Beyond Borders
A discussion of the book An Unfound Book: Accounts of a Walk Beside Ulysses in Search of Dr. Taha, by Mohamed Farag, alongside a screening of a film Translating Ulysses by Ayelen Cueto and Fırat Yücel.
About the project
The program traces the various attempts to engage with translating James Joyce's Ulysses across different languages and eras, where political and aesthetic allegiances intersect with the authority of the work and of cultural practice, alongside imaginaries of liberation and emancipation from official linguistic dominance and institutions of power. It also rethinks the relationship between language, text, and modernity, and approaches translation as a practice that brings together individual experience with a collective commitment to cultural heritage.
An Unfound Book: Accounts of a Walk Beside Ulysses in Search of Dr. Taha
The book Unfound: Accounts of a Walk Beside Ulysses, in Search of Dr. Taha moves between the intricate worlds of Joyce and the halls of various archives — from stories belonging to Egypt's publishing world in the 1990s, to what was written in the press about Dr. Taha, to scattered memories concerning the late translator. It attempts to open up multiple paths in search of Dr. Taha, and to ask how figures and works of such considerable cultural importance can fall into the circle of forgetting. The man who spent most of his life working "so that the Arab reader might find a sound text, just as its author intended," likely never imagined that his own work would one day be haunted by the specter of disappearance.
Translating Ulysses (2023), directed by Ayelen Cueto and Fırat Yücel
Kawa Nemir is a Kurdish translator and writer known for his extraordinary memory for the Kurdish language, documenting the words and expressions he hears and never forgetting them. Moving between exiles, he treats language as a portable homeland. Within this context, James Joyce's Ulysses becomes his central project and eternal obsession: an attempt to translate an immensely complex and expansive text into Kurdish, absorbing into it years of gathered vocabulary and expressions. After facing political persecution and the banning of the Kurdish language in Turkey, he leaves the country and takes refuge in Anne Frank's former house in Amsterdam, which has been turned into a residence for exiled writers. The film traces the course of this translation as a linguistic and cultural act, and raises a clear question about whether Ulysses can ever be fully translated and published, under the conditions of exile, censorship, and a long history of linguistic restriction.