Kurdish Language and Literature: Classical Poetry, Print and Translation

From Ehmedê Xanî’s poetry and educational writing to Hawar, modern fiction and digital archives, Kurdish literary history connects different languages, scripts, readers and forms of transmission.

Languages, scripts and literary communities

Kurdish belongs to the Iranian language family and includes regional varieties with their own histories. Kurmanji and Sorani are major literary forms. Inalco’s 2025–2026 programme describes Kurmanji in Latin script and Sorani in Arabic-based script, each with a literary norm; historical writing also used other scripts. [1] [2] Language history and literary history therefore meet in the choices of authors, teachers, editors and readers. An edition’s language, alphabet and date help locate it within this varied landscape.

Classification is not a test of cultural belonging

Glottolog 5.3 groups Northern, Central and Southern Kurdish under its Kurdish node, kurd1259. Its wider Northwestern Iranian tree lists Zaza separately, rather than as one of those three children; Gorani also appears on another branch. [7] This is a named linguistic catalogue’s classification. It should be distinguished from literary traditions and speakers’ cultural identification. A work’s language can be identified precisely while its author participates in Kurdish cultural life. Treating Kurmanji, Sorani and Zazaki as an uncontested, exhaustive three-part list obscures these different questions.

Classical poetry came before nineteenth-century print

Philip Kreyenbroek places Melayê Cizîrî, approximately 1570–1640, in the early Kurmanji literary tradition, drawing on Arabic and Persian poetic forms such as the qasida and ghazal. Ehmedê Xanî, 1650–1707, belongs to the following century, with the romance Mem û Zîn and the rhymed Arabic–Kurdish teaching vocabulary Nûbihara Biçûkan among his works. Kreyenbroek also describes Gorani writing under Ardalan patronage and Sorani poetry associated with the Baban court and Nalî’s Sulaymaniyah circle. [3] These settings connect literary expression to education, patronage and existing poetic traditions. A poem could have a classroom, courtly, devotional or narrative purpose, and several purposes could coexist.

Nineteenth-century collection and the Kurdish press

Joyce Blau describes Mahmud Bayazidi’s collaboration with Alexandre Jaba, the Russian consul in Erzurum. Their work contributed to a collection of Kurdish narratives published with French translation in 1860. She also traces later grammars, dictionaries and editions, showing how study and publication brought texts to new audiences. [2] The newspaper Kurdistan began publication in Cairo in 1898 under Miqdad Midhat Bedir Khan. The Kurdish Institute of Paris records that beginning in its account of the family’s publishing heritage. [4] Newspapers supplied a recurring space for writing and discussion, while libraries and collections preserved issues that could otherwise be dispersed.

Hawar and modern literary forms

In Damascus, Celadet Bedir Khan and colleagues developed a Latin-based Kurmanji orthography and worked through journals including Hawar, published from 1932 to 1943. Blau connects this work with grammatical codification and support for poets and storytellers. [2] In Sorani poetry, Kreyenbroek describes departures from classical forms during the 1930s, including Goran’s free and syllabic verse, followed by writers such as Şêrko Bêkes. [3] The history includes both the practical work of establishing written conventions and creative experiments in rhythm, form and voice.

A contemporary novel reaching readers in translation

Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree provides a specific example of Kurdish fiction circulating internationally. Archipelago published Kareem Abdulrahman’s English translation on 24 January 2023. Its publisher describes the novel’s protagonist, Muzafar-i Subhdam, emerging from long imprisonment to search for his son, within a narrative shaped by war, memory and imagination. [5] The translator’s name and the edition’s publication date are part of that literary history. They identify the route by which a work reaches another reading public, alongside the author’s creative work.

Digital preservation is also textual work

Historical publications can survive as images while remaining difficult to search. Blnd Yaseen and Hossein Hassani’s 2024 preprint describes training optical character recognition using 1,233 transcribed line images from pre-1950 publications collected at the Zheen Center for Documentation and Research. They identify damage, unusual fonts and spacing as obstacles. [6] Digitisation therefore includes preserving the page and producing an accurate text record. For readers, a useful starting point is a named work with a traceable edition: who wrote it, in which language and script, who edited or translated it, and where the text can be consulted.

Sources and further reading

1. Inalco, Kurdish licence programme 2025–2026, p.4; Kurmanji and Sorani literary norms, scripts and teaching history.
2. Joyce Blau, Kurdish Language ii. History of Kurdish Studies, Encyclopaedia Iranica; Bayazidi, Jaba, publications and the Damascus school.
3. Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Kurdish Written Literature, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2005, updated 2018; classical traditions, named works and modern poetic forms.
4. Kurdish Institute of Paris, Bulletin 314, May 2011; Bedir Khan archival project and Kurdistan newspaper’s 1898 beginning.
5. Archipelago Books, The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, translated by Kareem Abdulrahman, 24 January 2023; publisher’s edition record and synopsis.
6. Blnd Yaseen and Hossein Hassani, Making Old Kurdish Publications Processable by Augmenting Available Optical Character Recognition Engines, arXiv preprint 2404.06101, 9 April 2024; abstract and research description.
7. Glottolog 5.3, Kurdish, kurd1259; native classification tree with Northern, Central and Southern Kurdish and separate Zaza and Gorani nodes in Northwestern Iranian.