ERBIL () – Gabor, a Kurdish novel written by Seyed Qader Hedayati and published in 2015, has recently been translated into English by Chiya Parvizpur and Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo. The novel was published by Henar Press, an independent nonprofit publishing house based in Columbus, Ohio.
The novel is one of the well-known and best-selling Kurdish novels. It quickly gained popularity among the Kurdish literary intelligentsia.
Parvizpur, one of the contributing translators of the novel, told on Monday that, "Hedayati is one of the leading experimental novelists of contemporary Kurdish literature and belongs to the third generation of modern Kurdish writers. Gabor is regarded as one of his most important and experimental works."
Gabor was written in a state-of-the-art style and with postmodern themes and narration. It is set in a small town in Eastern Kurdistan (Western Iran) and tells the story of ordinary people.
"The novel is constructed largely through dialogue and contradictory, unreliable voices. Childhood, violence, absurdity, and fear become intertwined,"Parvizpur stated and added, "the English publication of Gabor is significant not only for Kurdish literature but also for world literature. It introduces English-language readers to a highly experimental Kurdish novelist whose work has rarely been available outside the Kurdish literary world."
The novel shares similarities in theme and dénouement with Ernest Hemingway's The Undefeated. At the end of Gabor, an old butcher is killed by a bull, much like the bullfighter in The Undefeated.
Hedayati, born in 1976 in Bukan, a city in the West Azerbaijan province, has written numerous novels, including The Echo of a Full Stop (2003), The Yoke of Azazel (2012), The Grave City (2020), and Bardinah (2022). His non-fiction essays include Stone on Stone (2019) and Kurdish Prose and the Change of Form (2019). He has also translated Bahram Bayzaie's The Truth and The Wise Man from Persian into Kurdish.
