Emirhan Esenkova
REFLECTIONS ON MURAT NEMET-NEJAT:
Incomplete Thoughts, Jump Cuts and Accented Notes
This article is an incomplete reflective piece of writing on Murat Nemet-Nejat’s Animals of Dawn, my appreciation of his poems and my experience with translating them. The emphasis on the incompleteness is ironically Shakespearean.
I. Animals of Dawn
My first encounter with Murat Nemet-Nejat’s work was through Efe Murad’s Turkish translation of his The Spiritual Life of Replicants (2011); Replikantların İç Dünyası (2018). The whole experience was unexpectedly new for me. The poems had this visual aspect that I tried to assess under the roof of auteurism. Although the voice of the translator was perfectly audible, I was very well aware that the rooms I was walking through were initially created by the poet. Wandering through these carefully created rooms, maybe even a little bit like Prufrock, personas came and went, talking of Orhan Veli, Blade Runner, Seyhan Erözçelik, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. In between the gaps, which felt completely intentional yet natural, I found the opportunity to self-isolate and spend time on my own. But only after I started to translate Animals of Dawn, did I have the chance to develop an understanding of Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poetry.
Animals of Dawn (2016) is an experimental poetic text structured upon the idea of reconstructing Sheakspeare’s Hamlet. Through the book, meaning is mainly shaped by the reader's perception, as Murat Nemet-Nejat deliberately creates a limitless poetic universe detached from time and space. His work grants the reader the freedom to distill the text into personal interpretations that leads to a sense of comfort for the reader. This openness ironically creates interwoven loops within the poem. Numerous layers of references and concepts are connected with each other by latent strings. The multi-dimensional structure of his poem paves the way to endless opportunities, creating questions which can be answered or even be left unanswered by the reader. The richness of his work comes from these unanswered questions. A similar concept is also embedded throughout Hamlet. Although T.S. Eliot refers to Hamlet as an artistic failure,[1] endless questions, the disconnectedness and incomplete actions create the richness of the tragedy. In this way, Murat Nemet-Nejat reflects Hamlet’s detachment from reality into his own work in a considerably surprising way.
Not only Animals of Dawn but Murat Nemet-Nejat’s entire poetica can be seen as a form of a thinking practice. It is not easy to just read one verse or even sometimes a word and move on to the next. In this sense, Animals of Dawn strips the language off of its limits. Deconstruction of structure and meaning is a prominent element in Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poetica. The poet wanders around concepts swiftly which I assume is a result of his linguistic background. In order to thoroughly understand the poet’s idea of language, the traces of his background can be read through his own words in Istanbul Noir (2001)[2] where hints of Nemet-Nejat’s daily relationship with language can be found. As a Persian Jew who grew up amongst the Sephardim and Turkish in Istanbul where he attended Robert College, the poet was exposed to fragments of different languages, “kırık diller”[3] in his own words, throughout his life. And now, years later, as an American poet Nemet-Nejat uses these cullet-like fragments to create his own glass sphere. Nemet-Nejat is a poet/translator who has achieved a delicate balance between west and east, mysticism and science, social and academic language, Shakespeare and modern poetry. Growing up in the heart of synthesis makes it possible for him to flow amongst the current smoothly. The poet creates this balance through his ability to internalize both languages, and his talent to keep diverse cultures in one perspective. Nemet-Nejat also has a unique gift that allows him to fill in the voids of each language through intentional misreadings and misinterpretations; he creates an ever-expanding gestalt.
Nemet-Nejat himself describes Animals of Dawn as a meta-poem, aiming to emphasize the semantic connection with the term metaphysics rather than a Marxist approach to the term meta. Turkish poet Efe Murad bridges his ideas of Materialist Poem and Nemet-Nejat’s concept of Godless Sufism and describes the term Materialist Poem as the Godless but Sufi Eda of contemporary Turkish poetry (Balikcioglu, 2007)[4]. My own understanding of Animals of Dawn also lines up with these previous statements. I think Animals of Dawn is an example of a meta-poem after all, irreligious yet spiritual just like Nemet-Nejat describes Istanbul in Eda (Nemet-Nejat, 2004, pg.19)[5]. Right at this point, jumping to the connection between Nemet-Nejat’s poetry and a totally new concept of meta seems notably relevant. Nemet-Nejat’s poetic language is like a device that is composed freshly from ever-changing elements each time it faces a new spatiotemporal dimension. He is not a digital-poet in the traditional sense for sure. However, endless possibilities, freedom and openness in his poetic universe reminds me of this fresh concept of meta. Just like the idea of integrating real and virtual worlds in the latest attempts on metaverse projects, Nemet-Nejat creates a space of reals and unreals in Animals of Dawn with the initial inspiration from Hamlet.
“Hamlet is the holy text that is at the heart of things, real or unreal, objects, living or un-living…” (p. 69)[6]
“That unbreachableness (the way the consciousness of the living, the real, the rational can not breach into the consciousness of the un-living, unreal) is at the heart of Hamlet's mysterious power, what makes it a holy text.” (p. 70)[7]
The idea of this dual universe creates an almost byzantine structure that can be traced back to nearly every literary text which found its way to our times including religious writing. Whether the source of this idea is pure human imagination, a rather individual asset or a spiritual impulse which seems more collective and even innate, or both the schema seems to be always there. This idea manifests itself through madness, repetition and unanswered questions in Hamlet whereas in Nemet-Nejat’s book-length poem, it has found its place through syntax experiments, disjunction and layers of context. With the help of these elements, the poet creates a threshold between our world and his limitless poetic universe; reals and unreals. Only time will tell how we or the following generations are going to experience the re-manifestation of this beginning-less idea through possible metaverse poetry. On the other hand, Animals of Dawn might be a preview of what’s to come, or even a user’s manual for future poets. This might seem like a hyperbolic statement however the notional connection between the terms meta-poem and meta-verse is too distinct to ignore.
II. Translating Continuum
From: Murat Nemet-Nejat / Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 4:06 AM
“Tabii şiirin sonu yok.
Sen de Animals of Dawn'u yeniden yazmıyor musun, benim Hamlet'te yaptığım gibi?”
“Sure, poetry is infinite. Aren’t you rewriting Animals of Dawn, just like I rewrote Hamlet…”
Just like The Spiritual Life of Replicants, Animals of Dawn is like a spacious house designed by the poet for the readers to roam around freely. So rather than its translator I feel like I am the mover of Animals of Dawn, trying to transport its items to a completely new place. Unfortunately it is an impossible task to translate all the elements when it comes to poetry. In this sense, poetry translation is an art of renunciation, just as cinema consists of raw images abandoned in editing. During the process I have been thinking about the best way to move the items. Should I transfer them all? How should I place them in their new space? How should I fill in gaps or should I even fill them after all? The answers were embedded in Animals of Dawn itself.
The most exciting part of translation is probably being able to open up new horizons in a language. As Walter Benjamin states “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.”[8] This idea can help us understand Nemet-Nejat’s approach to translation; according to him translation is a two-way transmission, through which some of the possibly missing elements in either source or target language can be completed by fitting elements from the other language. In other words, translation makes non-existing elements or concepts in a language become possible. In his 2019 interview[9] the poet compares this process to grafting. His grafting comparison might sound a little bold for a translator who is on the more conservative side of the spectrum, however being able to think about the concept of loyalty to the source-text with such a courageous approach feels liberating. Nemet-Nejat’s attitude influenced me deeply. His idea of creating new possibilities through translation and his tendency to expand the limits of language through poetry should be considered together. During our email conversations Nemet-Nejat made a significantly influential comment; “a poem changing in between translations is just like refraction of light, although it bends it is still the same light.” In my opinion this statement sums up the fundamentals of his literary standpoint.
According to Nemet-Nejat, Turkish poet Ahmet Haşim’s pre-republic poem “O, Belde'' (1921) is the core of Eda. Although it is constructed in Turkish syntax, Haşim felt the need to take a refuge in Farsi lexicon where Turkish felt inadequate. “Space” in Animals of Dawn (p. 21) is a translation of this poem and now I am translating it to today’s Turkish, completely based on Nemet-Nejat’s version, without referring to the original. In other words, I am entering an ouroboros. By doing so I am hoping to preserve the essence that Nemet-Nejat has infused into the book, without disrupting its continuum. And I am already imagining someone else translating it back to English so the cycle continues. Even this experience on its own has changed my perspective on poetry drastically. There is no such thing as untouchable. As long as the essence, the spirit of the whole is approached with respect even a holy text like Hamlet can be reconstructed.
III. Becoming a Part of the Continuum
Trying to deeply understand someone else’s poem makes you internalize some elements prominent to its poet. It is fair to admit that almost every poet I encountered had an effect, whether major or minor, on my understanding of poetry and even sometimes directly on my writing; some show fractions of themselves in my poems yet some I strictly avoid. My first realization of modern Turkish poetry was through Orhan Veli, his poem “İntihar”[10] to be exact. Veli influenced me with his novice yet adequate and clear style. As a young boy I realized that it was perfectly possible to build up poems using such modest use of language. Shortly after I discovered the harmony in Nazım Hikmet’s poems. The dynamism and his awareness of sound made me experiment with cadence.[11] I had many other influences as well, like writer and poet Vüs’at O. Bener. His usage of experimental lexicon and unique speech-like texts gave me a different perspective. My acquaintance with Murat Nemet-Nejat is more recent than the previous names yet his influence has started to show itself in my perception of poetry and language. As a singer of human speech who embraces kırık diller, Nemet-Nejat has made a rather personal impact on me compared to the others.
My first ever word was not anne.[12] It was mommy. I guess it would have felt alien to her hearing her firstborn call out to her in Turkish as she is a brave survivor with an accent after all. Mama is the agreed word in her community but it would have been “too obvious” so I guess the English version was a consensus between my parents. The daily language in the household was French, at least until my father left us. This was a choice my parents made, which caused unique challenges for me throughout my life. If Chomsky is right and there really is an innate device in our brains which is activated when exposed to the language that dominantly surrounds us as newborns, my device was not initially activated by Turkish, however it learned to operate in Turkish later on. My childhood was quite the rumpus between four households and school. Weekdays were in English and Turkish at school amongst mostly Sephardim friends. I did not understand some inside jokes yet I thought I was in the circle until we reached the age of bar mitzvahs. I was not invited to a single one. Weeknights at home were French for a long time. I was the only one speaking in Turkish. I guess it was an act of rebellion. Friday nights were French with Farsi fillers at Bidi’s house, my Persian origin francophone grandmother. I spoke Turkish because my French well, c'était ridicule. Weekends were in heavily accented Turkish with lots of Hayeren fillers, I spoke Turkish better than dede[13] and granmami yet found comfort and security in their distinct accents. Long holidays on the other hand were spent in Frankfurt at my other grandfather’s house, a hyperpolyglot who mastered seven languages. He spoke meticulous Istanbul Turkish with an expertly hidden accent. He has been gone for a long time now, and I still don’t know which one was the root of his obscure yet audible accent. Results of these mixed linguistic signals of my early critical years, the cacophony of languages and my belated diagnosis of dyslexia still linger today on my broken Turkish. Turkish is definitely my native language and the brokenness is not detectable by the ear, it is rather a structural defect. I still find it challenging to express myself through spoken language where I rely heavily on fillers. So I have been trying to compensate for what I thought I lacked in spoken Turkish through poetry. With Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poems I came to an understanding that what I thought was my underbelly could have been my unique voice. What I tried to hide since forever could have been transformed into poetry. As my poetic language continues to evolve with Nemet-Nejat’s influence, Turkish itself does continue its journey of transformation like every other language. In Istanbul Noir Nemet-Nejat observes a great deal of this transformation cycle. In my opinion it is not just a nostalgic memoir, it also displays a valuable analysis on the still continuing evolution of modern day Turkish and the sociopolitical scene behind it. Nemet-Nejat is such an on-point observer of the city and its relation with the language that his observations of the peripheral urbanization within the metropolis gives us the reasons why Modern Turkish, in addition to the fact that it can still be considered young, continues to evolve and change rapidly just like a snakelet sheds. With all these ideas in mind I have been experimenting with the timeless continuum of Eda. I’ve started to work on an overarching lingua-temporal manner where I try to create a place, my own place, including the past, present and the possibly future elements of Turkish. I am still trying to formalize my own language. I think this is why it took me considerably long to translate Animals of Dawn, as I am not only rewriting it, but I am also trying to create new gateways into my native language through it.
[1] Eliot, T.S. (1921). Hamlet and His Problems. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/sacredwoodess00eliorich/page/86/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater
[2] Kirecci, M. A., & Foster, E. (Eds.). (2001). Istanbul: Metamorphoses in an Imperial City. Talisman House.
[3] Meaning “broken languages” in Turkish.
[4] Balikcioglu, E.M. (2007, October). The Materialist Poem: “Godless Sufism”, as the Structure of Matter in the Turkish Poetry of Our Day. Jacket, 34, 139.
[5] Nemet-Nejat, M. (2004). Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry. Talisman House.
[6] Nemet-Nejat, M. (2016). Animals of Dawn. Talisman House.
[7] Nemet-Nejat, M. (2016). Animals of Dawn. Talisman House.
[8] Rendall, S. (1997). The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin (Translation). TTR, 10(2), 151–165. https://doi.org/10.7202/037302ar
[9] Ozmen, G. (2019, September-October). Her Çeviri Bir Yanlış Okumayla Başlar. YKY Kitap-lık, 205, 50-79
[10] The poem was translated into English in 1989 as Suicide by Murat Nemet-Nejat.
[11] Like most Turkish poets I also think that Nazım Hikmet’s influence is not only on modern Turkish poetry but on Turkish language itself. He had such an impact on Turkish language and literature that, as Turkish author Aziz Nesin says, all Turkish poets and writers who came after him were eventually influenced by him, whether they liked him or not.
[12] Meaning mother, mom in Turkish.
[13] Grandfather in Turkish
Incomplete Thoughts, Jump Cuts and Accented Notes
This article is an incomplete reflective piece of writing on Murat Nemet-Nejat’s Animals of Dawn, my appreciation of his poems and my experience with translating them. The emphasis on the incompleteness is ironically Shakespearean.
I. Animals of Dawn
My first encounter with Murat Nemet-Nejat’s work was through Efe Murad’s Turkish translation of his The Spiritual Life of Replicants (2011); Replikantların İç Dünyası (2018). The whole experience was unexpectedly new for me. The poems had this visual aspect that I tried to assess under the roof of auteurism. Although the voice of the translator was perfectly audible, I was very well aware that the rooms I was walking through were initially created by the poet. Wandering through these carefully created rooms, maybe even a little bit like Prufrock, personas came and went, talking of Orhan Veli, Blade Runner, Seyhan Erözçelik, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. In between the gaps, which felt completely intentional yet natural, I found the opportunity to self-isolate and spend time on my own. But only after I started to translate Animals of Dawn, did I have the chance to develop an understanding of Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poetry.
Animals of Dawn (2016) is an experimental poetic text structured upon the idea of reconstructing Sheakspeare’s Hamlet. Through the book, meaning is mainly shaped by the reader's perception, as Murat Nemet-Nejat deliberately creates a limitless poetic universe detached from time and space. His work grants the reader the freedom to distill the text into personal interpretations that leads to a sense of comfort for the reader. This openness ironically creates interwoven loops within the poem. Numerous layers of references and concepts are connected with each other by latent strings. The multi-dimensional structure of his poem paves the way to endless opportunities, creating questions which can be answered or even be left unanswered by the reader. The richness of his work comes from these unanswered questions. A similar concept is also embedded throughout Hamlet. Although T.S. Eliot refers to Hamlet as an artistic failure,[1] endless questions, the disconnectedness and incomplete actions create the richness of the tragedy. In this way, Murat Nemet-Nejat reflects Hamlet’s detachment from reality into his own work in a considerably surprising way.
Not only Animals of Dawn but Murat Nemet-Nejat’s entire poetica can be seen as a form of a thinking practice. It is not easy to just read one verse or even sometimes a word and move on to the next. In this sense, Animals of Dawn strips the language off of its limits. Deconstruction of structure and meaning is a prominent element in Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poetica. The poet wanders around concepts swiftly which I assume is a result of his linguistic background. In order to thoroughly understand the poet’s idea of language, the traces of his background can be read through his own words in Istanbul Noir (2001)[2] where hints of Nemet-Nejat’s daily relationship with language can be found. As a Persian Jew who grew up amongst the Sephardim and Turkish in Istanbul where he attended Robert College, the poet was exposed to fragments of different languages, “kırık diller”[3] in his own words, throughout his life. And now, years later, as an American poet Nemet-Nejat uses these cullet-like fragments to create his own glass sphere. Nemet-Nejat is a poet/translator who has achieved a delicate balance between west and east, mysticism and science, social and academic language, Shakespeare and modern poetry. Growing up in the heart of synthesis makes it possible for him to flow amongst the current smoothly. The poet creates this balance through his ability to internalize both languages, and his talent to keep diverse cultures in one perspective. Nemet-Nejat also has a unique gift that allows him to fill in the voids of each language through intentional misreadings and misinterpretations; he creates an ever-expanding gestalt.
Nemet-Nejat himself describes Animals of Dawn as a meta-poem, aiming to emphasize the semantic connection with the term metaphysics rather than a Marxist approach to the term meta. Turkish poet Efe Murad bridges his ideas of Materialist Poem and Nemet-Nejat’s concept of Godless Sufism and describes the term Materialist Poem as the Godless but Sufi Eda of contemporary Turkish poetry (Balikcioglu, 2007)[4]. My own understanding of Animals of Dawn also lines up with these previous statements. I think Animals of Dawn is an example of a meta-poem after all, irreligious yet spiritual just like Nemet-Nejat describes Istanbul in Eda (Nemet-Nejat, 2004, pg.19)[5]. Right at this point, jumping to the connection between Nemet-Nejat’s poetry and a totally new concept of meta seems notably relevant. Nemet-Nejat’s poetic language is like a device that is composed freshly from ever-changing elements each time it faces a new spatiotemporal dimension. He is not a digital-poet in the traditional sense for sure. However, endless possibilities, freedom and openness in his poetic universe reminds me of this fresh concept of meta. Just like the idea of integrating real and virtual worlds in the latest attempts on metaverse projects, Nemet-Nejat creates a space of reals and unreals in Animals of Dawn with the initial inspiration from Hamlet.
“Hamlet is the holy text that is at the heart of things, real or unreal, objects, living or un-living…” (p. 69)[6]
“That unbreachableness (the way the consciousness of the living, the real, the rational can not breach into the consciousness of the un-living, unreal) is at the heart of Hamlet's mysterious power, what makes it a holy text.” (p. 70)[7]
The idea of this dual universe creates an almost byzantine structure that can be traced back to nearly every literary text which found its way to our times including religious writing. Whether the source of this idea is pure human imagination, a rather individual asset or a spiritual impulse which seems more collective and even innate, or both the schema seems to be always there. This idea manifests itself through madness, repetition and unanswered questions in Hamlet whereas in Nemet-Nejat’s book-length poem, it has found its place through syntax experiments, disjunction and layers of context. With the help of these elements, the poet creates a threshold between our world and his limitless poetic universe; reals and unreals. Only time will tell how we or the following generations are going to experience the re-manifestation of this beginning-less idea through possible metaverse poetry. On the other hand, Animals of Dawn might be a preview of what’s to come, or even a user’s manual for future poets. This might seem like a hyperbolic statement however the notional connection between the terms meta-poem and meta-verse is too distinct to ignore.
II. Translating Continuum
From: Murat Nemet-Nejat / Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 4:06 AM
“Tabii şiirin sonu yok.
Sen de Animals of Dawn'u yeniden yazmıyor musun, benim Hamlet'te yaptığım gibi?”
“Sure, poetry is infinite. Aren’t you rewriting Animals of Dawn, just like I rewrote Hamlet…”
Just like The Spiritual Life of Replicants, Animals of Dawn is like a spacious house designed by the poet for the readers to roam around freely. So rather than its translator I feel like I am the mover of Animals of Dawn, trying to transport its items to a completely new place. Unfortunately it is an impossible task to translate all the elements when it comes to poetry. In this sense, poetry translation is an art of renunciation, just as cinema consists of raw images abandoned in editing. During the process I have been thinking about the best way to move the items. Should I transfer them all? How should I place them in their new space? How should I fill in gaps or should I even fill them after all? The answers were embedded in Animals of Dawn itself.
The most exciting part of translation is probably being able to open up new horizons in a language. As Walter Benjamin states “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.”[8] This idea can help us understand Nemet-Nejat’s approach to translation; according to him translation is a two-way transmission, through which some of the possibly missing elements in either source or target language can be completed by fitting elements from the other language. In other words, translation makes non-existing elements or concepts in a language become possible. In his 2019 interview[9] the poet compares this process to grafting. His grafting comparison might sound a little bold for a translator who is on the more conservative side of the spectrum, however being able to think about the concept of loyalty to the source-text with such a courageous approach feels liberating. Nemet-Nejat’s attitude influenced me deeply. His idea of creating new possibilities through translation and his tendency to expand the limits of language through poetry should be considered together. During our email conversations Nemet-Nejat made a significantly influential comment; “a poem changing in between translations is just like refraction of light, although it bends it is still the same light.” In my opinion this statement sums up the fundamentals of his literary standpoint.
According to Nemet-Nejat, Turkish poet Ahmet Haşim’s pre-republic poem “O, Belde'' (1921) is the core of Eda. Although it is constructed in Turkish syntax, Haşim felt the need to take a refuge in Farsi lexicon where Turkish felt inadequate. “Space” in Animals of Dawn (p. 21) is a translation of this poem and now I am translating it to today’s Turkish, completely based on Nemet-Nejat’s version, without referring to the original. In other words, I am entering an ouroboros. By doing so I am hoping to preserve the essence that Nemet-Nejat has infused into the book, without disrupting its continuum. And I am already imagining someone else translating it back to English so the cycle continues. Even this experience on its own has changed my perspective on poetry drastically. There is no such thing as untouchable. As long as the essence, the spirit of the whole is approached with respect even a holy text like Hamlet can be reconstructed.
III. Becoming a Part of the Continuum
Trying to deeply understand someone else’s poem makes you internalize some elements prominent to its poet. It is fair to admit that almost every poet I encountered had an effect, whether major or minor, on my understanding of poetry and even sometimes directly on my writing; some show fractions of themselves in my poems yet some I strictly avoid. My first realization of modern Turkish poetry was through Orhan Veli, his poem “İntihar”[10] to be exact. Veli influenced me with his novice yet adequate and clear style. As a young boy I realized that it was perfectly possible to build up poems using such modest use of language. Shortly after I discovered the harmony in Nazım Hikmet’s poems. The dynamism and his awareness of sound made me experiment with cadence.[11] I had many other influences as well, like writer and poet Vüs’at O. Bener. His usage of experimental lexicon and unique speech-like texts gave me a different perspective. My acquaintance with Murat Nemet-Nejat is more recent than the previous names yet his influence has started to show itself in my perception of poetry and language. As a singer of human speech who embraces kırık diller, Nemet-Nejat has made a rather personal impact on me compared to the others.
My first ever word was not anne.[12] It was mommy. I guess it would have felt alien to her hearing her firstborn call out to her in Turkish as she is a brave survivor with an accent after all. Mama is the agreed word in her community but it would have been “too obvious” so I guess the English version was a consensus between my parents. The daily language in the household was French, at least until my father left us. This was a choice my parents made, which caused unique challenges for me throughout my life. If Chomsky is right and there really is an innate device in our brains which is activated when exposed to the language that dominantly surrounds us as newborns, my device was not initially activated by Turkish, however it learned to operate in Turkish later on. My childhood was quite the rumpus between four households and school. Weekdays were in English and Turkish at school amongst mostly Sephardim friends. I did not understand some inside jokes yet I thought I was in the circle until we reached the age of bar mitzvahs. I was not invited to a single one. Weeknights at home were French for a long time. I was the only one speaking in Turkish. I guess it was an act of rebellion. Friday nights were French with Farsi fillers at Bidi’s house, my Persian origin francophone grandmother. I spoke Turkish because my French well, c'était ridicule. Weekends were in heavily accented Turkish with lots of Hayeren fillers, I spoke Turkish better than dede[13] and granmami yet found comfort and security in their distinct accents. Long holidays on the other hand were spent in Frankfurt at my other grandfather’s house, a hyperpolyglot who mastered seven languages. He spoke meticulous Istanbul Turkish with an expertly hidden accent. He has been gone for a long time now, and I still don’t know which one was the root of his obscure yet audible accent. Results of these mixed linguistic signals of my early critical years, the cacophony of languages and my belated diagnosis of dyslexia still linger today on my broken Turkish. Turkish is definitely my native language and the brokenness is not detectable by the ear, it is rather a structural defect. I still find it challenging to express myself through spoken language where I rely heavily on fillers. So I have been trying to compensate for what I thought I lacked in spoken Turkish through poetry. With Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poems I came to an understanding that what I thought was my underbelly could have been my unique voice. What I tried to hide since forever could have been transformed into poetry. As my poetic language continues to evolve with Nemet-Nejat’s influence, Turkish itself does continue its journey of transformation like every other language. In Istanbul Noir Nemet-Nejat observes a great deal of this transformation cycle. In my opinion it is not just a nostalgic memoir, it also displays a valuable analysis on the still continuing evolution of modern day Turkish and the sociopolitical scene behind it. Nemet-Nejat is such an on-point observer of the city and its relation with the language that his observations of the peripheral urbanization within the metropolis gives us the reasons why Modern Turkish, in addition to the fact that it can still be considered young, continues to evolve and change rapidly just like a snakelet sheds. With all these ideas in mind I have been experimenting with the timeless continuum of Eda. I’ve started to work on an overarching lingua-temporal manner where I try to create a place, my own place, including the past, present and the possibly future elements of Turkish. I am still trying to formalize my own language. I think this is why it took me considerably long to translate Animals of Dawn, as I am not only rewriting it, but I am also trying to create new gateways into my native language through it.
[1] Eliot, T.S. (1921). Hamlet and His Problems. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/sacredwoodess00eliorich/page/86/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater
[2] Kirecci, M. A., & Foster, E. (Eds.). (2001). Istanbul: Metamorphoses in an Imperial City. Talisman House.
[3] Meaning “broken languages” in Turkish.
[4] Balikcioglu, E.M. (2007, October). The Materialist Poem: “Godless Sufism”, as the Structure of Matter in the Turkish Poetry of Our Day. Jacket, 34, 139.
[5] Nemet-Nejat, M. (2004). Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry. Talisman House.
[6] Nemet-Nejat, M. (2016). Animals of Dawn. Talisman House.
[7] Nemet-Nejat, M. (2016). Animals of Dawn. Talisman House.
[8] Rendall, S. (1997). The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin (Translation). TTR, 10(2), 151–165. https://doi.org/10.7202/037302ar
[9] Ozmen, G. (2019, September-October). Her Çeviri Bir Yanlış Okumayla Başlar. YKY Kitap-lık, 205, 50-79
[10] The poem was translated into English in 1989 as Suicide by Murat Nemet-Nejat.
[11] Like most Turkish poets I also think that Nazım Hikmet’s influence is not only on modern Turkish poetry but on Turkish language itself. He had such an impact on Turkish language and literature that, as Turkish author Aziz Nesin says, all Turkish poets and writers who came after him were eventually influenced by him, whether they liked him or not.
[12] Meaning mother, mom in Turkish.
[13] Grandfather in Turkish