Place: Turkey

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.

In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.

Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.

In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.

With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Fındık” by Sait Faik Abasıyanık

January 7, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Will Washburn

Something else was going on with the dog; deep down, he was catching on to something.

Fındık, the titular character of Sait Faik Abasıyanık‘s short story, is the kind of dog you can find anywhere: one of those common strays who are nonetheless elevated by virtue of their sheer adorableness, endearing themselves to the local residents. He’s also a perfect litmus test for human character, exposing those who would scold a dog for merely approaching them. Despite such treatment, Fındık remains trusting and friendly. That is, until he encounters the Poison Man, a self-important garbage collector who is charged with culling the village’s canine population. Translated from the Turkish by Will Washburn, “Fındık” examines themes of moral responsibility, human-animal bonds, and the rationalizations people use to justify cruelty toward the downtrodden—but also, what spurs them to defy those rationalizations.

Fındık is pals with everyone in our village, young and old, who doesn’t have too high an opinion of themselves. Colored like a tabby cat, Fındık (his name means “hazelnut”) is the bastard offspring of a wolf-dog and a hunting dog. As a love-child, he ought to be beautiful, but in fact he isn’t. If you don’t give him a pat on the head when he approaches you, wagging his big thick tail and blinking his brown eyes, then you’re a strange one indeed. To reject an animal that approaches you with such a need for affection, you’d have to have never been in love in your life, never cared about anything, never known what it means to have a soft heart. You might hold that such people don’t exist. And yet how many times, with my own eyes, have I seen Fındık approach people—not just for a piece of bread, but in need of a simple pat—and be shooed off. So I’m unable to change my opinion of humanity.

It’s a well-known fact that, with the onset of summer, dogs catch a nasty microbial illness from each other. Around that time, the city busies itself with killing off every dog in sight. People hide all the dogs in their area. The municipality pays one-and-a-half lira per dog, and a bunch of dog-killers set off on their rounds.

In our village, we call this person the “Poison Man.” You should see this Poison Man: he’s an odd one. To be sure, not everyone who does that job is abnormal. But becoming a killer, an Angel of Death, inevitably alters a person’s condition, their character, their gaze, their walk. Or maybe it doesn’t alter them; maybe we only think it does. You know that play, So It Is (If You Think So)? Well, if we think the Poison Man is abnormal—then so he is. He might as well be the Düsseldorf Monster. That’s the fellow who used to carry a gleaming metal chain with a knife attached to one end, which he’d use to ensnare little children, take them behind the bushes, and kill them.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Frames of Silent Walls” by Pınar Yıldız

October 29, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Pınar Yıldız

Those voices and looks were as if they had been there forever and would remain there forever.

This week’s story, both written in and translated from the original Zazaki by Pınar Yıldız, is firmly confined within the walls of its narrator’s house. The photographs decorating the interiors offer an occasion for reflection on familial history for the narrator, who is suffocated by the silence that dominates the “soilless cemetery” of their home. These portraits, a collage of family members and Kurdish folk heroes, are portals into memories of a lush childhood, when the images seemed to manifest a corporeal existence, infusing the household with their vigorous commentary. Once, they held the power to influence the animate world; now, they are simply still lifes. The passage of time, resisted by the frozen shots, is instead measured by the tapering volume of their voices. Through reflections on preservation and vitality, Yıldız ponders what keeps a house, and a family, alive.

The walls of our house, like the walls of many other houses, were like a soilless cemetery. The unfortunate lives got stuck to the walls. It was as if the walls wanted to open their mouths and speak, but they were frozen like soulless frames. A silence spread from the walls into the house. Most of the time, like those frames, we would freeze without saying a single word. Like those photographs hanging on the walls, it was as if we were frozen in a different world.

Only three of the photographs hanging on the walls of our house had not been inside that soilless cemetery; they were struggling to live in a corner. One was Ahmet Kaya’s photo. With his saz (baglama) in his hand and his enthusiastic and hopeful smile, it was as if that photo had made him greater than death while he was still alive. The other photo was of my brother Roni, who had just started school. That photo of Roni in his blue apron was also very precious to my mother, just like Roni himself. Roni, born in the millennium century, looked at the camera with a look as if he was lost in worry and thought. The photograph of my father and Sheikh Necmettin taken by the sea in a distant city has been hanging on the wall in a frame for a long time, and liveliness and life radiated from this photograph. In that photo, Sheikh Necmettin did not look like a sheikh, but like a human being, a gentleman. He was not as old as he is now. I do not know why the sheikh, who I thought never left his big house with a courtyard, had been to that distant country. Maybe Sheikh Necmettin brought those pink hard candies from that distant land by the sea. Maybe he would keep those candies in his pocket as a souvenir from those days and distribute those candies not only to children but to everyone.

Apart from the photographs, calendars and timetables from the month of Ramadan were also lined up on the walls. I remembered the blue walls of my grandparents’ house. Calendars and timetables hung on the walls of their house too. An embroidered towel and a mirror always hung on the edge of the stove. The shape and model of the mirror never changed, but sometimes the surroundings of the mirror were blue and sometimes red. I never saw when the mirror was broken or replaced with a new one.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2024

October 14, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Christopher Higgs, Jonathon Atkinson, and Matilda Nevin

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

WaitingfortheFear

Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

February 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Kathryn Raver

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

READ MORE…

Translating Ulysses: An Interview with Filmmakers Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel

February 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

This is what makes the translation of Ulysses a gift for the Kurdish language and its readers; it allows the archiving of this linguistic heritage.

In the 2023 documentary Translating Ulysses, Turkish filmmakers Aylin Kuyel and Fırat Yücel chronicle the painstaking efforts of poet and translator Kawa Nemir in rendering James Joyce’s “untranslatable” tome into Kurdish. This herculean task, which may seem rooted in the desire of any lover of literature to share a classic text in their native language, is in fact a tremendous act of activism for the Kurdish language, which has long been suppressed by Turkish nationalist policies, as well as a testament to the written text as a living, ever-changing discourse. Through close observation and innovative cinematic technique, Kuryel and Yücel paint a moving, profound portrait composed of the destructive language politics in contemporary Turkey; the tenuous, confounding journey of the translator; and literature as archive. What results is a film that is not only a document of Nemir’s epic journey through the Joycean labyrinth, but a remarkable, intricate tracing of how the vast history and collective memory of language can find a home in a story, or in a mind.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Aylin, the relationships between images and their communication of ideology has been a continuous subject in your work as a filmmaker and thinker. In this film, however, it is not the image which takes centre stage, but a text; how has your conception of visual dialectics transferred into the consideration of language as a social and ideological construct? Has making this film changed the way either of you think about the role language plays, or the way its public usage interacts with discrete individuals?

Aylin Kuryel (AK): One of the central questions that haunted us while making this film was indeed how to ‘translate’ the process of translating a text into images, how to make both Ulysses itself and Kawa’s translation of Ulysses speak in images. This is probably why we ended up structuring the documentary in chapters, like a book, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of the process of translation. We wanted to approach the film as a text itself, making references to Ulysses, and edit it in a way that would allow the images to be ‘read’ in multiple ways.

We had the ‘speaking soap’ of Joyce in our mind while focusing on objects that surround Kawa during his translation process, the colours of Ulysses’s chapters while playing with the colours of the film, and so on. The language of the film needs to reflect—or at least allude to—the subject it follows. Therefore, apart from the references to Ulysses, we also wanted to use found footage (official propaganda material or visuals of Kurdish resistance, taken from Youtube and social media). A documentary that attempts to touch upon a long-lasting collective resistance (in this case, against the oppression of the Kurdish language) can consist of a collective of images too, captured in different periods, by different people and organizations, for different purposes. READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Marina García Pardavila, and Miranda Mazariegos

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

READ MORE…

Inside the Mind That Falls Apart: Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu on Lojman

September 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

"Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax."

Our August Book Club selection, Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, is a vivid and absorbing novel that traces the depths and illusions of psychic agony, pulled along by a singular, poetic style. Within these flowing, absorbing pages of emotional surges, however, is a representation of how imposed orders and hierarchies can rob the individual of humanity. In this following interview, translators Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu speak to us on the process of working with this language its rawness and its darkness, the narrative’s subtle political symbols, how it moves on from the Turkey’s social realist movement and its sociolinguistic history.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Lojman is a book that unleashes its narrative and its characters on us. There are so many uncontrollable elements in it, but what reigns it in is the prose, which is so precise and lyrical. I’m wondering what it was like reading this book in the original Turkish—if there was that similar effect, and if there were stylistic elements you were seeking specifically to preserve in translation.

Selin Gökçesu (SG): Lojman is very immersive, beautiful, and lyrical and Turkish too. I don’t keep up with contemporary Turkish literature as much as I would like to, but within what I’ve seen come out, this book is very in its lyricism—but also its topic and voice. Part of the unruliness of the narrative can perhaps be attributed to the Turkish editing style, which is definitely more open than in the American publishing industry; different voices will enter and come out barely edited—which has its drawbacks. The final translation, after Aron put the final touches on it, is a lot more polished in English then it’s in Turkish, but it still has the spirit of the original.

But I will say that Lojman’s forcefulness and gushing and uncontrolled quality, the very untamed writing—some of that is a product of how open the Turkish publication system is. They’ll allow people in, and they’ll publish things with very little editing or external control. So you get these really raw, powerful stories in different voices. Turkish contemporary literature is maybe less middle-class than American literature, so the class boundaries of allowing different voices in is a little bit more flexible, resulting in such unique products. I’m so glad we came together and caught Lojman amidst so many books being published in Turkey. It’s really serendipitous that this landed where it did.

Aron Aji (AA): I agree with everything Selin said about Ebru’s voice and writing style. To add to that, I was in Istanbul with Ebru this summer—she just finished her new novel. It’s being edited, and hopefully will be coming out in the next couple of months. It’s an entirely different novel. The form is entirely different, the language is incredibly elevated, but there was something very, very similar to the way she built the main character. I asked her to tell me what she was trying to do, and she mentioned how people always talk about the author as the witness of a character’s life and an author as the witness of her time. Then she said, “I want to put the reader in a position of witness, and the way I can do that is by pushing the reader as far into the mindset of the main character as possible.”

As you know, the characters in Lojman are very damaged, to say the least; your review also shows how that damage becomes pervasive. Ebru really is a writer that doesn’t want to stand in the way of the reader, so she writes with this incredible euphoria. There is another Turkish author, Aslı Erdoğan (also published by City Lights), who writes with euphoria, but it’s a lot more controlled, oddly enough. What we have in Ebru is really the rawest possible witnessing of a mind falling apart.

So by choosing to do this as a co-translation, we actually mixed two voices and two consciousnesses into the process—the splitting of voices. I should also say that Elaine of City Lights was incredible in her later editing. And the more voices and consciousnesses we incorporated, the more we were able to crystallize the language, but also retain its rawness. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen

August 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Ojen writes along the pulse, and everything she describes is powered by the thrashing motions of something holding on to life.

Lojman is a book that shows its teeth. In powerful, unflinching prose of malevolence and confinement, Ebru Ojen depicts the family unit as a condition in which the most abject of cruelties and annihilations are imagined, resulting in an unparalleled portrait of madness and oblivion. By pushing her characters to mental precipices, the author points us toward the emotional peaks of human existence, drawing blood in an open display of intense, battered aliveness.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu, City Lights, 2023

There’s something out there. Such are the familiar words that announce fear’s dramatic incarnations—a sudden violent churning along the horizon, a scream that shears the night-fabric, a figure separating itself from the darkness. The common portrait of horror is aiming its heavy steps towards us, drawing nearer with each quickened breath—a grasp, a suffocation, a descent inevitable as gravity, an opaque force and singular direction. We’ve all been stranded in this lingering vastness, certain of some unbearable thing that approaches, and yet this dreadful knowledge, of what may lie out there, is only an elementary stage in fear’s true theatre. Eventually, one finds a more intolerable, more defiling fact: something that does not pursue, does not invade—something that does not come scratching at our windows, but dwells already in the closest, most secret part of us, capable of everything and knowing nothing of order, nothing of control.

Ebru Ojen’s Lojman is a horror of intimacies. In brutal, visceral treads, it walks that demarcation separating the inside from the outside, revealing all that rages against walls both visible and invisible—the unspeakable violence of the precipice. And while the outside still holds the unknowable chill of our darkest suspicions, in Lojman, it is the inside where monsters are unleashed. The title, transliterated from the Turkish word for lodging, is the first indication of this novel’s form—as tightly fortified as architecture, and as taut and enigmatic as the human body. Through passages of incandescent maleficence and enthralled terror, we are led into the stifling, worldly containers that somehow manage to hold utterly uncontainable things—all that goes on in a house, all that goes on in a mind. We have been made so small in order to live, and that unbearable reality is given, here, for writing to bear. READ MORE…

A Perpetual Coming-of-Age: On Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

March 22, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

Tezer Özlü will never be imprisoned in the traps of bourgeois norms and conventions.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Serpent’s Tail/Transit Books, 2023

Known as the melancholy princess of Turkish literature, Tezer Özlü is one of the most influential figures of women’s writing in Turkey. Inspiring generations of writers with both her life and distinct writing voice, Özlü has been a permanent fixture in country’s intellectual history; it’s surprising that such a beloved figure of Turkish literature is debuting in English only now. Fortunately for us, her glaring absence from international publishing has finally been remedied by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Transit (USA), and English language readers can now discover the genius of a unique writer.

Despite being remembered as a leftist and feminist, Özlü was never a part of the revolutionary struggle like other famous Turkish authors recently translated into English. In Cold Nights of Childhood, she writes: “I was never a part of a revolutionary struggle. Not during the 12 March era, and not after it, either. All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie”. She wasn’t imprisoned or tortured like Sevgi Soysal or involved in organized politics as her close friend Leyla Erbil. Even though she retained leftist sensibilities and occasionally wrote about class struggle, her revolt was more individual and existential. Accordingly, she wrote autobiographical novels which situate readers in the midst of her confrontation with different kinds of authority.

Cold Nights of Childhood is a compact example of her autofiction, and a perfect choice to introduce Özlü to new readers, encapsulating the themes and style that launched her as a tremendous force in the Turkish literary. In the afterward to the novel, translator Maureen Freely writes: “she was one of the very few who broke rules at sentence level, refusing continuity, and slashing narrative logic to evoke in words the things she truly felt and saw, that we all might see them”. Rejecting the linear narrative, she weaves together fragments of time; this experimentation with chronology enables her to reflect on her past while also imagine a way for a gratifying future. READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, As Chosen by You: #6 An interview with Maureen Freely

December 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

To translate [Pamuk] was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break.

2022 was a bumper year for fascinating interviews, and one of the best of the bunch, in this humble editor’s opinion, is also our sixth most read article of the year. For our Summer issue, Assistant Interview Editor Rose Bialer sat down with acclaimed translator Maureen Freely to discuss her upbringing in Istanbul, the craft of translation, and the state of literature in Turkey today.

It takes two to make an interview really work: Bialer has a knack for perceptive questions, and Freely is lyrically articulate about her unusual upbringing. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is full of gems, such as when she talks about working with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk as the English translator of his novels. Their relationship is complex, delicate, respectful, and as Pamuk’s star rises, it grows increasingly strained. The two are “exact contemporaries” and grew up in similar parts of Istanbul, and when he writes about his childhood in the city, his memories, so different from her own, start to crowd out hers:

I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space.

If you’re curious about some of Freely’s output, read Irmak Ertuna Howison’s review of her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn from the Asymptote Blog.

And if her interview piques your interest in Turkish literature, don’t forget that our twelve-year digital archive is a veritable treasure trove of gems waiting to be discovered.

DISCOVER OUR SIXTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…