A Persian rendering of the Kurdish-language novel ‘City of White Musicians’ should soon be in the bookstores published by Afraz Publication soon.
Reza Karim-Mojaver has translated the book written by Iraqi novelist Bakhtyar Ali Muhammad in 2006.
It is a story of three Kurdish musicians who set out on a trip to different cities to compile old ethnic songs and pieces of music before they are assigned to oblivion, Honaronline reported.
Art, its value, and the efforts taken for its preservation can be considered as the main themes of this nonlinear narrative (a narrative technique in which events are portrayed out of chronological order).
Bakhtyar Ali, 57, who currently lives in Germany, was born in the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. He is a novelist, literary critic, essayist and poet. He started out as a poet and essayist, but has established himself as an influential novelist from the mid-1990s. So far, he has published six novels and several collections of poetry and essays.
In his academic essays, he has dealt with various subjects mostly philosophical issues. He often employs western philosophical concepts to interpret an issue in Kurdish society, modifying or adapting them to his own context.
In 2016 his novel ‘Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination’ was published in English under the title ‘I Stared at the Night of the City’, and became the first Kurdish-language novel to be published in English. In the same year, his novel ‘The World’s Last Pomegranate’ was translated into German.
