The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen

Sandorf Passage. 2025. 239 pages.

Last spring, as I pursued my MFA in literary translation at Boston University, Nicholas Glastonbury was invited to give a guest lecture in BU’s long-running seminar, “The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation.” He spoke of translation as desire, as violence, as a bodily act reshaped by Turkish and Kurdish rubbing against each other with centuries of violence packed into each vowel. “When I translate,” he articulated, “I move in concert with the other, I breathe with them.” Reading Sener Ozman’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories in Glastonbury’s lucid translation, I was struck by how deeply that philosophy animates the book. Translation does not stand outside the novel; it pulses from within it, responding to the text’s wounds, anxieties, and dark humors.

Set in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, the novel follows Sertac Karan, a “vehement atheist” teaching at an Islamic high school, harassed by his students and emasculated by his wife. Crushed by a state that has long thought to erase Kurdish language and culture, Sertac spirals into paranoia, disassociation, and manic narration. Ozmen intricately writes about what it means to live inside a language that is not yours, a country that disowns you, a narrative that refuses completion.

Sertac does not simply lose his mind; he loses his syntax for the world. Interestingly, the novel’s structure mirrors this breakdown: stories erupt only to vanish midsentence; the paragraphs rupture. Footnotes argue with the main text. Endnotes spiral into digressions. A single page can contain a plot, a memory, a rant about Turkish bureaucracy, an erotic anecdote, and a footnote declaring: “All mechanics are crooks. Not a one will see the gates of Heaven.” These footnotes are not comedic asides; they are part of the psyche’s architecture. They track Sertac’s associative logic, the insurgent, digressive, unruly way his mind refuses linearity.

Ozmen, a prominent Kurdish artist and writer, composed the novel in Turkish—the very language that sought to unmake Kurdishness. This fact complicates any easy reading of the text, as it becomes a battleground of syntax and silence. In his lecture, Glastonbury argued that Turkish is not an innocent vessel. It is a language engineered through purges, prohibitions, and “structured forgetting.” Kurdish, conversely, is a language long criminalized—outlawed from publication, beaten out of schools, whispered instead of spoken. In that sense, the language becomes both setting and weapon. Thus, when Sertac thinks, teaches, curses, or loses his composure, the sentences buckle, fragment, contradict themselves.

The title is no metaphor. Stories literally refuse completion. The narrator jumps back in time, contradicts himself, abandons scenes, sometimes even loses interest. Kurdish narratives, like Sertac’s, are unfinished because the state continually interrupts their telling. Hence, unfinishedness becomes the novel’s political aesthetic. Stories that cannot be completed reflect histories that have not been healed. Lives that cannot be narrated reflect identities forced underground. Footnotes that overwhelm their main text reenact the way unofficial knowledge survives beneath the state’s sanctioned surface.

At its most compelling, the novel feels like a fever dream narrated by someone who refuses to be oppressed into sanity. Scenes oscillate between brutal realism and fantastical hallucination. The early chapters reveal Sertac’s digressions about demons, footnotes about menacing folklore creatures like piranha, erotic recollections, academic absurdities, and the constant presence of the Turkish state. This ecosystem of competing registers—sacred and obscene, bureaucratic and mythical, philosophical and petty—is what makes the book uniquely Kurdish-Turkish. Laughter and imagination become survival strategies. Madness becomes resistance. Erotics become a counterlanguage to humiliation. In the psychiatric evaluation embedded in the text, Dr. Sarîn writes:

His imagination is highly advanced. He writes stories but is not sure what he writes or what language he uses to do so. The primary axis of his fantasies is erotic; more specifically, Decameronic. He asserts that Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Márquez’s greatest work.

Although this diagnostic framing tries to reduce Sertac’s unruly interiority to pathology, the very traits described—imagination, linguistic instability, erotic excess—are presented as modes of resistance and strategies of survival.

I believe that the translator is the author of a constrained representation. In this book, that claim becomes visible on the page. Glastonbury’s translation is neither invisible nor dominating; it is aware of its own complicity. In his lecture, Glastonbury admitted the desire to add “exorbitant footnotes” or become an “unreliable translator” on purpose, just to replicate the original’s linguistic unease. English cannot experience the violence embedded in Turkish–Kurdish relations. Glastonbury, therefore, re-creates that pressure through (a) footnotes that heckle the narrative, (b) a tone that refuses smoothness, and (c) a rhythm that feels intentionally destabilized. In doing so, he practices what Katerina Bantinaki calls “creative fidelity,” a fidelity not to surface form but to the text’s internal logic, affective weight, and ethical texture.

In brief, what remains most revealing is that The Competition of Unfinished Stories resists being finished—structurally, politically, emotionally. Glastonbury’s translation honors that resistance. It breathes with Ozmen, stumbles with him, improvises with him, and crucially refuses to domesticate him. It is not a transparent window onto a Kurdish interiority, nor a smooth English version of a jagged Turkish original. It is something more ambitious, a co-created space where unfinished stories can finally breathe. If a text is no longer the author’s once it is in the world, this translation is not merely a conduit; it is a co-authored act of survival. And if translation is a site of spectral recovery, then Nicholas Glastonbury’s work resurrects the ghosts embedded in Ozmen’s pages—ghosts of unfinished stories.

Ibrahim Fawzy
Boston University