Turkish Forum

Tag: Turkish literature

  • Turkish literature to look out for

    Turkish literature to look out for

    By Sameer Rahim

    muge_iplikci
    Müge İplikçi

    Visitors to Istanbul usually stay close to the old town, where Byzantine relics vie with Ottoman splendour. They walk in the footsteps of European travel writers from Nerval to Flaubert, who were attracted by its oriental aspects: caliphs, harems and dervishes. As Orhan Pamuk writes in his enchanting memoir Istanbul, Eastern strangeness exerts a powerful pull – even on those from the city.

    But any visitor who crosses the Golden Horn will find a teeming metropolis of 10 million. There you will find stories that have as little to do with the Blue Mosque as most modern Londoners have with St Paul’s.

    Part of the difficulty we have in reading Turkish writers is that Turks themselves have not been able to read them either. After the founding of the republic in 1923, the language was reformed to be written in Latin rather than Arabic script – at a stroke cutting the people off from their literary heritage.

    While I was in Istanbul last week, I spoke to the critic Murat Belge. “After the end of the empire,” he told me, “the republic turned inward.” Greeks and Armenians, who in 1900 made up half the population of Istanbul, left a country that became more narrowly nationalistic.

    In later years, especially after the military coup of 1980, censorship and a crackdown on “Marxist” or “obscene” literature made life difficult for publishers. I spoke to Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, co-founder of Metis Books, who was active in radical circles at the time. “It was a very difficult time,” she said. “50,000 people were put in prison.” Translating the wrong type of book into Turkish could land you in jail.

    Sökmen has also defended Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul in court. Shafak won the case but the cost of such cases can be crippling.

    Another publisher, Can Öz, spoke to me about bringing out Paul Auster’s Winter Journal last year. Auster had told Hürriyet newspaper that he didn’t want to visit Turkey “because of imprisoned journalists and writers”.

    His comments brought an extraordinary response from the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He told a party meeting that Auster was “an ignorant man”, adding: “If you come, so what? If you don’t come, so what? Will Turkey lose prestige?”

    Despite his opposition, Winter Journal sold 20,000 copies on its release in Turkey. Öz also told me about a project that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: a biography of Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Öcalan.

    It’s easy, however, to get caught up in skirmishes over freedom of speech. In reality, Turkish literature has never been more free.

    The country is the focus nation at this month’s London Book Fair. Among the 20 writers the British Council is bringing over to London is the crime writer Ahmet Ümit, whose most recent novel in English, A Memento for Istanbul, is a thriller set in the days of the Byzantine Empire. One, I suspect, for fans of Pamuk’s My Name is Red, a medieval murder mystery set in Ottoman-era Istanbul.

    Another name that might be unfamiliar to British readers is Müge Iplikçi. An experienced author of novels for both adults and children, Iplikçi’s Mount Kaf will be published in English this autumn. The novel takes the reader on a dark journey into the CIA rendition programme as well as taking in the devastating earthquake of 1999.

    The Turkish inwardness Belge complained about is now a thing of the past. Nearly 35 per cent of books bought in Turkey are translated from foreign languages. We could learn from their example.

    * The Market Focus Cultural Programme at The London Book Fair is curated by the British Council. Visit www.literature.britishcouncil.org

    via Turkish literature to look out for – Telegraph.

  • Turkish Literature and Translation Trapped Between East and West

    Turkish Literature and Translation Trapped Between East and West

    By Roger Tagholm

    The challenges of translating Turkish into English and what you might call Turkey’s dilemma — whether to choose the mosque or the mall, positioned as it is between East and West – were among themes addressed at the first ever conference devoted to Turkish literature, held at Oxford University last Friday.  It was the first cultural activity organised by the Turkish government’s National Organising Committee ahead of the country’s position as Market Focus at next month’s London Book Fair.

    Academics and scholars gathered at Ertegun House, surely the most appropriate of venues. It is named after the legendary record producer and founder of Atlantic Records Ahmet Ertegun, who was born in Turkey and whose widow, Mica, bequeathed money to the university to fund a graduate scholarship programme in the humanities. It was her thank you gesture to England after Led Zeppelin, whom her husband signed to Atlantic when they were virtually unknown, played a benefit gig in London following Ahmet’s death in 2006. A whole lotta love indeed.

    The Pull Between East and West

    Kicking off proceedings was the great bear-like figure of Professor Murat Belge of Istanbul’s Bilgi University, left-wing scourge of the Turkish establishment and someone who has risked prison to speak out about the plight of Turkish writers over the years. He gave a fascinating history of Turkish fiction, observing that Turkish writers had a “love hate relationship with the West. We want to be like the West — we have this envy of the west and its civilization — and yet we also dislike the west because this word ‘civilization’ can have imperialist overtones, which we don’t like.”

    He said this feeling was even expressed in the country’s national anthem which includes the line “civilization: that monster with one remaining tooth.”

    “Writers with a mission continue, but they’re mainly Islamists and the aesthetic is very weak.”

    The early Turkish novelists of the ’20s were “nation builders, for whom the mission weighed heavier than the aesthetic,” he said.  In 1971, “after one of our numerous military takeovers” (this, a nice bit of tobacco-dry humor), many women writers came to the fore, “getting into the texture of daily life and contributing greatly to the development of the Turkish novel.”

    He hailed Seventies writer Oguz Atay as the “James Joyce of Turkish literature” — but he’s not translated into English — and said that today many trajectories for the Turkish novel existed. “Writers with a mission continue, but they’re mainly Islamists and the aesthetic is very weak. The post-modern novel is in vogue, with much allegorising of Turkish history. They’re great fun to read, but sometimes you forget what they are about.”

    Fellow academic Dr Duygu Tekgul of Yeditepe University, Istanbul, spoke on the Modern Turkish Novel in English Translation, including digressions on Even –Zohar’s polysystem theory (“culture is a system and literature a system within that”) and Arjun Appaurai’s field theory (“the imagination has become an organized field of social practices”).

    But before it became too abstract she put up slides of various jackets, including one for Perihan Magden’s 2 Girls(Serpent’s Tail) that showed two images, one of two young women by a swimming pool, the other the minarets of a mosque.  She raised the issue of western publishers opting for cultural stereotypes when creating cover art. “The cover of this novel features a mosque, even if there isn’t a mosque featured in the story. But publishers think ‘it’s set in Turkey, quick, get the photo library, we need a picture of the Blue Mosque.’”

    Agent Nermin Mollaoglu of the Kalem Agency in Istanbul grinned, but said she accepted the clichés on so many covers. Many authors would accept this too, if that were what it takes to get published. Only Orhan Pamuk, it seems, has the clout to have his say on his jackets, sometimes designing them himself.

    Translating Turkish is Tricky, But More Are Up to the Challenge

    Pamuk’s translator, the US-born journalist and novelist Maureen Freely, said that translating Turkish to English was particularly difficult. “It’s the voice, the music, the way Turkish writers play with time and structure, the aesthetic qualities of Turkish. The translator needs to find a way to capture this. It’s not just the sense, but capturing the magic that is there. The Turkish mind has a greater understanding of time and tense. Anglo-Saxon minds are more closed. We always want to know who what where when, but you can go through a whole book in Turkish not knowing that.”

    But of course great things are happening in the field of translation, most notably the Turkish government’s TEDA “subvention” program, which was established in 2005 and provides grants for the translation of Turkish literature outside the country. “We have had 1,400 applications so far and have published 900 books,” said Professor Onur Bilge Kula, General Director of Libraries and Publications, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and a driving force behind the Market Focus program. “Turkish literature is now available in 57 countries and in 53 languages. In the United States, we have supported the translation of 93 books in English. Turkish literature is now opening to the world and we are very proud of this initiative.”

    With the huge success of novels like The Kite Runner, Western publishers are aware that the next big property might come from this part of the world.  Freely, who runs the Literary Translation Centre at Frankfurt, had some good advice for Turkish publishers. She urged them not to worry overmuch about English or US sales, but use sales into European territories as a route in. “Editors in the UK love to visit the French, German, Spanish, Italian stands at Frankfurt. They’ll always ask ‘what’s going on?  What’s good? What should I know about?’ That can be a way of reaching these publishers.”

    For Turkish publishers, the next big opportunity to meet with US and UK publishers is just a few weeks away.

  • Missing works of Turkish sufi Haci Bektas Veli found in British museum

    Missing works of Turkish sufi Haci Bektas Veli found in British museum

    KIRK HADISHaci Bektasi Veli’s Fatiha Commentary, which was one of his missing works, was found in the British Museum Library.

    In addition to this valuable commentary, there was another work of Haci Bektasi Veli named Forty Hadith Commentary missing as well. Assistant Professor Nurgul Ozcan prepared the book for publication. The book Forty Hadith Commentary is an excellent door to develop an understanding of Haci Bektasi Veli’s Sufi world.

    Throughout history writing a translation or commentary on “forty hadith” has continued on as an important tradition of Turkish scholars and poets. Important names like Ali Sir Nevâî, Fuzûlî, Nev’î, Nabi, Âsik Celebi, Sadreddin Konevi, and İbrahim Hakki Bursevi have written highly valuable works on this subject. Among these valuable works in Turkish literature is Haci Bektasi Veli’s Forty Hadith Commentary.

    Prepared for publication for the first time by Nurgul Ozcan, the book was released by Fatih University Publication. The story behind the book’s publication sounds a lot like a detective novel, Cihan news agency said.

    The story dates back to the years when Assistant Professor Huseyin Ozcan, who is a lecturer at Fatih University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was still a student in college. During the course of his college education, Ozcan began researching the Fatiha Commentary with the encouragement of his professor Abdurrahman Guzel. He went to England in 2008 and searched for this book in every library he visited. While reviewing the manuscripts in the British Museum Library he came across a copy of the commentary and another work named Makalat. In addition to the Fatiha commentary, Ozcan found another missing work of Haci Bektasi Veli named Firty Hadith Commentary.

    In the first section of the book, Nurgul Ozcan provides information on the life and works of Haci Bektasi Veli. Noting that the works of Haci Bektasi Veli need to be studied in order to understand him Ozcan said ” The works of Haci Bektasi Veli which consists of Sufistic conversations between the mürsit (mentor) and his disciples (murid), which there are broad examples of in the Sufi tradition, are the main sources that directly reflect his ideas.” Ozcan explains that scholars and poets write commentaries on forty hadith for the purposes of obtaining the Prophet’s intercession, to find peace in the world, to be remembered with blessings, to find salvation in the hear after, to go to heaven, and to be free of troubles. According to Ozcan, Turks have shown the most interest in translations on forty hadith.

    The second part of the book is on the forty hadith tradition in Turkish literature and works that have been written in this area. There is also a review of hadith included in other works written by Haci Bektasi Veli. Haci Bektasi Veli’s commentary on forty hadith was written approximately in the 14th century. The commentary, which consists of 19 pages and is written in naskh calligraphy with vowel markings, includes forty hadith that explains the concept of poverty as a dervish. The main topics of Haci Bektasi Veli’s Forty Hadith is the importance of the concept of poverty, the virtues of poverty, the rewards of helping those who are poor and the punishments for those who despise the poor. At the end of the book, there is an original and Turkish translation of the Forty Hadith.

    , 23 August 2010