Aeolian Visions / Versions: Modern Classics and New Writing from Turkey
400
Aeolian Visions / Versions: Modern Classics and New Writing from Turkey
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781840598537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milet Publishing,Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Series: | Turkish Literature Series |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Mel Kenne is a poet and translator and a founding member of the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature (CWTTL). Six collections of his poetry have been published, most recently Take and a bilingual collection, The View from Galata. Saliha Paker is a literary translator and professor of translation studies who retired in 2008 from Bogaziçi University. She founded the CWTTL in 2006, under the sponsorship of the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Amy Spangler is the cofounder and director of AnatoliaLit Agency and the translator of The City in Crimson Cloak by Asli Erdogan and the translator of Noontime in Yenisehir by Sevgi Soysal.
Read an Excerpt
Aeolian Visions/Versions
Modern Classics and New Writing from Turkey
By Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, Amy Spangler, Cunda International Workshop f (CWTTL)
Milet Publishing
Copyright © 2013 Milet PublishingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84059-853-7
CHAPTER 1
Translated Texts from the Periphery
Excerpt from a Talk by Nurdan Gürbilek (2006)
Translated by Sehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar (2006)
... writers at the periphery have a different fate. They are read as a means of knowing more about a certain part or aspect of the world — a certain country, a religion, the Muslim world, the East or something of that nature.
Although the list of works translated from Turkish into English is long, these texts are somehow lost. Lost in the sense that they don't have a context and seem to come out of nowhere. They are like free-floating stars without a galaxy, they do not make a constellation, either among themselves or among texts in other languages. They do not talk among themselves or with texts written in other languages. There is something missing there ... I'm afraid that most of them become victim to the tendency to take them only as a localized color of the periphery, a different flavor, a different taste in world cuisine. If a text does not have a context, we know that it will have one only if the literary market can offer it.
* * *
Here in Turkey, even young students don't read Baudelaire or Proust to learn more about France, Dostoevksy to learn more about Russia, or Shakespeare to learn more about the history of England. We read them because they are classics of world literature, because they speak to us of the adventures of the human soul, of the existential problems of humankind. But writers at the periphery have a different fate. They are read as a means of knowing more about a certain part or aspect of the world — a certain country, a religion, the Muslim world, the East or something of that nature. Orhan Pamuk was fortunate enough to go a little beyond these limits. Still, it is no coincidence that in his interviews abroad, he is asked more questions about Turkey's membership in the European Union, Islam, human rights in Turkey, torture, the Kurdish problem, the Armenian problem, or almost anything other than Turkish literature or literature in general. I don't want to be misunderstood here; every writer has the choice of becoming a political figure. But I think in Orhan Pamuk's case, his position has less to do with personal choice and more to do with the fact that he comes from a country in the periphery. A few days ago, I was talking to the novelist and short story writer Leylâ Erbil about her novel Tuhaf Bir Kadin (A Strange Woman), which was translated into German. She told me how disappointed she was when she learned that the best review of the novel focused on how women meet their doom in an underdeveloped Muslim country.
We know Frederic Jameson's notorious speculations on third world literature — that all third world texts, even those that are seemingly particular, are necessarily allegorical, and that they should be read as national allegories. This was fiercely debated in the 1990s, and it is not my intention to start the whole discussion all over again. In fact, I think that as a theory it has its strengths, especially in explaining some of the traumas related to the belated arrival of the modern Turkish novel. But I think his theory is also significant in showing us some traps that await us when one culture is translated to another. Actually, what Jameson was trying to do was to translate, to convey what he calls third world literature, to the western world. He was trying to draw attention to it, to remind western readers that there is a different literature out there — different, not primitive, naive or anachronistic, as western judgment tends to see it. He was exposing the limits of western judgment. He was saying that third world literature, with its national allegories, its political implications, always keeping in mind its particular social totality, can be a model for western writers, to remind them of their own repressed political consciences. As I said before, however, talking about cultural difference has its traps.
CHAPTER 2Bad Boy Turk I (Kötü Çocuk Türk I)
By Nurdan Gürbilek (2001)
Translated by Erdag Göknar, Sehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar and Nilüfer Yesil (2006)
One of the few abject heroes of Turkish literature appears in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's A Mind at Peace as Suad, who is one of the major figures in the novel, if not the main character. Suad's character transforms the novel into one of dis ease, through his alienation and animosity, his foul smirk, his atheism and his insolence. His character, which is pathologically depraved, fundamentally destroys every possibility he might have for contentment. His dark soul disturbs everyone's peace by valorizing the material over the spiritual, nothingness over being and perverse pleasures over moderation. He dims the all-illuminating light of love, and reminds all who believe in culture and happiness that death is nothing but wretched decay. He believes that salvation from the cruel game of life occurs through yet another cruel act; that the way to discovering one's own treasure of goodness passes through murder.
Resenting the unfairness of his affliction, Suad has become the enemy of kindness, joy and health, as from his sickbed in the sanatorium he tries to poison everyone. This is not to say that denial is absent in his malevolence. Suad opposes the awareness and will that Ihsan represents, as much as the love and aesthetic pleasure represented by Mümtaz. He confronts their ideals and dreams with all his vulgarity, brutality and defiance. Frustrated with social etiquette, he ridicules the mediocre ideas, moderate pleasures, measured compassions, trivial hopes and half-hearted anguish of the intellectuals around him. Onto the love story that we read he casts the shadow of destructive emotions unrepressed by culture — spite, anger, vengeance, misery, and malicious doubt. Tanpinar has chosen to describe him as a "dirty hand." He enters everyone's lives "just like a dirty and sticky hand whose grimy fingers soil a cabinet full of clean laundry in the dark." He "turns everything into a disgusting sludge" and sucks everyone into this "black, sleazy, ash-colored mud." Suad is openly compared to shit: he contaminates everything he encounters with "the disgusting slime of his miserable personality," smearing everyone with this "runny mess." Sometimes Mümtaz gets a whiff of "the worst kind of toilet stink" from him, repellent and nauseating. In all these aspects, Suad deserves to be considered one of the few pathetic as well as devilish heroes in Turkish literature.
It is obvious that Suad plays an essential role in the development of A Mind at Peace. Under his influence Mümtaz is overcome by "the merciless seduction of deadly thoughts," and Nuran feels revolted by love, by his existence as much as his suicide, with the awful grimace on his lifeless face. But again, it is Suad who succeeds in drawing Mümtaz's attention to the underworld of high culture, to the people whose lives he otherwise would not have known about, whose opinions remain unsolicited; to those who would never have appeared in this novel of ideas. It is only after Mümtaz has been overcome by Suad's influence that he momentarily averts his gaze from mosques, yali seaside villas, and the beauties of the Bosphorus, seeing, if only out of the corner of his eye, things beyond aesthetic culture. He now notices streets where raw sewage flows, where people live in houses built of tin and mud bricks, where boys serve coffee-vendors and porters hunch under their burdens: "a humanity ready to leap over all culture or good breeding." Moreover, it is again Suad who brings nightmare into Tanpinar's "dream aesthetic," destroying the triangular theme of art, nature and love in the novel's second chapter, denying the representational terms (like "dream," "reign of the soul" and "chance") that contribute to the novel's philosophical depth, and violating Tanpinar's beloved notion of "civility." Clearly, Tanpinar tries to include the opposite of his own aesthetic viewpoint through Suad, and attempts to portray evil not just as an external enemy but as an inner force with its own appeal.
Herein lies the problem: despite his essential role in the novel, Suad is not a believable character. Furthermore, in many ways he appears to be an imitation; an excessively textual, representational and symbolic character planted in the novel only to represent evil. Although he enables us to distance ourselves from the aestheticism of Mümtaz, who sees life as a matter of taste, and saves the novel from becoming a procession of ideas and dreams, Suad cannot save himself from being a kind of pale copy or a foreign "concept." At best, he can only represent Mümtaz's morbid, solitary and exilic melancholy, his emptiness in the years following his parents' deaths, and his inner "deathly leaven": Suad is an externalized embodiment of Mümtaz's bleak consciousness. He seems to be placed in the novel simply to render meaningless Mümtaz's inner accumulation of culture, to smash its layers, and reveal the emptiness beneath; in short, to authenticate the "leading man"s melancholy rather than his own misery. Apart from this, Suad is a stranger, a foreigner, as made evident by his act of suicide to the accompaniment of Beethoven's violin concerto. In fact, critics have been preoccupied with this matter: Suad is artificial and awkward, an imitated — in other words, "translated" — character who seems to have emerged from a novel by Dostoevsky. In particular, Suad's suicide resembles too closely that of Stavrogin, the protagonist of The Possessed; Suad's suicide too is a "translated" one.
There are elements of truth in these criticisms. What Tanpinar writes elsewhere about Beyoglu also applies to Suad. Just as everything in Beyoglu has its "more authentic" counterpart abroad, everything about Suad also has a "more authentic" foreign counterpart. Indeed, Suad stands before us as a textual character, culled from European literature and philosophy, as a veritable Russian–French–German mix. Behind him, there is a pinch of Nietzsche, a pinch of Baudelaire, and a handful of Dostoevsky. His words parrot sentences we have read elsewhere, some of them from fascist Italian futurists. Suad desires "virgin türkü songs" and "celebration songs for the newborn." He rejects "any scraps from bygone days," believes in war as a form of cleansing, the only way to free humanity from decrepit models, and shrugs off the poetry of both Ronsard and Fuzûlî. This man who appears as though he has accidentally fallen into an environment of Turkish taverns, of Mevlevi rituals performed in the Ferahfeza mode, or of Rumelia türkü songs is truly a foreigner. In contrast to holy Kandil night-pastries, Ramazan rhymes, Kandilli's printed kerchiefs, Bursa's woven fabrics, in short, to "all the forms and shapes that we have created through our lives on this soil," Suad remains an alla franca evil assembled from foreign ideas, a low-life snob, and an excessively elegant bad boy.
CHAPTER 3From A Mind at Peace ([Huzur)
By Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1949)
Translated by Erdag Göknar (2008)
From Part II, Chapter 12
Toward the end of September, the bluefish runs offered another excuse to savor the Bosphorus. Bluefish outings were among the most alluring amusements on the straits.
An illuminated diversion stretching out along both shores beginning from Beylerbeyi and Kabatas in the south, extending north to Telli Tabya and the Kavaklar near the Black Sea, and gathering around the confluence of currents, the bluefish catches gave rise, here and there, to waterborne fetes, especially on darkened nights of the new moon. In contrast to other excursions that developed as part of a venture demanding long outings, this carnival dance developed right then and there, together with everyone.
Since childhood, Nuran had adored the seas over which caique lanterns shimmered like brilliants swathed in black and purple velvets, the translucent darkness beginning where such radiance ceased, shattering a little further onward due to another cluster of anglers, the wake of a ferryboat, or small swells; she adored the rising of this luminous silhouette within a thousand prismatic refractions, the way it spread through the setting as if it might abduct her. In brief, she loved these nocturnal excursions for bluefish that conveyed a sense of occurring in a realm where reflection, glint and shocks of light alone appointed a highly polished, radiant palace accompanied by crescendos progressing from small melodies and musical measures to vast and idiosyncratic variations.
Before she'd married, and even when younger, her father, who considered his daughter and Tevfik his only like-minded cohorts in the house, would take them fishing for bluefish. When she reminisced about these nights with Mümtaz, he didn't miss the opportunity to take summer, which had been so wondrous, to a plane of higher pleasure.
* * *
Mümtaz adored this old-world philanderer, who, around the time of Mümtaz's birth, declared his love for the neighborhood ladies five times a day as if it were an inseparable part of the call to salvation sounded to the entire neighborhood from the minaret of the quaint mosque. Tevfik was possessed of a gentlemanly Epicureanism that found open expression only in the subdued air of satisfaction that collected in his eyes when he wiped his grayed mustache with the back of his hand.
A gentleman of rare experience, he greatly facilitated Nuran and Mümtaz's appreciation of Bosphorus bluefish outings and their understanding of the role of ardor in human experience. From the very first day, he'd taken Mümtaz under his wing, diminishing the atmosphere of animosity in the household created by Fatma's jealousy, which had found a most fertile ground under Yasar's wardship. Mümtaz was quite cognizant of the part Tevfik's friendship played in his amicable acceptance by Nuran's mother at the Kandilli household. Even when most resistant to Mümtaz's visitations, she could not withstand her brother's enthusiasm and was oftentimes swayed by him.
The way this salty philanderer regarded their love so earnestly astounded Mümtaz. Tevfik's profligate life contained little that might naturally indicate his admiration for such passion. At first, Mümtaz assumed that Tevfik's mask of approval concealed expressions of mockery toward him and his inexperience, or that he took Mümtaz this seriously only due to respect for the feelings of his dearest beloved niece. Later, as Tevfik gradually entered Mümtaz's life, he realized that his rakish, extravagant and at times brutal existence obscured bewildering Pangs of Nostalgia. One day, Nuran's uncle casually confided to him that most ladies' men — objects of envy during a reckoning of one's life, or whilst one wallowed in depression after a missed opportunity for gratification due to a bankrupt phantasy — hadn't had the chance to love a woman fully or had lost this chance and had attempted to make up for it by chasing after contingencies, an ideal or an array of tired repetitions of the same experience ... In short, men like Mümtaz who lived through a singular beloved were the objects of genuine envy.
From Part IV, Chapter 2
Mümtaz recognized the türkü. During the last war, while in Konya with his father, soldiers being transported by evening freight trains and peasants carting vegetables to town toward daybreak always sang this song in the station. It had a searing melody. The entire drama of Anatolia was contained in this türkü.
"How strange!" he said. "It's acceptable, even forgivable, for the masses to moan and complain. Just listen to türküs from the last war! What spectacular pieces! The older ones are that way too. Take that Crimean War türkü. But these songs aren't liked by intellectuals. So the people have no right to whine! That means we are responsible."
Nuri returned to the earlier topic: "And how d'you know that things won't run amok this time? Brought about by only one piece of straw, more or less."
Mümtaz completed his thought: "I'm not defending war. What makes you think that I am? For starters, can humanity even be divided into 'victorious' and 'vanquished'? This is absurd. This division is sufficient to bankrupt values and ethics and even what we're fighting for. Naturally, it's a mistake to expect good or great things to follow in the wake of every crisis. But what's to be done? You see, there are five of us here. Five friends. When we think independently, we find ourselves possessed of an array of strengths. But in the face of any crisis ..."
His friends gazed at him intently as he continued: "Since morning I've been debating this on my own." Abruptly, then, he returned to the previous topic: "On the contrary, worse, much worse things could arise."
"What have you been deliberating since the morning?"
"This morning, near the Hekim Ali Pasha Mosque, girls were playing games and singing türküs. These songs have existed maybe since the time of the conquest of Istanbul. And the girls were singing them and playing. You see, I want these türküs to persist."
"That's a defensive struggle ... That's different."
"Sometimes a defensive struggle can change its character. If there's a war, I'm not saying we'll rush into it at all costs. For nobody knows what the developments leading up to it will be. Sometimes, unexpectedly, a back door opens. You look to find an unforeseen opportunity! In that case, waging or refraining from war becomes a matter that's within your own control.
"When one contemplates it, it's confounding. The difference between those who controlled humanity's fate at the start of the last war and today's statesmen is immeasurable."
Mümtaz turned to Ihsan in his thoughts as if to ask him something.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aeolian Visions/Versions by Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, Amy Spangler, Cunda International Workshop f (CWTTL). Copyright © 2013 Milet Publishing. Excerpted by permission of Milet Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Editorial Notes,Guide to Turkish Pronunciation,
About This Book,
Translated Texts from the Periphery Excerpt from a Talk by Nurdan Gürbilek,
Bad Boy Turk I | Nurdan Gürbilek,
From A Mind at Peace | Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar,
Garden Vines | Gülten Akin,
Poetry, Ideology and Conscience Excerpt from a Talk by Gülten Akin,
From Poems of 42 Days | Gülten Akin,
a | Zeynep Uzunbay,
sesinle | Zeynep Uzunbay,
Saturday Mother | Ahmet Büke,
From Lonelinesses | Hasan Ali Toptas,
The Plan | Sevgi Soysal,
From The Return, Part V of Secret Domain | Güven Turan,
San Gimignano | Güven Turan,
The Poet's Share of Words Excerpt from a Talk by Haydar Ergülen,
Letter to God | Haydar Ergülen,
We're Lonely, Brother Cemal | Haydar Ergülen,
My Big Brother | Behçet Çelik,
A Cold Fire | Behçet Çelik,
Poem of the Girl Who Died Alone | Gülten Akin,
Being the Mirror Boy and the Son of Scheherazade Excerpt from a Talk by Hasan Ali Toptas,
The Balcony | Hasan Ali Toptas,
Night Moods | Zeynep Uzunbay,
Carry Us Across | Haydar Ergülen,
From The Shadowless | Hasan Ali Toptas,
Flour Soup, Cherry Raki, A Pinch of Time | Gökçenur Ç.,
Nothing in Nature Says Anything | Gökçenur Ç.,
The Lakeshadow | Ahmet Büke,
The Land of Mulberry | Gonca Özmen,
Autumn Chills | Gonca Özmen,
The Forgotten | Oguz Atay,
Eastern Mountain | Murathan Mungan,
The Translator's Voice and Halal Magic Excerpt from a Talk by Murathan Mungan,
Appropriation | Murathan Mungan,
The Money Djinns | Murathan Mungan,
Today Let It Be Like This | Murathan Mungan,
Railway Storytellers—A Dream | Oguz Atay,
Baroque | Gülten Akin,
Stain | Gülten Akin,
From The Garden of Forgetting | Latife Tekin,
Kuzguncuk Hotel | Haydar Ergülen,
Lost Brother | Haydar Ergülen,
Ghazal of Idylls | Haydar Ergülen,
The Worm in the Apple | Ahmet Büke,
Blemish | Gonca Özmen,
Shadows | Gonca Özmen,
Start Again | Gonca Özmen,
Why I Killed Myself in This City | Mine Sögüt,
From Lonelinesses | Hasan Ali Toptas,
Tradition and Innovation, Ghost Ship Adventures, and Writing for Effect Excerpt from a Talk by Murat Gülsoy,
From A Week of Kindness in Istanbul | Murat Gülsoy,
Done with the City | Gülten Akin,
Rubai for the Saints | Murathan Mungan,
Write, and You'll Really Be Up Shit Creek | Ahmet Büke,
The Spokesperson of Words | Gökçenur Ç.,
A Monument to the Impossibility of Utterance | Gökçenur Ç,
From After Gliding Parallel to the Ground for a While | Baris Biçakçi,
Metaphors for Rent | Murathan Mungan,
Network ID | Murathan Mungan,
Tanaba Tanaba Entububa | Ahmet Büke,
Poetry, Pleasure and the Im/Possibility of Being Correct Excerpt from a Talk by Gökçenur Ç.,
Ölüm, Yildizlari Gecenin Kabuk Tutmus Yaralari Saniyor | Gökçenur Ç.,
Thrashing Life | Gökçenur Ç.,
The Perforated Amulet | Sevgi Soysal,
Borges Slum | Murathan Mungan,
Old Dream | Murathan Mungan,
Glass Summer | Murathan Mungan,
Kurdish Cats and Gypsy Butterflies | Mine Sögüt,
Two-Way Gypsy | Gülten Akin,
I Cut My Black Black Hair | Gülten Akin,
Translating the Silence of the Poor Excerpt from a Talk by Latife Tekin,
From Muinar | Latife Tekin,
you gotta go when you gotta go | Zeynep Uzunbay,
wet | Zeynep Uzunbay,
From "The Legs of Sahmeran" | Murathan Mungan,
From Lonelinesses | Hasan Ali Toptas,
Tante Rosa's Animals | Sevgi Soysal,
Tante Rosa Is Excommunicated | Sevgi Soysal,
Lament for a Working Mother's Child | Gülten Akin,
Sand | Gülten Akin,
From May I Have a Fly-Sized Husband to Watch Over Me | Hatice Meryem,
Mustafa | Gonca Özmen,
Memet | Gonca Özmen,
Snake | Mine Sögüt,
Scheherazade | Gülten Akin,
Three Masters to One Captive | Gülten Akin,
The Poetry of Memory and Books with a Backbone Excerpt from a Talk by Birhan Keskin,
From Y'ol | Birhan Keskin,
The Yellow Notebook of Dreams | Ahmet Büke,
Afterword: The Path Leading to Cunda | Saliha Paker,
Biographies of Authors and Translators,
Acknowledgements,
Permissions Acknowledgements,