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Kafka in Kurdish

A banned language reanimates the legacy of the iconic writer The Baffler

Lovers of Franz K. by Burhan S?nmez, translated by Sami Hêzil. Other Press, 144 pages. 2025.

A single letter can bear a heavy burden. Just ask the fifteen million Kurds living in Turkey, where the letters X, Q, and W were long banned from names and public use due to their association with the repressed Kurdish language. Or the Palestinians, whose claims to nationhood have been similarly denigrated by Israeli lawmakers on the spurious basis that the Arabic language lacks a letter P. But you could also ask Franz Kafka, whose own fraught struggles to determine his literary destiny lurk behind the initial K, borne by multiple protagonists of the Austrian-Czech writer’s oeuvre, suggesting a degree of autobiographical intent even as it expresses the way both national and personal identity are obscured by dehumanizing circumstances. Lovers of Franz K.,the sixth novel from PEN International president and exiled Turkish citizen Burhan S?nmez and his first written in his native Kurdish, subtly links these quests for historical, literary, and political self-determination.

At the same time, Loversstrives to evade the straitjacket of an identitarian politicization. S?nmez makes no direct reference to the Kurdish issue; his narrative instead travels from Istanbul through Cold War-era Berlin, Paris ‘68, and a century of contested literary history. The novel’s central conceit is simple: Kafka’s intimate companion and literary executor Max Brod is targeted by a clandestine, Red Brigades-style cell led by would-be assassin Ferdy Kaplan (another F. K.). Brod is singled out for his own literary “execution” on the basis of his infamous decision to disregard Kafka’s apparent wishes and posthumously publish his fiction.

Like Kafka’s own work, Lovers is not a simple allegory. There are no direct parallels here between K-for-Kafka and K-for-Kurdistan. Rather, S?nmez freshens what might be familiar debates over literary inheritance and an artist’s relationship with their audience by offering an implied and unexpected counterpoint to the Kurdish people’s struggle to find their own place on the global stage. Who has the right to decide who is heard, how, and by whom? Kaplan gradually comes to realize these complex questions deserve complex answers. Lovers is improbably marketed as a “thriller”: in fact, this lightly satirical police procedural more closely resembles one of Kafka’s puzzling, self-sabotaging short stories than a detective potboiler, or even S?nmez’s other, more sprawling novels.

The links between Kafka’s literary angst and the so-called Kurdish question are not immediately obvious; reading Loversin English translation, it would be possible to ignore any connection at all. So why did S?nmez choose to publish in Kurdish? The Kurdish literary and political experience has undeniably been Kafkaesque in the colloquial sense, defined by often baffling, contradictory, and bureaucratic repression. The Kurds, who today total around forty million, were denied a state of their own in the post-World War I consensus, which divided up the Middle East into competing spheres of imperial influence. Kurdish language, culture, and political movements have suffered violent repression ever since, particularly at the hands of the authoritarian nation-states that came to dominate the region in the post-colonial era, including Iraq, where Kurds faced genocide under Saddam Hussein, as well as Iran and Syria.

But it is in S?nmez’s native Turkey, unlike these other states a key Western ally and NATO member with aspirations to membership in the European Union, that the repression of the Kurdish minority has become most bureaucratized and most farcical. State propaganda long denied there was any such thing as a Kurdish people or Kurdish language, which was officially banned in Turkey until 1991. Today, it remains banned as a language of primary instruction in schools. Even wearing the Kurdish red, yellow, and green colors or dancing traditional Kurdish dances can result in arrest in Turkey, where Kurdish-language plays, poetry, music, names, and even gravestones are still regularly censored. Thousands of Kurdish intellectuals, journalists, writers, social media users, and activists have been jailed, tortured, and murdered over the years. S?nmez himself survived a near-deadly beating by Turkish police in 1996 that prompted his exile in the UK; he now advocates for his jailed fellow citizens in Turkey and worldwide at PEN International, which works across ninety countries on behalf of writers facing repression.

When Kaplan asserts, “Every single letter of our names has a meaning. If only you knew how much I suffered for the sake of only one letter,” S?nmez offers a hint of how the particular Kurdish experience has informed his depiction of censorship, repression, and struggles over identity. At the same time, S?nmez carefully universalizes lessons learned on the front lines of protest against Turkish brutality. Ferdy Kaplan, a Turkish-German, suffers a beating for spelling his name with German Y rather than a Turkish ?, a reminder that discrimination is a matter of structural state power rather than inherent to a particular group.

In a simpler analogy between political and literary repression, Kaplan might be expected to advocate for Kafka’s work to be allowed into the world. Instead, he admires Kafka for his apparent insistence that “not every piece of writing is meant for publication,” pointing for instance to Kafka’s “Letter to the Father,” in which the author sought a reckoning with his overbearing parent that went unpublished in his lifetime. Yet Kafka’s failure to communicate with his father and reticence to see his work in print could equally be interpreted as acts of cowardice, a neglect of his duty to a particular audience. Over the course of the novel, Kaplan comes to revise his initial fealty to Kafka’s authorial intent, recognizing the issue is far from straightforward—particularly when it is revealed that Brod himself not only regrets publishing Kafka’s work, but even wrote the anonymous letters urging his own assassination that inspired Kaplan’s crime.

S?nmez’s slim novel is largely built around police interviews and court appearances, as Kaplan is interrogated over his motives. “I’ll tell you the same things, but again you won’t understand me,” he confidently informs his interrogator. In a deft reversal of the fate suffered by Joseph K. in The Trial, here it is the accused who holds all the answers, while the authorities must scrabble for the truth. Their various assumptions that Kaplan must be an antisemite (like his Nazi parents), a “spy for East Germany,” or an anarchist insurrectionist are confounded one after the other. Transcript-style conversations between Kaplan and a West Berlin police chief are stripped-back and repetitive, with the language growing more expressive only in shorter sections where the interrogation-room dialogue abruptly gives way to biographical detail from Kaplan’s earlier life. This richer language and insight is generally denied to the interrogating officer, much in the way a little-understood native language might offer a refugee or political prisoner the solace of a sense of interiority denied to the monoglot English, German, or Turkish speaker.

In this sense, the novel offers a fantasy of escaping state violence through recourse to a secret, hidden reality, inaccessible to the authorities. The experience of being interrogated in a foreign language is certainly an alienating and humiliating one—yet it can also create room for indecipherability, quiet resistance, or defiance. S?nmez’s third novel, Istanbul, Istanbul (2015), is exemplary in this respect, as prisoners suffering torture in dungeons below Turkey’s largest city distract one another with more or less fantastical tales of the city over their heads, half-real, half-imagined, after the pattern of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

This tension between public and private expression animates the novel, and it is what best clarifies S?nmez’ decision to write Lovers in the Kurdish language. As S?nmez told me in an interview last year, “I had a feeling that I could write this book in Turkish, Kurdish or English—but I said, it’s time to return home. My home is the Kurdish language.” This sense of returning “home” justified the risk of working in a banned, repressed, unofficial mother tongue, potentially off-putting to a Turkish or global readership. “People say, ‘Oh, you are ruining your own career. It’s a wrong turn, for a writer.’ But they don’t understand that in literature, there is not a good or bad language—only a good or bad story.”

In accordance with the ethnocentric Turkish state’s categorization of the Kurds as mere “mountain Turks,” Kurdish has likewise been denigrated as a “mountain language,” fit only for women gathered around a fire, rather than associated with literary greatness. In fact, the Indo-European Kurdish language is extremely distant from Turkic languages (it has more in common with Iranian, Hindi, and even English than Turkish). Meanwhile, there is a rich Kurdish oral tradition dating back over a millennium, alongside a small but proud written literature exemplified by seventeenth-century epic Mem ? Z?n, the so-called Kurdish Romeo and Juliet.

Nonetheless, centuries of marginalization and persecution have left an impact on the language, which today has official status only in Iraq. Absent standardization and formal education, Kurdish remains a generally oral language and varies dramatically from town to town. “We never saw a printed Kurdish text, a book or magazine, or anything on TV or radio in Kurdish,” S?nmez recalls. “Our education was only in Turkish.” The two main “dialects” of Kurdish are not mutually intelligible and written in different alphabets, further complicating the situation.

Many Kurds prefer Turkish or Arabic for formal business and written communications, and spoken Kurdish is interlarded with technical, conceptual, and everyday terms from the region’s dominant languages. The issue is politically fraught, as Kurdish activists and scholars lament their fellow citizens’ lack of familiarity with Kurdish vocabulary, at times shading into an essentialist valorization of an imagined, pure Kurdish. Indeed, a Turkish-Kurdish activist once told me off for using the Turkish word bilgisayarto refer to my laptop. I should take care to use the original, Kurdish word, he said—komputer.

S?nmez describes his own struggles when returning “home” to Kurdish: “It was not a natural [process]. . . . Returning from an oral to a written Kurdish language was a challenge. You have to adapt a new grammatical approach. In daily, oral language, grammar is totally free, there are not any rules; written, it’s totally different.” This orality, fluidity, and heavy borrowing from neighboring and occupying languages doesn’t delegitimize the Kurdish spoken by millions throughout the region. But it does create challenges for any author trying to express themselves in a language generally more familiar from political communiqués than experimental novels. Should heterogeneity and communicability be sacrificed on the altar of an “authentic,” literary Kurdish?

S?nmez is not the only author to have recently taken up the challenge. In 2023, another Kurdish writer, Kawa Nemir, published a herculean translation of James Joyce’s Ulyssesinto Kurdish. Nemir battled against the traditional limitations of Kurdish and state repression to piece together a vocabulary fit for the task, traveling throughout occupied Kurdistan to collect arcane terms and idioms from interviews with prison inmates, aged villagers, oral poets, and the pages of Mem ? Z?n. Nemir was forced into exile as he finished the project, with the completed text standing as a formidable testament to the richness, depth, and polyvalency of this long-repressed language.

In the same spirit, the way in which everyday speakers of Kurdish weave onomatopoeia, borrowed terminology, and folk references into their conversations can be considered a strength, not a weakness, of a language which has survived centuries of repression precisely due to its adaptability. S?nmez’s work takes a similar approach, braiding folk tales into tapestries of everyday life, as previously exemplified in Istanbul, Istanbul. He turns a similar, magpie eye on the Western literary tradition in Lovers, drawing on the way certain writers are remembered, repurposed, and turned into myths or caricatures. Kafka is approached here as a literary legend, arriving through garbled anecdotes as much as through his work in its own right. For example, S?nmez makes use of a well-known and possibly apocryphal story in which Kafka comes across a girl in a park weeping over her lost doll and comforts her by writing anonymous letters on behalf of the missing doll as it “travels” around the world.

On its own merits, the vignette is rather cloying. But S?nmez shows how the story has been taken up and rewritten by his protagonist’s grandfather, suggesting that Kafka-as-symbol can play a role exceeding or even contradicting his intentions as an arist. “My grandfather was trying to give me hope,” says Kaplan, when he relays the tale to his interrogator, even though “Kafka didn’t try to give hope to anyone.”

The history of literature, Lovers of Franz K. suggests, is a history of imperfect translation, appropriation, and productive error. If Brod went against Kafka’s wishes by renaming his unpublished debut novel Amerika and allowing the infamous cockroach to appear on the cover of Metamorphosis, S?nmez implies he was only following a tradition at least as old as Boccaccio, who revised Dante’s Comedy by appending Divine to the title. And over six hundred years later, S?nmez reminds us, Brod’s own archive, including some of Kafka’s work, would be misappropriated by his secretary after his death, continuing the chain of disregarded wishes. It’s therefore possible to identify a particular Kurdish spirit in the theory of literary production and reception implied by Lovers, one which recognizes all languages and cultures as a mishmash of appropriated terms and misrepresented myths.

Still, we needn’t consider S?nmez’s novel inherently political due to his Kurdish identity—that would be to repeat the crimes of the interrogating officers, who attempt to understand Kaplan through a reductive and identitarian frame as a mere terrorist motivated by antisemitic spite or doomed to reaction through the fact of his parent’s own Nazi affiliation, struggling to believe a migrant could be motivated by literary concerns. Authorities’ failure to understand that literature can be radicalizing in itself is what allows insurgent literary cultures to develop amid conditions of repression, in Kurdistan as worldwide. Here, finally, is where K-for-Kafka and K-for-Kurdistan meet: a complex desire on behalf of both nation and artist for recognition and acceptance, but on terms of their own choosing.

It’s appropriate, therefore, that Lovers of Franz K. closes with a passing reference to Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” In this short story, a comparison is set up between the wretch who starves himself as entertainment before an ever-dwindling audience and the suffering, overlooked artist. But this is no simplistic analogy. Just as he dies, Kafka’s hunger artist admits to his own corruption, failure, and self-serving intent, rather as Kaplan’s own complex and imperfect motivations emerge throughout Lovers.

With this image in my mind, I was left thinking of the Kurdish hunger strikers languishing in Turkish prisons. Like Kafka, like the titular hunger artist, like S?nmez himself, they have made grave sacrifices in pursuit of their chosen cause, yet they need an audience to ensure these sacrifices are not in vain. This burden is borne by both artists and revolutionaries, who must both sometimes compromise themselves in pursuit of recognition by the very systems they seek to challenge or subvert. If writing in Kurdish marks a homecoming for S?nmez, it is necessarily a profoundly uncertain home—the shadowy world of banned languages, interview-room misunderstandings, censored texts, and unpublished oeuvres.