradition. The Bible is the best example (Tymoczko 2010, 5).
- 4.
Shevris was portrayed in the missionary narratives many times, but often he was misidentified. He was presented as an Armenian bishop or a Roman Catholic priest belonging to the Jesuit order (Perkins 1843, 350).
- 5.
Shevris was a metropolitan bishop in Siirt during the years 1810–1823 (Wilmshurst 2000, 95).
- 6.
In opinion of Garnik Asatrian it was ‘a literal, nearly verbatim copy of the Western Armenian version of the Gospels, although the translators, in effect, had a mastery command of Kurdish and its vocabulary’ (Asatrian 2009, 13).
- 7.
The good example is an Arabic-Kurdish dictionary Nûbihara Biçûkan composed by Ehmedê Xanî in poetic form. The dictionary was addressed to children in order to help them understand Arabic religious texts via the language they were familiar with.
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Work on this chapter was supported by the Polish National Science Centre, grant DEC-2012/05/E/HS2/03779.
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Rzepka, M. (2018). Translation, Power and Domination: The Postcolonial Explorations of the Bible in the Kurdish Context. In: Bocheńska, J. (eds) Rediscovering Kurdistan’s Cultures and Identities. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93088-6_5
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