from Matchsticks

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.