Efe Murad
Notes on Godless Sufism, Eda, and Translatability: The Narratives of Subjective Spirituality in Contemporary Turkish Poetry[1]
On “Godless Sufism”
In a number of essays, the poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat has highlighted the works of a group of Turkish poets who has given voice to (often self-proclaimed) spiritualities and subjective beliefs. A strand of Turkish poets from the 1980/1990s, such as Enis Batur (d. 1952), Ahmet Güntan (b. 1955), Lâle Müldür (b. 1956), Seyhan Erözçelik (1962-2011), Sami Baydar (1962-2012), and küçük İskender (1964-2019), have crafted a “secular” form of religious expression with certain spiritual sensibilities and references to various traditions, including Sufi spirituality, Eastern Orthodoxy/Catholicism, as well as the broader category of Inner Asian religions.[2] Nemet-Nejat has often used the term “Godless Sufism” to describe this strand of self-reflexive spiritual expressivity in contemporary Turkish poetics.
The idea of “Godless Sufism” underwent a subtle transformation for Nemet-Nejat over the years. When he first wrote about the term in the 1990s, he noticed that this concept was discernible in a considerable number of poets from different parts of the poetic spectrum, such as Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) and Orhan Veli (1914-1950). Nemet-Nejat posited that the poetics of these diverse figures showed the signs of an expression of spirituality, one that is very akin to expressive ideas in Sufism: desire, yearning for union (or reunion), for something/someone lost, being one with the universe, as well as a lover, a city from which one is in exile, a supreme moment of joy, and self-effacement, etc. Yet this sort of desire rather encapsulates a sense of spirituality that refers to neither the object nor the subject of religious expression—but laying bare the poet’s emotional universe in the “new age.”
In a parallel way, Nemet-Nejat’s “Godless Sufism” points to the subversive subtext of the term eda (“mood” or “moodiness”), a fresh voice that Turkish poetry assumes with the new Republic that provides some leeway for a subjective interpretation of religiosities.[3] One can look at eda in Turkish poetry as the progressive emergence of silenced voices into visibility, revealing their own sound in poetry—reaching an almost ecstatic range in “the poetry of motion” from the 1980s onwards.
Nemet-Nejat links the conglomerate term “Godless Sufism” to Alevite mysticism conventionally, a term that needs to be further qualified, and it is not clear whether it denotes the secular aspects of the Alevi faith or religiosity in modern Turkey or any non-Sunni approach in religious knowledge. “Godless Sufism” points to something that Turkish poets were practicing without naming, a secular attitude towards spiritual understanding that is infused with fragmented self-narratives of neo-spiritual confessionalism(s). The Eda anthology mainly brings to consciousness what many poets were practicing and names it, showing not only its connection to the nature of Turkish language and spiritual beliefs, but also situating this sense of poetic disposition in global context—without necessarily borrowing words or relying on cognates from European poetry movements, such as Symbolism and Surrealism.
Sufism has been historically a vehicle for what has been perceived as “heretical” thoughts and practices within Islam. As Nemet-Nejat points out, “Allah” might be the most suppressed word in modern Turkish poetry—in that way, “Godless Sufism” means a Sufism in which the word “God” (Allah) is suppressed. Interestingly, many socially suppressed voices have become heard in contemporary Turkish poetry through the last century. The word “Allah” still remains radioactive (even among Islamist poets), insinuating a sense of “Godless Religiosity.”
I would rather refrain from using Sufism in this context, since it is an umbrella term that includes any type of mystical attitude/disposition in the Islamicate world, ranging from Sunni orthodoxy to various forms of “metadoxy.” As mentioned, Nemet-Nejat often conflates Sufism with Alevism; the latter is a term that rather refers to non-Sunni forms of Islam that are perceived to be less orthodox, i.e. stringent on a strict diet of religious ritualism. The poets of “Godless Sufism,” in this regard, cannot be understood in the classical sense of Sufism but rather as a rhetorical remark that emphasizes the changing attitudes in an age of subjective expressivity of spiritual recipes. The narratives of spirituality in contemporary Turkish poetry are byproducts of the Republican-era secularism, as well as a global sense of discursivity that gives room for poetic confessionalism and lyrical expressivity.
On Eda and Translatability
Nemet-Nejat sees translation as a visceral reaction that gives a new persona to the original language. For him translatability is only measured by the host language’s ability to distance itself from the naturalized tongue. That is, a strong translation leaves its mark on both languages—the original and the host at the same time. It should be noted that Nemet-Nejat’s poems often feed on his own translations as he interjects hidden fragments from the Turkish poems that inspire him. His “readings,” thus “misreadings,” cannot be conceived outside of his overall poetic practice. Eda, the argot of a transmuted language, turns to his own, generating its voice by expanding the boundaries of translatability and authorship. Translation, in this sense, has its own non-linear (replicated?) life in Nemet-Nejat’s poems (especially The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman House, 2011)) that becomes autonomous and unique in creation.
Setting intentionality in poetry as a common denominator, an arbiter of translation, eda is an underlying notion which implies a movement towards the self’s possible union with God. By breaking the modern Turkish syntax, eda achieves a sense of transcendence from everyday life and religious experience. It is a poetry of process that attempts at reaching a sense of subjective spirituality that does not directly define its source and the movement of its intentionality (i.e. a sense of classical Ottoman poetry where the love of God or a beloved blends into the lover). Eda directs towards a sensibility of being, a movement towards the present “now” in flux, staying in the present—yet by defying the confines of poetic consciousness and agnostic mind vis-à-vis an immutable God that may or may not exist.
Select Bibliography:
Nemet-Nejat, Murat. “Translation and Style.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 6 (Spring 1991): pp. 98-100.
—. “A Godless Sufism: Ideas on 20th-Century,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 14 (Fall 1995): pp. 32-38.
—(ed./trans.). “The Idea of a Book.” In Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Jersey City: Talisman House, 2004), pp. 4-20.
For selected essays: <http://jacketmagazine.com/34/eda-essays.shtml>.
—. “Turkey’s Mysterious Motions and Turkish Poetry.” The Daily Star 11 (November 20, 2004): pp. 1-5. Available at <http://www.dailystar.com.lb/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=939 97& mode=print>.
This is an essay published in the Lebanese newspaper in English The Daily Star on November 20, 2004 at the very beginning of the first Iraq War. The piece elaborates on “the poetry of motion” (part of Eda) that was first presented in the anthology.
—. “A Reading of Seyhan Erözçelik’s Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds.” In Seyhan Erözçelik, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, trans. Muray Nemet-Nejat (Greenfield: Talisman House, 2010), pp. 98-110.
—. “Eda” and the Afterword “A Few Thoughts On Fragments.” In The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Northfield: Talisman House, 2011), pp. 49 and 96-97.
“A Few Thoughts On Fragments” refers to and discusses Eda as a viable poetics for the 21st century poetry across national boundaries and, specifically, its potential for creating a new poetry involving space in American poetry.
—. “Eda: Allah yahut Allahsızlık (Modern Türk Şiiri Üzerine Düşünceler).” Kitap-lık 160 (May 2012): pp. 92-98.
This is the text of Nemet-Nejat’s talk at Bilkent University on February 22, 2012 with a heated Q&A session participated by both the faculty and students. The talk discussed the specific changes the Eda anthology brings to the way modern Turkish poetry is approached.
—. “Birhan Keskin’s Y’ol” and “A Few Notes on Translatıng Y’ol.” In Birhan Keskin, Y'ol, trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), pp. 75-78.
—. Interview with the Bengali poet Runa Bandyopadhyay (November 21, 2021). Broadcasted at Youtube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vNYrjP8gtw>.
In the beginning of the interview, Nemet-Nejat reads a sequence from his new poem camels and weasels, which infuses lines from Turkish poets İlhan Berk and Birhan Keskin along with lines from Hamlet that merged into one single poem.
—and Kent Johnson. “A Dialogue Between Two Poet Friends: Murat Nemet-Nejat In Correspondence with Kent Johnson.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 51 (2022). Forthcoming.
A series of e-mail exchanges between the poet Kent Johnson and Nemet-Nejat in which Kent asks him why the Eda anthology was attacked and initially was even considered “a hoax” (like his own Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (New York: Roof Books, 1997)) while it is a great booster for the reputation of modern Turkish poetry outside the country. Towards the end, Nemet-Nejat suggests the existence of a profound relationship between anthology, sacredness and “a hoax.”
Özmen, Gonca. “Her çeviri bir yanlış okumayla başlar (Murat Nemet-Nejat’la Söyleşi),” Kitap-lık 205 (October 2019): pp. 50-79.
[1] I would like to thank Fahri Öz for his suggestions and comments.
[2] For instance, see Enis Batur’s İblise Göre İncil (Yeni Ankara, 1979) and Abdal Düşü (Altıkırkbeş, 2003), Lâle Müldür’s Buhurumeryem (Metis, 1994) and Bizansiyya (YKY, 2014), Sami Baydar’s Yeşil Alev (Yayınevi, 1991), küçük İskender’s cangüncem (YKY, 1996), Seyhan Erözçelik’s Vâridik Yoğidik (Simurg, 2006), as well as Ahmet Güntan’s Romeo ve Romeo. (YKY, 1995) and Esrârîler. (YKY, 2003)—the latter of which was translated into English under the title The Tribe of the Esraris. by Ali Alper Çakır (KUY/Imprint, 2018).
[3] Nemet-Nejat writes that eda denotes three meanings: (i) coquettishness as in “edalı kadın,” meaning “woman with style”; (ii) an unaffected sense of free expressivity and spirituality based on the Bektaşi-Alevi poetic tradition; (iii) a special type of cadence based on the Turkish syntax and agglutination (Nemet-Nejat, “Eda: Allah yahut Allahsızlık (Modern Türk Şiiri Üzerine Düşünceler),” Kitap-lık 160 (May 2012): pp. 92-93).
On “Godless Sufism”
In a number of essays, the poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat has highlighted the works of a group of Turkish poets who has given voice to (often self-proclaimed) spiritualities and subjective beliefs. A strand of Turkish poets from the 1980/1990s, such as Enis Batur (d. 1952), Ahmet Güntan (b. 1955), Lâle Müldür (b. 1956), Seyhan Erözçelik (1962-2011), Sami Baydar (1962-2012), and küçük İskender (1964-2019), have crafted a “secular” form of religious expression with certain spiritual sensibilities and references to various traditions, including Sufi spirituality, Eastern Orthodoxy/Catholicism, as well as the broader category of Inner Asian religions.[2] Nemet-Nejat has often used the term “Godless Sufism” to describe this strand of self-reflexive spiritual expressivity in contemporary Turkish poetics.
The idea of “Godless Sufism” underwent a subtle transformation for Nemet-Nejat over the years. When he first wrote about the term in the 1990s, he noticed that this concept was discernible in a considerable number of poets from different parts of the poetic spectrum, such as Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) and Orhan Veli (1914-1950). Nemet-Nejat posited that the poetics of these diverse figures showed the signs of an expression of spirituality, one that is very akin to expressive ideas in Sufism: desire, yearning for union (or reunion), for something/someone lost, being one with the universe, as well as a lover, a city from which one is in exile, a supreme moment of joy, and self-effacement, etc. Yet this sort of desire rather encapsulates a sense of spirituality that refers to neither the object nor the subject of religious expression—but laying bare the poet’s emotional universe in the “new age.”
In a parallel way, Nemet-Nejat’s “Godless Sufism” points to the subversive subtext of the term eda (“mood” or “moodiness”), a fresh voice that Turkish poetry assumes with the new Republic that provides some leeway for a subjective interpretation of religiosities.[3] One can look at eda in Turkish poetry as the progressive emergence of silenced voices into visibility, revealing their own sound in poetry—reaching an almost ecstatic range in “the poetry of motion” from the 1980s onwards.
Nemet-Nejat links the conglomerate term “Godless Sufism” to Alevite mysticism conventionally, a term that needs to be further qualified, and it is not clear whether it denotes the secular aspects of the Alevi faith or religiosity in modern Turkey or any non-Sunni approach in religious knowledge. “Godless Sufism” points to something that Turkish poets were practicing without naming, a secular attitude towards spiritual understanding that is infused with fragmented self-narratives of neo-spiritual confessionalism(s). The Eda anthology mainly brings to consciousness what many poets were practicing and names it, showing not only its connection to the nature of Turkish language and spiritual beliefs, but also situating this sense of poetic disposition in global context—without necessarily borrowing words or relying on cognates from European poetry movements, such as Symbolism and Surrealism.
Sufism has been historically a vehicle for what has been perceived as “heretical” thoughts and practices within Islam. As Nemet-Nejat points out, “Allah” might be the most suppressed word in modern Turkish poetry—in that way, “Godless Sufism” means a Sufism in which the word “God” (Allah) is suppressed. Interestingly, many socially suppressed voices have become heard in contemporary Turkish poetry through the last century. The word “Allah” still remains radioactive (even among Islamist poets), insinuating a sense of “Godless Religiosity.”
I would rather refrain from using Sufism in this context, since it is an umbrella term that includes any type of mystical attitude/disposition in the Islamicate world, ranging from Sunni orthodoxy to various forms of “metadoxy.” As mentioned, Nemet-Nejat often conflates Sufism with Alevism; the latter is a term that rather refers to non-Sunni forms of Islam that are perceived to be less orthodox, i.e. stringent on a strict diet of religious ritualism. The poets of “Godless Sufism,” in this regard, cannot be understood in the classical sense of Sufism but rather as a rhetorical remark that emphasizes the changing attitudes in an age of subjective expressivity of spiritual recipes. The narratives of spirituality in contemporary Turkish poetry are byproducts of the Republican-era secularism, as well as a global sense of discursivity that gives room for poetic confessionalism and lyrical expressivity.
On Eda and Translatability
Nemet-Nejat sees translation as a visceral reaction that gives a new persona to the original language. For him translatability is only measured by the host language’s ability to distance itself from the naturalized tongue. That is, a strong translation leaves its mark on both languages—the original and the host at the same time. It should be noted that Nemet-Nejat’s poems often feed on his own translations as he interjects hidden fragments from the Turkish poems that inspire him. His “readings,” thus “misreadings,” cannot be conceived outside of his overall poetic practice. Eda, the argot of a transmuted language, turns to his own, generating its voice by expanding the boundaries of translatability and authorship. Translation, in this sense, has its own non-linear (replicated?) life in Nemet-Nejat’s poems (especially The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman House, 2011)) that becomes autonomous and unique in creation.
Setting intentionality in poetry as a common denominator, an arbiter of translation, eda is an underlying notion which implies a movement towards the self’s possible union with God. By breaking the modern Turkish syntax, eda achieves a sense of transcendence from everyday life and religious experience. It is a poetry of process that attempts at reaching a sense of subjective spirituality that does not directly define its source and the movement of its intentionality (i.e. a sense of classical Ottoman poetry where the love of God or a beloved blends into the lover). Eda directs towards a sensibility of being, a movement towards the present “now” in flux, staying in the present—yet by defying the confines of poetic consciousness and agnostic mind vis-à-vis an immutable God that may or may not exist.
Select Bibliography:
Nemet-Nejat, Murat. “Translation and Style.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 6 (Spring 1991): pp. 98-100.
—. “A Godless Sufism: Ideas on 20th-Century,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 14 (Fall 1995): pp. 32-38.
—(ed./trans.). “The Idea of a Book.” In Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Jersey City: Talisman House, 2004), pp. 4-20.
For selected essays: <http://jacketmagazine.com/34/eda-essays.shtml>.
—. “Turkey’s Mysterious Motions and Turkish Poetry.” The Daily Star 11 (November 20, 2004): pp. 1-5. Available at <http://www.dailystar.com.lb/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=939 97& mode=print>.
This is an essay published in the Lebanese newspaper in English The Daily Star on November 20, 2004 at the very beginning of the first Iraq War. The piece elaborates on “the poetry of motion” (part of Eda) that was first presented in the anthology.
—. “A Reading of Seyhan Erözçelik’s Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds.” In Seyhan Erözçelik, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, trans. Muray Nemet-Nejat (Greenfield: Talisman House, 2010), pp. 98-110.
—. “Eda” and the Afterword “A Few Thoughts On Fragments.” In The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Northfield: Talisman House, 2011), pp. 49 and 96-97.
“A Few Thoughts On Fragments” refers to and discusses Eda as a viable poetics for the 21st century poetry across national boundaries and, specifically, its potential for creating a new poetry involving space in American poetry.
—. “Eda: Allah yahut Allahsızlık (Modern Türk Şiiri Üzerine Düşünceler).” Kitap-lık 160 (May 2012): pp. 92-98.
This is the text of Nemet-Nejat’s talk at Bilkent University on February 22, 2012 with a heated Q&A session participated by both the faculty and students. The talk discussed the specific changes the Eda anthology brings to the way modern Turkish poetry is approached.
—. “Birhan Keskin’s Y’ol” and “A Few Notes on Translatıng Y’ol.” In Birhan Keskin, Y'ol, trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), pp. 75-78.
—. Interview with the Bengali poet Runa Bandyopadhyay (November 21, 2021). Broadcasted at Youtube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vNYrjP8gtw>.
In the beginning of the interview, Nemet-Nejat reads a sequence from his new poem camels and weasels, which infuses lines from Turkish poets İlhan Berk and Birhan Keskin along with lines from Hamlet that merged into one single poem.
—and Kent Johnson. “A Dialogue Between Two Poet Friends: Murat Nemet-Nejat In Correspondence with Kent Johnson.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 51 (2022). Forthcoming.
A series of e-mail exchanges between the poet Kent Johnson and Nemet-Nejat in which Kent asks him why the Eda anthology was attacked and initially was even considered “a hoax” (like his own Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (New York: Roof Books, 1997)) while it is a great booster for the reputation of modern Turkish poetry outside the country. Towards the end, Nemet-Nejat suggests the existence of a profound relationship between anthology, sacredness and “a hoax.”
Özmen, Gonca. “Her çeviri bir yanlış okumayla başlar (Murat Nemet-Nejat’la Söyleşi),” Kitap-lık 205 (October 2019): pp. 50-79.
[1] I would like to thank Fahri Öz for his suggestions and comments.
[2] For instance, see Enis Batur’s İblise Göre İncil (Yeni Ankara, 1979) and Abdal Düşü (Altıkırkbeş, 2003), Lâle Müldür’s Buhurumeryem (Metis, 1994) and Bizansiyya (YKY, 2014), Sami Baydar’s Yeşil Alev (Yayınevi, 1991), küçük İskender’s cangüncem (YKY, 1996), Seyhan Erözçelik’s Vâridik Yoğidik (Simurg, 2006), as well as Ahmet Güntan’s Romeo ve Romeo. (YKY, 1995) and Esrârîler. (YKY, 2003)—the latter of which was translated into English under the title The Tribe of the Esraris. by Ali Alper Çakır (KUY/Imprint, 2018).
[3] Nemet-Nejat writes that eda denotes three meanings: (i) coquettishness as in “edalı kadın,” meaning “woman with style”; (ii) an unaffected sense of free expressivity and spirituality based on the Bektaşi-Alevi poetic tradition; (iii) a special type of cadence based on the Turkish syntax and agglutination (Nemet-Nejat, “Eda: Allah yahut Allahsızlık (Modern Türk Şiiri Üzerine Düşünceler),” Kitap-lık 160 (May 2012): pp. 92-93).