from Matchsticks

Murathan Mungan

Artwork by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

The Scribe of Mysteries

There is no such thing as a mystery, he said.

A mystery is just deferred knowledge. Whatever God knows is known to everyone; people just don’t want to know it. They defer it, postpone it, put it off, gloss over it; they pretend not to see or understand it. Death is what people fear above all, isn’t it? But people know quite well what comes after death. They know that nothing will happen. You simply die. Nothingness. That’s all. It’s reality that people find harsh—not mysteries. That’s why they like to mystify reality. To be able to endure it. To be able to endure existence, to endure being alive. You don’t have to cope with mysteries as you do with reality. People never grow weary of mysteries.      

Who are you, anyway? I said.

And how did you sneak into this story?

Isn’t that what stories are, he replied, doors left ajar for people to sneak into? Perhaps I’m part of the mystery that wafts into you as a sound, that falls onto your page as a letter. . . Take me and give me to someone else. Don’t forget, mysteries exist to be passed on to others.

translated from the Turkish by Will Washburn



Click here to read Murathan Mungan’s poetry from the Fall 2012 issue.

Read the original in Turkish

Listen to the original read by Ahmet Gürata:

This short piece that I translated for Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue, “Sır kâtibi,” comes from Turkish author Murathan Mungan’s 2011 collection Kibrit Çöpleri (Matchsticks), whose eighty stories—ranging from just a few sentences to a page and a half in length—are written in a laconic, cryptic style, often featuring unnamed and/or ungendered characters. Due to its greater reliance on cultural/linguistic context, “Sır kâtibi” presents a special set of challenges for the translator. For instance, few non-Turkish readers are likely to know that the Turkish phrase sır kâtibi, the “scribe of secrets,” refers to the official in the Ottoman Empire tasked with handling the sultan’s correspondence. But sır does not only mean a “secret” in the sense of “something known to a limited group of people”; it can also be translated as a “mystery” in the broader sense of a universal enigma. While both meanings are present in Mungan’s text (and both terms overlap, to some extent, in English), I felt I had to be consistent and choose only one of them in my translation.

The concept of the sır has long been of crucial importance in Turkish Sufi orders, whose initiates are traditionally sworn to secrecy. (In Turkish Sufi parlance, sırlamak—“to make secret”—and sırrolmak—“to become secret”—are euphemisms for “to bury” and “to die,” respectively.) Mungan’s piece seeks to undermine such a concept, suggesting that knowledge is inherently porous and that secrets, as such, do not exist. On that note, there is another bit of potential wordplay in Mungan’s Turkish which became lost in translation. In Turkish, the sır meaning a “secret/mystery” is indistinguishable from the etymologically unrelated word sır, i.e. glaze used to waterproof ceramics: intriguingly, the line which I translated as “And how did you sneak into this story?” could also be translated as “And how did you leak into this story?” (sızmak being the standard Turkish word for “to leak” in both the literal and figurative sense). Despite such inevitable semantic breakage, “Sır kâtibi” is an arresting and thought-provoking piece which I was glad to be able to translate.

Murathan Mungan (b. 1955, Istanbul), one of Turkey’s most prominent contemporary authors, grew up in the city of Mardin in southeastern Turkey. After studying theater at Ankara University, Mungan embarked on a prolific literary career as a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is especially known for his fictional and nonfictional portrayals of his hometown of Mardin in such works as his sequence of plays entitled Mezopotamya Üçlemesi (The Mesopotamian Trilogy) and his 1997 collection Paranın Cinleri (The Genies of Money). His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Will Washburn was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1977, and grew up in New York City, studying classics at Columbia University. He has lived in Istanbul on and off for more than a decade and works as a translator.