The new Jacket issue, Jacket 34, has just come out. It contains a 120-page section on modern Turkish poetry, including selections from Murat Nemet-Nejat's Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, and additional essays on the translation process and new translations.
Through Western Eyes
I.
...
It has often been said that the natives
will only teach foreigners a fake, degraded language,
a mock system of signs
parodying the real language.
It has also been said that the natives
don't know their own language,
and must mimic the phony languages of foreigners,
to make sense out of their lives.
— Linh Dinh, "Vocab Lab," American Tatts
II.
If one wants to grasp the underlying principle of 20th century Turkish poetry in one stroke, it is that it brings animism into the middle of our global universe. Everything in that poetry becomes relatively clear from that perspective. Not only trees or animals, but in this poetry colors, objects, things, natural processes are in dialogue with each other, weaving their endless patterns. Eda is the structure of that pattern, the mesh of linguistic and geographic coordinates which go to its creation. Not the individual, but objects, colors, things are at the center of this endless transformation, the ego attached to it only tangentially, a detail, suffering and ecstatic. It is this peripheral relationship of consciousness to wider natural forces — subjective and objective, visceral and abstract — which gives Turkish poetry its stunning originality.
III.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Murat
Showing posts with label turkish poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label turkish poetry. Show all posts
12/1/07
2/13/07
Murat Nemet-Nejat responds to Dubravka Djuric's post
Dubravka Djuric's post can be found here >>
Thank you for your wonderful, thought-provoking post. I would like to respond to the issue of a nationalist language and poetry as it works itself out in the Turkish context and also to your speculation on what a "nationalist literature" must really mean in Turkey, namely: "and what is contemporary serbian or turkish poetry tradition? it is enlightenment romantic context through which the political elites of these nations identify themselves in time and posit it as a universal image of its nation."
There is no question that Turkish critics (and a few poets) who see Turkish poetry in western ideological terms, as a conflict between communist ideology and corrupt "lackey" Americanism see Turkish poetry in terms you describe. The best example of this is in their attitude towards the poets Nazim Hikmet and Orhan Veli, who lived about the same time. The more widely known of the two, Hikmet, a communist, whose poetry was suppressed, spent most of his time in jail. Veli, whose poetry seems almost about nothing, was quite popular, and to this day people know many of his poems by heart. Years after their deaths, the poet Attila Ilhan, quite characteristically of a certain point of view, claimed that the Turkish government pushed Veli's popularity in order to suppress Nazim Hikmet's poetry, as part of a political campaign. Ilhan called Veli a "state poet." in an analysis which basically would agree with your concluding words, "populism in its parodical humor, and entertaining folklore may looks like subversive, but it is always object of manipulation of cultural elites and state apparatuses."
I completely disagree with this view, as far as Turkish poetry is concerned. Attila’s Ilhan’s critique of Veli is occurs through the eyes of the cold war, to paraphrase your words, through the prism of a 19th century western ideology of Marxism. It distorts the reality of Turkish poetry as it has occurred. This does not mean my view leans towards an epic,” nationalism driven poetry. Such a poet does exist in Turkish, Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca (translated by Talat Sait Halman and published by Pittsburgh University Press in…). Some critics consider Daglarca to be the greatest Turkish poet since Hikmet. I disagree. Daglarca or Attila Ilhan do not appear at all in my anthology. That is part of its controversial status in Turkey.
To clarify how I think Turkish poetry, eda, creates an experimental literature (not necessarily in western avant-garde terms), I will turn to traditional spiritual troubadour poetry.
As I mentioned earlier, the traditional Turkish folk form is “koshma,” which consists of rhymed, syllabic quatrains in abab//cccb/dddb, etc, format with the final stanza mentioning the poet’s name. After 1923 and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, a number of poets for a short while used the rhymed stanza form as the proper form for a new Turkish poetry. The great contribution of both Veli and Hikmet is that each in his own way demolished this stanzaic structure releasing the cadential movement of nuances –a language of unfolding perceptions- which is the essence of Turkish. In my view, Veli is finally the superior poet –at least the one I feel closer to- because in his work this essence exist in a purer form, first, more directly abstracted from a demotic language of the street; second, because Veli refuses to use any other enhancing rhetorical means, besides cadence. His poetry has almost no metaphors, except as a joke, so that one is forced to ask after reading a Veli poem, why does the poem resonate so much, why is it so powerful. Many Veli’s poems are on the internet (http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/orhan_veli.html). Fifteen additional ones are in the Talisman magazine which just came out:
I love beautiful women,
I also love working women;
But I love beautiful working women
More.
Because of the amount of time he spent in jail, there is something static about Nazim Hikmet’s Turkish. For instance, though his absolutely wonderful poems about his life in prison, in letter form to his wife, describe his longings, his thoughts, the life of the other inmates in the ward, the language in the poems shows almost no influence of the language of people around him, no slang, no particular twists of language, etc. It remains the same, basically the spoken Turkish of his aristocratic, upper middle class background remaining as given. In that sense, for Hikmet the language he uses is transparent.
The two major movements ensuing Hikmet and Veli in the 20th century, "The Second New" in the late fifties and sixties and "The Poetry of Motion" (my phrase) in the nineties, both start with an attack on Veli (the "insufficiency" of his poetic revolution) and end up embracing or emulating him.
After Hikmet and Veli, Turkish poetry crosses ideological, ethnic, geographical and historical and sexual lines. It has a democratic elasticity which admits almost any voice into itself, acting as a reflecting, constantly adapting mirror, a public Samizdat (an amazing number of major Turkish books, particularly in the early years, were self-published) . For instance, the Kurdish poems of Ahmet Arif, written in the sixties, say things that may have easily ended him in jail. His is a poetry written in the voice, point of view of mountain Kurds, a guerrilla lyric, describing their guerilla fights against the authorities. Ece Eyhan, his language seemingly the reverse of Arif’s, elliptic, cryptic, hermetic, injects Jewish, Armenian, Greek references, to their histories and holy books, and gay and hustler slang, their coded puns into his poetry (A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, Sun and Moon Press, 1997). Ahmet Arif and Ece Ayhan knew each other. What is more they belong to the same movement, “The Second New,” to which also belong Cemal Süreya, Ilhan Berk (Selected Poems by Ilhan Berk, edited by Onder Otçu, Talisman House, 2004), Metin Eloglu, Edip Cansever and Turgut Uyar. This assimilative power, which draws and unites otherwise utterly heterogeneous tendencies within an underlying linguistic movement is unique to 20th century Turkish among middle eastern languages. From what Duvranka is saying it may be unique including Eastern European/ Balkan languages. In my view, it is unique, including Western modernism, with the possible exception of U.S. for which a poetics describing the nature of this unity has not been spelled out yet. I believe this enterprise should start with rejecting any idea of an American poetic tradition, replacing it with a poetics of cross currents, at the heart of which lies an analysis of the place of words in the American (and global) culture, and its struggle (of words) with the place of images in the same culture.
Echoing Dubravka’s comments at the end of her post, I would like to make two militant statements. They may be militant within the frame of this blog, but even more so within the framework of Turkish literature and criticism:
a) 20th century Turkish poetry does not constitute a national literature. The three prongs which define eda, its underlying concept, undercut the very idea of such national identity.
The first prong is geographic, eda’s focus on the city of Istanbul. Everything about Istanbul is non-unitary, an endlessly assimilative urban landscape. (In his Journals visiting Constantinople, Melville puts his finger exactly on this quality of the city.) First, the city is divided in its middle into two continents, Asia and Europe, by The Bosporus. Second, the city is the spiritual center of both East Orthodox Christianity (as Constantinople/Byzantium) and Islam (Istanbul). Located in its different parts, both minorities and Moslems inhabit the city (the red light areas belonging to the district mostly inhabited by minorities at the time). Parts of stunning, almost erotic beauty are intermingled with crooked, narrow, dilapidated streets. From 1950 to 2006, Istanbul changes from a city of one million to a 21rst century global metropolis of about fifteen million. Eda poets trace different parts of the city as if it were a body, with visible and hidden parts, to develop a narrative of subversive revelation, sexual, political, religious, etc. To see how this works, as the saying goes, one should buy the book, the Eda Anthology, and read it at some length.
In 1991, the poet Lale Müldür wrote the stunning poem “Waking to Constantinople “in which through sinuous, long lines she creates a poem of synthesis between the “dream world” of Byzantium and the Islamic “rationality.” The poem ends with the lines:
you are asleep now in the white washed byzantine room, you are very
alone. one of the ancients is saying, “Don’t cry.”
“Tomorrow is your birthday. Tomorrow a new name will be given to you.”
Müldür read this poem in a public park which used the be part of the grounds of the Ottoman Topkapi palace. She was booed off stage. The booing reflects both the power of poetry still in the Turkish culture and also its subversive transnational nature.
The second prong of eda is in the nature of the language itself. To find their way in it, first rejecting the Ottoman court language, Turkish poets turn to the early history of Turkish poetry, from Anatolia going back to Central Asia. In other words, consciously or not, they are not treating Turkish in national, modern Republic terms. As a consequence, often also only half consciously, they also drag in the pantheistic, animistic sensibility which is at the heart of Sufism. Particular since 1990’s, Turkish poetry has developed an exquisite assimilative sensibility pulling movements both from the East (the central Asia and the former Turkish republics of the Soviet Union ) and the West (former Soviet satellites) into itself, continuously in search of an evolving synthesis, what I call the poetry of motion.
What I am trying to say is that Turkish has created a poetry which speaks exquisitely to our time, where old boundaries have fallen apart and new ones have not been built yet, and what one has is only painful, gut-grinding process, change. It is a poetry of unfolding process, as Turkish is the language of thought unfolding. This poetry is the result of a perfect storm created by the almost accidental convergence of social, historical, geographic and linguistic forces –and not through the will of a national consciousness- the way suddenly an island appears, due to tectonic movements under water. Its shape can be hoped, guessed for; but not completely defined.
As a book in English, part of the purpose of the Eda anthology is to create a lingua franca, to refer to Linh’s beautiful space of sailors in his post, a pidgin English through which us nomads of different parts of the world can find a common language. One of the central books of Turkish poetry, Cemal Süreya’s “üvercinka” is translated in the Eda anthology as “Pigeon English.”
Ciao,
Murat
Thank you for your wonderful, thought-provoking post. I would like to respond to the issue of a nationalist language and poetry as it works itself out in the Turkish context and also to your speculation on what a "nationalist literature" must really mean in Turkey, namely: "and what is contemporary serbian or turkish poetry tradition? it is enlightenment romantic context through which the political elites of these nations identify themselves in time and posit it as a universal image of its nation."
There is no question that Turkish critics (and a few poets) who see Turkish poetry in western ideological terms, as a conflict between communist ideology and corrupt "lackey" Americanism see Turkish poetry in terms you describe. The best example of this is in their attitude towards the poets Nazim Hikmet and Orhan Veli, who lived about the same time. The more widely known of the two, Hikmet, a communist, whose poetry was suppressed, spent most of his time in jail. Veli, whose poetry seems almost about nothing, was quite popular, and to this day people know many of his poems by heart. Years after their deaths, the poet Attila Ilhan, quite characteristically of a certain point of view, claimed that the Turkish government pushed Veli's popularity in order to suppress Nazim Hikmet's poetry, as part of a political campaign. Ilhan called Veli a "state poet." in an analysis which basically would agree with your concluding words, "populism in its parodical humor, and entertaining folklore may looks like subversive, but it is always object of manipulation of cultural elites and state apparatuses."
I completely disagree with this view, as far as Turkish poetry is concerned. Attila’s Ilhan’s critique of Veli is occurs through the eyes of the cold war, to paraphrase your words, through the prism of a 19th century western ideology of Marxism. It distorts the reality of Turkish poetry as it has occurred. This does not mean my view leans towards an epic,” nationalism driven poetry. Such a poet does exist in Turkish, Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca (translated by Talat Sait Halman and published by Pittsburgh University Press in…). Some critics consider Daglarca to be the greatest Turkish poet since Hikmet. I disagree. Daglarca or Attila Ilhan do not appear at all in my anthology. That is part of its controversial status in Turkey.
To clarify how I think Turkish poetry, eda, creates an experimental literature (not necessarily in western avant-garde terms), I will turn to traditional spiritual troubadour poetry.
As I mentioned earlier, the traditional Turkish folk form is “koshma,” which consists of rhymed, syllabic quatrains in abab//cccb/dddb, etc, format with the final stanza mentioning the poet’s name. After 1923 and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, a number of poets for a short while used the rhymed stanza form as the proper form for a new Turkish poetry. The great contribution of both Veli and Hikmet is that each in his own way demolished this stanzaic structure releasing the cadential movement of nuances –a language of unfolding perceptions- which is the essence of Turkish. In my view, Veli is finally the superior poet –at least the one I feel closer to- because in his work this essence exist in a purer form, first, more directly abstracted from a demotic language of the street; second, because Veli refuses to use any other enhancing rhetorical means, besides cadence. His poetry has almost no metaphors, except as a joke, so that one is forced to ask after reading a Veli poem, why does the poem resonate so much, why is it so powerful. Many Veli’s poems are on the internet (http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/orhan_veli.html). Fifteen additional ones are in the Talisman magazine which just came out:
I love beautiful women,
I also love working women;
But I love beautiful working women
More.
Because of the amount of time he spent in jail, there is something static about Nazim Hikmet’s Turkish. For instance, though his absolutely wonderful poems about his life in prison, in letter form to his wife, describe his longings, his thoughts, the life of the other inmates in the ward, the language in the poems shows almost no influence of the language of people around him, no slang, no particular twists of language, etc. It remains the same, basically the spoken Turkish of his aristocratic, upper middle class background remaining as given. In that sense, for Hikmet the language he uses is transparent.
The two major movements ensuing Hikmet and Veli in the 20th century, "The Second New" in the late fifties and sixties and "The Poetry of Motion" (my phrase) in the nineties, both start with an attack on Veli (the "insufficiency" of his poetic revolution) and end up embracing or emulating him.
After Hikmet and Veli, Turkish poetry crosses ideological, ethnic, geographical and historical and sexual lines. It has a democratic elasticity which admits almost any voice into itself, acting as a reflecting, constantly adapting mirror, a public Samizdat (an amazing number of major Turkish books, particularly in the early years, were self-published) . For instance, the Kurdish poems of Ahmet Arif, written in the sixties, say things that may have easily ended him in jail. His is a poetry written in the voice, point of view of mountain Kurds, a guerrilla lyric, describing their guerilla fights against the authorities. Ece Eyhan, his language seemingly the reverse of Arif’s, elliptic, cryptic, hermetic, injects Jewish, Armenian, Greek references, to their histories and holy books, and gay and hustler slang, their coded puns into his poetry (A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, Sun and Moon Press, 1997). Ahmet Arif and Ece Ayhan knew each other. What is more they belong to the same movement, “The Second New,” to which also belong Cemal Süreya, Ilhan Berk (Selected Poems by Ilhan Berk, edited by Onder Otçu, Talisman House, 2004), Metin Eloglu, Edip Cansever and Turgut Uyar. This assimilative power, which draws and unites otherwise utterly heterogeneous tendencies within an underlying linguistic movement is unique to 20th century Turkish among middle eastern languages. From what Duvranka is saying it may be unique including Eastern European/ Balkan languages. In my view, it is unique, including Western modernism, with the possible exception of U.S. for which a poetics describing the nature of this unity has not been spelled out yet. I believe this enterprise should start with rejecting any idea of an American poetic tradition, replacing it with a poetics of cross currents, at the heart of which lies an analysis of the place of words in the American (and global) culture, and its struggle (of words) with the place of images in the same culture.
Echoing Dubravka’s comments at the end of her post, I would like to make two militant statements. They may be militant within the frame of this blog, but even more so within the framework of Turkish literature and criticism:
a) 20th century Turkish poetry does not constitute a national literature. The three prongs which define eda, its underlying concept, undercut the very idea of such national identity.
The first prong is geographic, eda’s focus on the city of Istanbul. Everything about Istanbul is non-unitary, an endlessly assimilative urban landscape. (In his Journals visiting Constantinople, Melville puts his finger exactly on this quality of the city.) First, the city is divided in its middle into two continents, Asia and Europe, by The Bosporus. Second, the city is the spiritual center of both East Orthodox Christianity (as Constantinople/Byzantium) and Islam (Istanbul). Located in its different parts, both minorities and Moslems inhabit the city (the red light areas belonging to the district mostly inhabited by minorities at the time). Parts of stunning, almost erotic beauty are intermingled with crooked, narrow, dilapidated streets. From 1950 to 2006, Istanbul changes from a city of one million to a 21rst century global metropolis of about fifteen million. Eda poets trace different parts of the city as if it were a body, with visible and hidden parts, to develop a narrative of subversive revelation, sexual, political, religious, etc. To see how this works, as the saying goes, one should buy the book, the Eda Anthology, and read it at some length.
In 1991, the poet Lale Müldür wrote the stunning poem “Waking to Constantinople “in which through sinuous, long lines she creates a poem of synthesis between the “dream world” of Byzantium and the Islamic “rationality.” The poem ends with the lines:
you are asleep now in the white washed byzantine room, you are very
alone. one of the ancients is saying, “Don’t cry.”
“Tomorrow is your birthday. Tomorrow a new name will be given to you.”
Müldür read this poem in a public park which used the be part of the grounds of the Ottoman Topkapi palace. She was booed off stage. The booing reflects both the power of poetry still in the Turkish culture and also its subversive transnational nature.
The second prong of eda is in the nature of the language itself. To find their way in it, first rejecting the Ottoman court language, Turkish poets turn to the early history of Turkish poetry, from Anatolia going back to Central Asia. In other words, consciously or not, they are not treating Turkish in national, modern Republic terms. As a consequence, often also only half consciously, they also drag in the pantheistic, animistic sensibility which is at the heart of Sufism. Particular since 1990’s, Turkish poetry has developed an exquisite assimilative sensibility pulling movements both from the East (the central Asia and the former Turkish republics of the Soviet Union ) and the West (former Soviet satellites) into itself, continuously in search of an evolving synthesis, what I call the poetry of motion.
What I am trying to say is that Turkish has created a poetry which speaks exquisitely to our time, where old boundaries have fallen apart and new ones have not been built yet, and what one has is only painful, gut-grinding process, change. It is a poetry of unfolding process, as Turkish is the language of thought unfolding. This poetry is the result of a perfect storm created by the almost accidental convergence of social, historical, geographic and linguistic forces –and not through the will of a national consciousness- the way suddenly an island appears, due to tectonic movements under water. Its shape can be hoped, guessed for; but not completely defined.
As a book in English, part of the purpose of the Eda anthology is to create a lingua franca, to refer to Linh’s beautiful space of sailors in his post, a pidgin English through which us nomads of different parts of the world can find a common language. One of the central books of Turkish poetry, Cemal Süreya’s “üvercinka” is translated in the Eda anthology as “Pigeon English.”
Ciao,
Murat
1/30/07
Further Thoughts on Modern and Ancient Translations
Thinking on Lawrence Venuti's provocative entry, "Where is the foreign in "international," the last two weeks days, I tried to see whether there is a difference between translating from contemporary texts and ancient ones. My first answer was that there is not. The difference between translations of poetry in the last twenty years or so and before is that many more American poets of the last twenty years have a sense of self-sufficiency, that they are at the center of poetic universe. They do not experience the sense of lack, need, which I think is at the root of all generative translations. For instance, Ron Silliman's blog –being the most visited by experimental poets, I assume quite representative- has very few discussions of translations or of foreign writers per se. The blog reminds me of Henry Ford's famous assertion that, "history is bunk"(what would Ford have said of the events in Iraq, of Ramsfeld's "new thinking" as opposed to "old thinking"?). Ironically, Silliman's early essays consistently refer to European thinkers and writers. One key rationale for the necessity of the "new sentence," the basis of his poetics, is a European event, the invention of the printing press, which, for him, transforms a poetry for the ear (performed) to a poetry of the book.
I agree that there have been even fewer translations of ancient texts than of contemporary ones in the last twenty five years,. Nevertheless, I can add a few to the list started by Lawrence ("Men in Aida" and "War Music") and Kent ("The Tablets"): Andrew Schelling's translations of Sanskrit erotic lyrics, Vincent Katz's "The Satyricon" and Kent Johnson's "The Miseries of Poetry," which contains a group of translations of ancient Greek fragments at its core.
What is provocative and insightful about Lawrence's distinction is that it points to a real, significant difference between the translations on the list and those of contemporary texts. While the latter texts focus more on the interests and issues of poetic language, translations of ancient texts have a thematic dimension, as if the interest in the ancient text has something to do with the attempt to say something about one's own time.
All these texts revolve around the themes of war and sexuality, and the nexus of violence which connects them both. In "The Tablets," "The Miseries of Poetry" and k. Iskender's "souljam" this sadomasochistic violence connects to the fragmentation (dissolution through time) of language, that is to say, to translation.
I would like now to include a number of my translations from 13th and 16th century Turkish poetic texts, and also an adaptation from the 16th century Persian poet, Hafiz. These translations had an important place in my development of the idea of eda. I hope they will add to the discussions.
Go to the translations >>
Ciao,
Murat Nemet-Nejat
I agree that there have been even fewer translations of ancient texts than of contemporary ones in the last twenty five years,. Nevertheless, I can add a few to the list started by Lawrence ("Men in Aida" and "War Music") and Kent ("The Tablets"): Andrew Schelling's translations of Sanskrit erotic lyrics, Vincent Katz's "The Satyricon" and Kent Johnson's "The Miseries of Poetry," which contains a group of translations of ancient Greek fragments at its core.
What is provocative and insightful about Lawrence's distinction is that it points to a real, significant difference between the translations on the list and those of contemporary texts. While the latter texts focus more on the interests and issues of poetic language, translations of ancient texts have a thematic dimension, as if the interest in the ancient text has something to do with the attempt to say something about one's own time.
All these texts revolve around the themes of war and sexuality, and the nexus of violence which connects them both. In "The Tablets," "The Miseries of Poetry" and k. Iskender's "souljam" this sadomasochistic violence connects to the fragmentation (dissolution through time) of language, that is to say, to translation.
I would like now to include a number of my translations from 13th and 16th century Turkish poetic texts, and also an adaptation from the 16th century Persian poet, Hafiz. These translations had an important place in my development of the idea of eda. I hope they will add to the discussions.
Go to the translations >>
Ciao,
Murat Nemet-Nejat
11/25/06
Ideas Towards a Theory of Translation in Eda
MURAT NEMET-NEJAT
I
"No gendered pronouns, no stable word order, Turkish is a tongue of radical melancholia."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
The above statement, which seems to be about the Turkish language, in truth is also an analysis of English. The statement asserts a tension, a dialectic between the two languages, removing the grammars of both from their states of naturalness. Substantiating them both, it turns them both into distinct systems of contemplation -what is there, and what is not here...
For instance, the natural thing for a Turkish translator to do is to use the appropriate gender pronoun in given passages. In Eda, I follow the reverse system. Unless the gender reference is absolutely specific, I shift the pronoun. This method -which results in a "translated text" which is more distant, more unsettling to the host reader- has two reasons. A submerged theme of coded homosexuality exists in the 20th Turkish poetry, a theme that gradually is liberated and comes to the surface. The Eda anthology is interested in this process of liberation.
Second, because the very concept of distinctions, between animate and inanimate, object and human, male and female, love and sex, human or divine does not exist in Sufism, which is the metaphysics at the heart of this language and poetry.
Consequently, the strategy of distance, of subtle disorientation becomes a portal to enter, or at least get a hint of, a completely different cultural matrix. The translation involves itself not only with individual poems, but also the society, the city, the culture in which the poem lives, from which it derives. The radical melancholia is hooked to a specific mode of consciousness, as it works itself through a specific language.
The Hour of Sleep
Seeing me he came from you
wanting himself, love, I was in you,
let him take from me, the wanter, what he wants
I am near you, I came near you, me,
hasn't flown yet, will go then,
you, time then, for your want.
Waited for your arrival, with you,
near, next someone someone, with me
I'll love him, he forgot it before,
Forgetting, he slept, the before, with the one there,
but he says he compares tears to me, his better self,
sleeping forget, said, hey you, the one here.
More than me you, I'll remember, I
sleep in you, me
if you want to see, come, look where I sleep.
Romeo, my Romeo's leaving me,
when you wake up, turn back, my lover, here, towards you,
as I sleep, me, on the road you meet, me, I'll meet you.
I had arrived, here, I want to find, here, again,
as I wake up be near me you found me
only I love as much as you love me, you.
Don't lie, love invisibly, me,
there where you spent the night
search me, can you sleep, then, near me, in you.
Let's sleep, let's, one-two-three-thirty,
four-five-six-thirty, seven-eight-nine-thirty,
ten-thirty, sleep time.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, 1995, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
II
"As much as a collection of translations of poems and essays, this book is a translation of a language. Due to the fortuitous convergence of historical, linguistic and geographic factors, in the 20th century -from the creation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920's to the 1990's when Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium turned from a jewel-like city of contrasts of under a million to a city of twelve million- Turkey created a body of poetry unique in the 20th century, with its own poetics, world view and idiosyncratic sensibility. What is more these qualities are intimately related to the nature of Turkish as a language -its strengths and its defining limits. As historical changes occurred, the language in this poetry responded to them, flowered, changed; but always remaining a continuum, a psychic essence, a dialectic which is an arabesque. It is this silent melody of the mind -the cadence of its total allure- which this collection tries to translate. While every effort has been made to create the individual music of each poem and poet, none can really be understood without responding to the movement running through them, through Turkish in the 20th century. I call this essence eda, each poet, poem being a specific case of eda, unique stations in the progress of the Turkish soul, language.
In The Task of the Translator Walter Benjamin says that what gives a language 'translatability' is its distance from the host language. Eda is this distance."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
In Eda a state of being is transformed into a movement, dance of language. It does so by creating a narrative in which there are three characters. The first is the city of Istanbul, the body, the space in which the movement of the spirit occurs. The second is Turkish itself, a totally agglutinative language, with an absolutely flexible, permutable word order, which enables the language to record very subtle nuances of feeling, to record the process of perception as it emerges. The third is Sufism, originating from Central Asian Shamanism, which intuits a deep unity in multiplicity, in chaos. This impulse to unity balances the vertiginous impulse of the Turkish language and society towards chaos. It enables a state of extreme differentiation, in culture and poetry, to thrive as a living organism.
In Eda both sides of the translation pole see themselves in a new way, emerging from out of their systems. Turkish becomes aware of Eda as an organizing principle. In point of fact, this anthology, which includes many essays, basically written as a tool of understanding for Western audiences, has had a surprising and crucial function of self-definition for Turkish poets and critics. For once, they were able to see their achievements in their own terms, without being co-opted by Western terminology or thought systems, such as surrealism or symbolism, etc.
For the Western reader the situation is more complex, because Eda avoids familiar templates, points of reference to make the material familiar. The relationship is tangential, the text existing as a meta-language, which basically what translation is. Its presents to the host language reader a field, a dream of possible alternatives, which the host language can or may not take.
In that way, in a translation both languages move to a third place where language sees or may have the possibility of seeing itself in a new perspective, in that way transforming itself.
Sleep
Sleeping you depart,
forgetter of your leaving is, me
as I return from sleep, get,
you return from sleep, you.
As I return from sleep
if you return into
me, there forget
what it forgot, you.
Sleep with me, you,
in sleep you depart, from me,
in sleep I forget, I, I
depart, from you.
The sleeper departs, departer sleeps,
the mark in sleep, me,
I'll lull to sleep,
in me, what repeats itself.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
Murat Nemet-Nejat
November 18, 2006
The New York Literary Translation Festival
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey
I "No gendered pronouns, no stable word order, Turkish is a tongue of radical melancholia."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
The above statement, which seems to be about the Turkish language, in truth is also an analysis of English. The statement asserts a tension, a dialectic between the two languages, removing the grammars of both from their states of naturalness. Substantiating them both, it turns them both into distinct systems of contemplation -what is there, and what is not here...
For instance, the natural thing for a Turkish translator to do is to use the appropriate gender pronoun in given passages. In Eda, I follow the reverse system. Unless the gender reference is absolutely specific, I shift the pronoun. This method -which results in a "translated text" which is more distant, more unsettling to the host reader- has two reasons. A submerged theme of coded homosexuality exists in the 20th Turkish poetry, a theme that gradually is liberated and comes to the surface. The Eda anthology is interested in this process of liberation.
Second, because the very concept of distinctions, between animate and inanimate, object and human, male and female, love and sex, human or divine does not exist in Sufism, which is the metaphysics at the heart of this language and poetry.
Consequently, the strategy of distance, of subtle disorientation becomes a portal to enter, or at least get a hint of, a completely different cultural matrix. The translation involves itself not only with individual poems, but also the society, the city, the culture in which the poem lives, from which it derives. The radical melancholia is hooked to a specific mode of consciousness, as it works itself through a specific language.
The Hour of Sleep
Seeing me he came from you
wanting himself, love, I was in you,
let him take from me, the wanter, what he wants
I am near you, I came near you, me,
hasn't flown yet, will go then,
you, time then, for your want.
Waited for your arrival, with you,
near, next someone someone, with me
I'll love him, he forgot it before,
Forgetting, he slept, the before, with the one there,
but he says he compares tears to me, his better self,
sleeping forget, said, hey you, the one here.
More than me you, I'll remember, I
sleep in you, me
if you want to see, come, look where I sleep.
Romeo, my Romeo's leaving me,
when you wake up, turn back, my lover, here, towards you,
as I sleep, me, on the road you meet, me, I'll meet you.
I had arrived, here, I want to find, here, again,
as I wake up be near me you found me
only I love as much as you love me, you.
Don't lie, love invisibly, me,
there where you spent the night
search me, can you sleep, then, near me, in you.
Let's sleep, let's, one-two-three-thirty,
four-five-six-thirty, seven-eight-nine-thirty,
ten-thirty, sleep time.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, 1995, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
II
"As much as a collection of translations of poems and essays, this book is a translation of a language. Due to the fortuitous convergence of historical, linguistic and geographic factors, in the 20th century -from the creation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920's to the 1990's when Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium turned from a jewel-like city of contrasts of under a million to a city of twelve million- Turkey created a body of poetry unique in the 20th century, with its own poetics, world view and idiosyncratic sensibility. What is more these qualities are intimately related to the nature of Turkish as a language -its strengths and its defining limits. As historical changes occurred, the language in this poetry responded to them, flowered, changed; but always remaining a continuum, a psychic essence, a dialectic which is an arabesque. It is this silent melody of the mind -the cadence of its total allure- which this collection tries to translate. While every effort has been made to create the individual music of each poem and poet, none can really be understood without responding to the movement running through them, through Turkish in the 20th century. I call this essence eda, each poet, poem being a specific case of eda, unique stations in the progress of the Turkish soul, language.
In The Task of the Translator Walter Benjamin says that what gives a language 'translatability' is its distance from the host language. Eda is this distance."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
In Eda a state of being is transformed into a movement, dance of language. It does so by creating a narrative in which there are three characters. The first is the city of Istanbul, the body, the space in which the movement of the spirit occurs. The second is Turkish itself, a totally agglutinative language, with an absolutely flexible, permutable word order, which enables the language to record very subtle nuances of feeling, to record the process of perception as it emerges. The third is Sufism, originating from Central Asian Shamanism, which intuits a deep unity in multiplicity, in chaos. This impulse to unity balances the vertiginous impulse of the Turkish language and society towards chaos. It enables a state of extreme differentiation, in culture and poetry, to thrive as a living organism.
In Eda both sides of the translation pole see themselves in a new way, emerging from out of their systems. Turkish becomes aware of Eda as an organizing principle. In point of fact, this anthology, which includes many essays, basically written as a tool of understanding for Western audiences, has had a surprising and crucial function of self-definition for Turkish poets and critics. For once, they were able to see their achievements in their own terms, without being co-opted by Western terminology or thought systems, such as surrealism or symbolism, etc.
For the Western reader the situation is more complex, because Eda avoids familiar templates, points of reference to make the material familiar. The relationship is tangential, the text existing as a meta-language, which basically what translation is. Its presents to the host language reader a field, a dream of possible alternatives, which the host language can or may not take.
In that way, in a translation both languages move to a third place where language sees or may have the possibility of seeing itself in a new perspective, in that way transforming itself.
Sleep
Sleeping you depart,
forgetter of your leaving is, me
as I return from sleep, get,
you return from sleep, you.
As I return from sleep
if you return into
me, there forget
what it forgot, you.
Sleep with me, you,
in sleep you depart, from me,
in sleep I forget, I, I
depart, from you.
The sleeper departs, departer sleeps,
the mark in sleep, me,
I'll lull to sleep,
in me, what repeats itself.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
Murat Nemet-Nejat
November 18, 2006
The New York Literary Translation Festival
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey
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