Translating Ulysses

Kurdish writer Kawa Nemir undertakes the herculean task of translating James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses into his native language, which remains a banned and persecuted language in Turkey. Nemir himself lives abroad in exile to avoid political persecution. This makes his translation also an experiment in thinking about language and politics and an attempt to save the collective memory of the Kurdish population from oppression.

Translating Ulysses is a dazzling mix of found footage, archive footage, YouTube fragments, newspaper clippings and images of the Kurdish resistance. A documentary that, as James Joyce would put it, tries to capture how history becomes a nightmare.