Butterfly Valley

Butterfly Valley is Sherko Bekas' response to the 1988 atrocities by Saddam's Ba'athis régime on Iraqi Kurdistan. Stunned by the world's silence in the face of this genocide, Bekas - in exile in Sweden at the time - longs to go home and mourn the victims. He laments the repetitive cycles of continuous oppression and suppressed revolutions in Kurdish history, and in his despair speaks to other exiled Kurdish poets (Nali, Haji Qadir and Mawlawi among them) from the ninteenth century to the present day. This long poem unfolds in beautifully-drawn images of the poet's homeland - mountains and forests, rivers and villages, meadows and flowers - which are juxtaposed with scenes of death, destruction and suffering. This is an immensely powerful poem, at once lyrical and heart-rending, and Choman Hardi's fine translation at last gives the English-speaking reader the most extensive example yet of his outstanding writing.



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Product Details

Paperback: 64 pages
Published: Bloodaxe Books Ltd.
2 edition (30 Sept. 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 852246448
ISBN-13: 987-1852246440
Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.5 x 2.6 cm
Paperback: £7.95

Katrina Naomi
Modern Poetry in Translation, November 2018

There is so much to admire here, including Bekas’s even-handedness in discussing Kurdish politics, from the woman who had had enough of revolution, ‘What is left for you to come for? The sieve of our bodies?’ to the warring within Kurdistani political movements, ‘the self-destructive flocks of wounds’. His imagery – and Choman Hardi’s translation – is tremendous.


Ian Brinton
Tears in the Fence, 26th November 2018


This is a sophisticated and intense expression of grief in which Sherko Bekas, as is made clear on the back cover of this astonishingly powerful and beautifully produced edition from Arc Publications, uses a mixture of conflicting traditions, “folksong, funeral lamentation, wedding ritual”. The poem mourns but also celebrates the victims not only of Anfal and Halabja, but also those of past centuries. Butterfly Valley, a long poem of human response to pain, deserves a wide readership and if we ignore it we become thinner by doing so.