The Language of Liberation : Culture: Rashid Karadaghi is waging his own war to save his people--he's writing a Kurdish-English dictionary. But his life's work is threatened because he's out of money.

By MILES CORWIN

Dec. 9, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SANTA BARBARA — On Page 4,272 of this immense manuscript--reams of lined notebook paper filled with a neat, handwritten script--is a single word --tailor-made --the final entry in an abandoned dictionary.

For 21 years, Rashid Karadaghi devoted his life to this English-Kurdish dictionary. Living alone in a tiny cottage near UC Santa Barbara, he worked from dawn until late at night, hunched over his array of reference books, sometimes spending an entire day on a single definition.

But now Karadaghi is broke, unable to obtain a grant and searching for a full-time job. He’s been forced to put aside the dictionary and is doubtful he ever will be able to finish his life’s work. To Karadaghi, this is more than simply the first English-Kurdish dictionary--he considers it a political act, a work of liberation.

For centuries, the 25 million Kurds, living in a mountainous area wedged among Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, have been an oppressed minority under countless hostile political regimes. Still, the Kurds have survived as a people. And the reason they have survived, Karadaghi says, the reason they have maintained such a strong national identity, after living so long without a homeland, is because their language has survived.

“They can take your cattle away; they can take your land away, but as long as you preserve your language, you are still a separate people,” Karadaghi says, raising a forefinger. “This dictionary to me is more a cause than a scholarly work. It’s my way to ensure the survival of the Kurdish culture.”

A small, intense man with curly gray hair, Karadaghi, 53, has long been a curiosity in Isla Vista, a boisterous student community next to the UC Santa Barbara campus. While he is holed up at his desk, translating obscure words from another world, suntanned fraternity members play volleyball outside his back window, students next door blare rock music, and surfers, carrying their boards, stroll by his front door. But Karadaghi remains oblivious to these distractions, occasionally stepping out into the harsh sunlight, squinting, lost in a fog of conjunctions and transitive verbs.

During the late 1980s, Karadaghi, who is from a small town in Iraqi Kurdistan, agonized as Iraqi troops gassed Kurdish villages, killing more than 5,000 in one town alone. Then, after the Gulf War, the Kurds revolted against the Iraqi government and were brutally suppressed. Thousands of Kurds died, either from Iraqi bullets or starvation and disease, while fleeing in the snow across the mountains. During this period, Karadaghi worked feverishly, more determined than ever to finish the dictionary.

“I can’t go into the mountains, carry a gun and fight . . . This dictionary is my way of fighting back.” He closes his eyes briefly and says softly, “It’s the only weapon I have.”

For the Kurds to gain a homeland or find some measure of self-determination, he says, they need the support and political pressure of the West. But both Kurdish--an Indo-European language related to Persian--and the rugged, remote area of Kurdistan have been inaccessible to most Westerners. The dictionary, he says, can help serve as the necessary link between the two cultures.

If Karadaghi ever is able to finish his dictionary, he will dedicate the work to his late parents, both of whom were illiterate. Although his father, a farmer, was an uneducated man, he had a great reverence for learning. One of the religious leaders in the town once asked why he sacrificed to send his children to school, when they could be helping him on the farm. He told the religious leader, Karadaghi recalls, that he would do anything, including “selling the rug from under my feet” to pay for his children’s education.

After Karadaghi finished college in Iraq and taught high school for a few years, he received a scholarship for graduate school at UC Santa Barbara. In June of 1971, the day after he received his Ph.D. in English, instead of seeking a tenure-track teaching job like his classmates, he began work on the dictionary. Rejected several times for grants, he supported himself over the years with part-time teaching jobs and occasional translating work.

Karadaghi stayed in the United States because he felt his life would have been in danger in Iraq. He did not want to take the risk of working on the dictionary in a country where people have been jailed, tortured and killed for advocating Kurdish independence.

“I was simply afraid of being a Kurd there. That sums it up.”

While there are Kurdish dictionaries with definitions in other languages, the need for an English-Kurdish dictionary is critical, said Andras Bodrogligeti, a professor in UCLA’s department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Even after the Gulf War, when the world’s attention was focused on the Kurds’ desperate flight across the mountains, they were scrambling for interpreters to communicate their plight to the world. They often had to rely on Turkish or Iranian translators, said Bodrogligeti, who has consulted with Karadaghi about the dictionary.

Last year, after more than two decades of tedious, painstaking labor, the completion of the dictionary was finally in sight. Karadaghi had completed more than 50,000 entries and figured another year or two of 12-hour days and he would be through.

But then his ascetic, carefully ordered life was inalterably changed--he met a Kurdish woman when he returned home to visit his family, married and brought her back to his ramshackle cottage. She is now pregnant, and with the exigencies of a family to support and his savings exhausted, he no longer has the luxury of devoting the time necessary to finish the dictionary.

“I always had put my personal life on hold, so I would have more time to devote to the dictionary. But when I turned 50, I suddenly became conscious of time. I realized, ‘If I didn’t do it soon, I’d better forget about having a family forever.’ ”

Karadaghi is so frustrated because the dictionary is 90% complete and he needs only a year or two of full-time work to finish. But instead of working on the dictionary he is spending his days applying for full-time teaching positions and researching new grant possibilities.

Even if he were able to work an hour or two a night, he would not be able to make much progress because writing a dictionary is such assiduous work and momentum is needed. He realizes if he is unable to obtain a grant, it could take him decades to complete the dictionary, and at age 53, he may never finish.

Karadaghi feels he is one of the few people who is qualified to complete such a work. With his Ph.D., his knowledge of colloquial English, his years of studying in the United States, he has had opportunities few Kurds are granted. The dictionary, he says, is “my responsibility, my mission, my destiny.”

Sometimes, after working late into the night, he wanders out into the dark and asks himself: “Why am I spending my life doing this?” But then, he says, a voice always answers: “If I don’t do it, who will?”

When Karadaghi was studying English in the ninth grade, he came upon a word that, ultimately, would change his life. The word was rude , and he could not figure out the meaning.

Since there was no English-Kurdish dictionary he attempted to figure out the word by translating it into Arabic. But his Arabic was not fluent, so he never was able to understand the exact meaning. It was then that Karadaghi first began thinking about the need for a dictionary.

“The knowledge of English is so important to the Kurdish people on so many levels. Since so many of the textbooks in medicine, agriculture and science are in English, you can not get ahead in the world without these language skills. For me and so many others, English was the key to our advancement.”

For more than two decades, Karadaghi has worked in the corner of his living room at a small desk--a few feet from the kitchen--filled with a jumble of more than 20 dictionaries in various languages. It is a challenge, he says, to describe a word’s every nuance, and impart just the right tone.

In Karadaghi’s dictionary, the word set for example, has 33 definitions as a transitive verb, 12 as an intransitive verb, 9 as an adjective and 12 as a noun. He delineates the difference between set apart, set aside, set back, set off, set up, and on and on.

Translating American expressions into Kurdish is a particular challenge. Explaining go to bat for to a people who are unfamiliar with baseball, or behind the 8-ball to a people who are unfamiliar with pool, tests Karadaghi’s creative powers.

“Some people might think this work is tedious, but for me, my most exciting times are when I’m at my desk, working on the dictionary,” says Karadaghi, peering over a tall stack of reference books. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”

Karadaghi keeps his immense manuscript in a battered metal safe, each of the letters completed --from A to S, held together by giant metal clips--the size of a phone book. The definitions are neatly written in black ink, with corrections and emendations added in red and green ink.

A few years ago, Karadaghi was in London researching the dictionary with the world’s foremost Kurdish scholar. One afternoon, the scholar turned to Karadaghi and told him he couldn’t imagine anyone else being able to compile the dictionary. Karadaghi asked him why.

“Because no one can do this kind of work for money or for fame,” the scholar told him. “You are the only person who can do this work . . . because you are in love with it.”