TEHRAN – Iraqi Kurdish translator Mariwan Halabjayi has recently finished rendering his fellow Kurdish writer Hiwa Kader’s novel “House of Cats” into the Persian language.  

“In this novel, as a prominent writer, Hiwa Kader has considered people’s loneliness in the West and East and their identity crisis,” Halabjayi told the Persian service of ISNA on Wednesday.

“The writer has splendidly presented the cultural differences and the loneliness of those people that are living in exile and their attachment to pets and cats in particular,” he added.  

He said that the novel has some sub-stories, one of which is about Mr. Sharifi and Mrs. Ziba, a rich Iranian couple that have a happy life in Stockholm.   

Ziba returns to Iran for some reasons, leaving her spouse alone in the Swedish capital. In her absence, Sharifi buys a cat from the House of Cats, naming it after Ziba, due to his love for his wife.

Halabjayi said that the novel is being translated into the English, Danish, Norwegian and Arabic languages and added his Persian translation of the book will be published by Saless, a major Tehran-based publishing house, in the near future.

Kader, who has published five collections of poetry, lived in Sweden for two decades. He currently lives in his hometown Sulaymaniyah, a city in the eastern portion of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq.

He also translated Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s book “War’s Unwomanly Face” and Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind” into Kurdish.

Photo: Iraqi Kurdish translator Mariwan Halabjayi in an undated photo.

MMS/YAW