A Brief History of Turkish Poetry Translations into English
by
Jeffrey Kahrs
Jeffrey Kahrs
English-language translations of Ottoman poetry didn’t begin until the publication in 1902 of E. J. W. Gibb’s Ottoman Literature. Though no doubt fascinating to someone who is interested in what happens when Ottoman Divan poetry is translated into couplets that resemble someone like Tennyson, the book will remain a relic of the first attempt to bring a 700-year-old tradition into English. The half-naked slave woman being bargained for in the frontispiece really tells the reader all they need to know about the trivializing oriental imagery being imposed on an ancient poetic tradition that was once considered among the great art forms of its time.
Though cut off to a great extent from the cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire after World War One and the War of Independence, Turkish poetry continued the metamorphosis begun in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Adapting various Western traditions to their taste, particularly from the French, new forms began to grow in the heady atmosphere of change brought on by the creation of the Turkish Republic, though very few outside the country knew this was happening.
Though Nazim Hikmet would in time be remembered as the greatest Turkish poet of the 20th Century, his remained an isolated, imprisoned figure known primarily to a few fellow travelers before World War II and had not been translated into English. Only with the publication in 1945 of a slim volume, The Star and the Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Poetry chosen by Derek Patmore, did the new Turkish poetry that had completely broken free of its Ottoman constraits appear in English. Patmore obviously had a great affection for Turkey and Turkish culture as he would go on to write a book about his time in the country. He also introduced many of the most famous Turkish painters to the world during his lifetime through exhibitions he arranged with Edouard Roditi. His groundbreaking chapbook featured work by now-famous poets such as Yahya Kemal, Orhan Veli Kanık and Oktay Rifat. As the Garıp Movement in the 1940s brought the full force of modernism to Turkish poetry. The act of translating Turkish poetry in a manner befitting its modernity began.
Although Turkish poems appeared in English now and then through the 1950s and 60s, only Nazim Hikmet’s work was published in numerous languages. It wasn’t until 1978 with The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse that a truly representative collection of Turkish verse was made available to English-language readers. The book begins with a large collection of the formal Divan poetry, but more modern work, edited and often translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu, gave an interested audience the first opportunity to fully experience the profound depth of Turkish modernism. The book includes translations by accomplished and still well-known translators like Talat Sait Halman, Richard McKane, Murat Nemet-Nejat and others. Since the publication of this collection, Halman and Nemet-Nejat have left their own respective stamps on the translation of Turkish poetry into English as each has edited well-known anthologies of modern Turkish verse.
It is in the availability of books dedicated to the work of single Turkish poets that the translation of Turkish poetry into English has dramatically changed. Where once you could only find a volume of Nazim Hikmet or Orhan Veli, books by various poets, some quite young, are now published regularly in the United States and Britain, and there are now numerous translators and presses fighting the good fight. I don’t know nor have time to mention all the translators, but in the UK people like Ruth Christie and George Messo have done great work, and the Cunda Group, led by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne, have long been curators of Turkish poetry in English. Neil Patrick Doherty, Derick Mattern, Eric Mortenson, Amy Spangler and Donny Smith are all representatives of this new generation of translators.
No publishing house in the United States has done more to bring Turkish poetry to the English-speaking word than Talisman House. We as readers should celebrate its dedication to making so many great writers available.
Gülten Akın: What Have You Carried Over? Poems of 42 Days and Other Works (2014) Edited by Salıha Paker and Mel Kenne
Along with Nazım Hikmet and Orhan Veli, I consider Gülten Akın one of the three greatest Turkish poets of the 20th Century. Though there is a new generation of women poets that have come to the fore recently, such as Bejan Matur and Gonca Özmen, Akın was the pioneer. Influenced by the Second New movement, social consciousness, and her concerns as a woman and mother of five, Akın somehow found time to write 14 collections of poetry, 12 of which are represented here. Though her work soars with a depth of emotion and Sufic influences, it stands more solidly in life as lived than most of her contemporaries. You’ll find her in a kitchen serving dinner as the starting point for a lamentation. I loved poems such as “Summer”, “Woman’s Song”, and “Short Poem/One”, as well as the powerful epic section called “Poems of 42 Days”, an anguished series of work about a mother and her son who is on a hunger strike in prison: “She wanted them never to put off looking back and to keep their eyes on what had happened way back, long, long ago, in the struggle for human dignity.” Edited and primarily translated by the organizers of the famous Cunda workshops and leading translators from Turkish to English, Akın's work is one of the best places to start reading Turkish poetry.
Silent Stones: Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday (2017) Translated by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad
Featuring precise, startling juxtapositions that are emotionally moving, these translations illustrate the three distinct periods in Anday’s writing. A joint effort by the remarkable American poet Sidney Wade, and Efe Murad, one of the most important young poets in Turkey and a figure of considerable intellectual weight, one feels the lapidary movement of these words as they roll through these lines. Though the middle period in Anday’s work is marked by his interest in the epic form, one can generally feel the influence of the Garip school of poets, of which he was a part, as well as French surrealism throughout his work. To my mind his poem “Changes” alone is worth the price of admission. Composed of nine parts, one to a page, it starts with a repetitive poetic structure reminiscent of the ghazal form, though this formal approach comes apart as he struggles with the chaotic interaction of the worlds of his poem that ranges majestically over time, nature and emotions such as regret, despair and faith. “Although we are rich, we’ve gone through all our grain. / We will learn again the most recent word / of the tree inside the tongue.” Always surprising and delighting the reader with the melding of the human and the natural world, Anday is a writer to be read again and again.
Ash Divan: Selected Poems of Enis Batur (2006) Edited by Saliha Paker
Much as I’m a fan of Orhan Pamuk, after reading these poems I wondered if Enis Batur should have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Batur performs a wondrous high-wire act, moving with graceful eloquence across the worldly topography of his poetry. Part of what makes him so compelling is how comfortable he is with his cosmopolitan reality—at home on the underground in Paris, Tokyo, Athens, or New York, thinking of Sâdi of Shiraz, Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Montale, Gide, Rilke, or one of the many other figures of world literature. In stating his influences clearly in his work, Batur has been influenced by Pound, though the structure of his poems, usually written in long lines and often about history, bear the beautiful burdens of Old World concerns such as history. “Poetry is neither order nor chaos. / It may only be a whimsical focal point that lies / between two extremes to trip up time.” A powerful meditation on time/history is what we should expect from a person so deeply in love with the ancient stones of his hometown of Istanbul.
The bad news is this book is now quite difficult to find, even second-hand. The good news is a larger volume of Batur’s work is due out any time.
Selected Poems of Ilhan Berk (2004) Edited by Önder Otçu
Language would be lonely without Ilhan Berk. Once he broke loose and found his voice as a member of the Second New in the early 1950s, Berk became the most restless voice in Turkish poetry, continually pushing the boundaries of accepted form. If there’s any Turkish poet who would have understood the concept of the FIELD made famous in Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse”, I believe it would have been Berk, whose writing runs the gamut of passionate love poems, panegyrics, fables, koans, and an almost pantheistic sense of the universe. Deeply philosophic, his writing probes the images and concepts of how we know the historic and the moment, and he does this with a loving, playful relationship between the words and the page. As Berk says, “I wonder if the sky knows / I am writing about the sky”.
Dirty August: Edip Cansever (2009) Translated by Julia Clare & Richard Tillinghast
Drinking deep from the earlier Garip movement, Cansever is one of the leading lights of its successor generation in Turkish poetry, the Second New movement. His poetry meditates on the mortality of human existence and human aloneness, which stand in his poems in opposition to the timeless, pure existence of nature and its ability to renew itself. Existentialism, the aloneness of the singular figure observing, is a constant motif in the earlier poems here.
Later on in this collection, Cansever’s poetry about the sea makes a particularly remarkable appearance. Leaning on notions of the subjective and creativity, Cansever says he is “both the sea and the man dreamed [dreaming?] of the sea”. His essay “Abstract Concrete” says that poems are like living creatures struggling “to become concrete”, for an abstract poem “is, at its best, the unwritten poem”.
Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (2004)
Edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Nemet-Nejat, the editor of this anthology, is a poet, critical essayist, and translator, one of a handful who have made it a substantial part of their life’s work to transmute Turkish poems into English. Though starting to show its age as a generation and more of young Turkish poets have arisen since Eda was published, no anthology covers 20th Century Turkish poetry so thoroughly. The choices in this book naturally reflect Nemet-Nejat’s taste and biases. He favors poets he’s worked on like Orhan Veli, Ece Ayhan and Sami Baydar, but there’s no shame in this. As long as many other deserving poets are included, why not give pride of place to poets you love?
The last section of the book includes several excellent essays, including the very influential piece Nemet-Nejat wrote called “Godless Sufism”, where he defines the Turkish word eda and explains why it carries a poetic weight as critical to the work coming out of Istanbul, in its own way, as Lorca’s duende.
Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds: Seyhan Erözçelik (2010) Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Nemet-Nejat is a perfect translator for Erözçelik’s writing as his work fits with someone who is interested in experimental writing. There are two sets of serial poems here. The “Coffee Grinds” poems are very much action poems reading fate from “the sky” rather than static coffeehouse meditations between the physical world and conclusions of the mind. They range over an animistic landscape that drinks in our relationship between fate and kismet.
Though I enjoyed “Coffee Grinds”, “Rosestikes” is the series that captured my heart. Using the rose—a famous Sufi symbol—as a symbol of the blooming nature of the fallen world in which we live, Erözcelik traverses a landscape again filled with natural forces, with a personal focus on emotional and erotic love held and lost. The rose here comfortably sits between existence and language, as Erözcelik says, “a movable mecca spinning” like a dervish.
Though cut off to a great extent from the cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire after World War One and the War of Independence, Turkish poetry continued the metamorphosis begun in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Adapting various Western traditions to their taste, particularly from the French, new forms began to grow in the heady atmosphere of change brought on by the creation of the Turkish Republic, though very few outside the country knew this was happening.
Though Nazim Hikmet would in time be remembered as the greatest Turkish poet of the 20th Century, his remained an isolated, imprisoned figure known primarily to a few fellow travelers before World War II and had not been translated into English. Only with the publication in 1945 of a slim volume, The Star and the Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Poetry chosen by Derek Patmore, did the new Turkish poetry that had completely broken free of its Ottoman constraits appear in English. Patmore obviously had a great affection for Turkey and Turkish culture as he would go on to write a book about his time in the country. He also introduced many of the most famous Turkish painters to the world during his lifetime through exhibitions he arranged with Edouard Roditi. His groundbreaking chapbook featured work by now-famous poets such as Yahya Kemal, Orhan Veli Kanık and Oktay Rifat. As the Garıp Movement in the 1940s brought the full force of modernism to Turkish poetry. The act of translating Turkish poetry in a manner befitting its modernity began.
Although Turkish poems appeared in English now and then through the 1950s and 60s, only Nazim Hikmet’s work was published in numerous languages. It wasn’t until 1978 with The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse that a truly representative collection of Turkish verse was made available to English-language readers. The book begins with a large collection of the formal Divan poetry, but more modern work, edited and often translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu, gave an interested audience the first opportunity to fully experience the profound depth of Turkish modernism. The book includes translations by accomplished and still well-known translators like Talat Sait Halman, Richard McKane, Murat Nemet-Nejat and others. Since the publication of this collection, Halman and Nemet-Nejat have left their own respective stamps on the translation of Turkish poetry into English as each has edited well-known anthologies of modern Turkish verse.
It is in the availability of books dedicated to the work of single Turkish poets that the translation of Turkish poetry into English has dramatically changed. Where once you could only find a volume of Nazim Hikmet or Orhan Veli, books by various poets, some quite young, are now published regularly in the United States and Britain, and there are now numerous translators and presses fighting the good fight. I don’t know nor have time to mention all the translators, but in the UK people like Ruth Christie and George Messo have done great work, and the Cunda Group, led by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne, have long been curators of Turkish poetry in English. Neil Patrick Doherty, Derick Mattern, Eric Mortenson, Amy Spangler and Donny Smith are all representatives of this new generation of translators.
No publishing house in the United States has done more to bring Turkish poetry to the English-speaking word than Talisman House. We as readers should celebrate its dedication to making so many great writers available.
Gülten Akın: What Have You Carried Over? Poems of 42 Days and Other Works (2014) Edited by Salıha Paker and Mel Kenne
Along with Nazım Hikmet and Orhan Veli, I consider Gülten Akın one of the three greatest Turkish poets of the 20th Century. Though there is a new generation of women poets that have come to the fore recently, such as Bejan Matur and Gonca Özmen, Akın was the pioneer. Influenced by the Second New movement, social consciousness, and her concerns as a woman and mother of five, Akın somehow found time to write 14 collections of poetry, 12 of which are represented here. Though her work soars with a depth of emotion and Sufic influences, it stands more solidly in life as lived than most of her contemporaries. You’ll find her in a kitchen serving dinner as the starting point for a lamentation. I loved poems such as “Summer”, “Woman’s Song”, and “Short Poem/One”, as well as the powerful epic section called “Poems of 42 Days”, an anguished series of work about a mother and her son who is on a hunger strike in prison: “She wanted them never to put off looking back and to keep their eyes on what had happened way back, long, long ago, in the struggle for human dignity.” Edited and primarily translated by the organizers of the famous Cunda workshops and leading translators from Turkish to English, Akın's work is one of the best places to start reading Turkish poetry.
Silent Stones: Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday (2017) Translated by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad
Featuring precise, startling juxtapositions that are emotionally moving, these translations illustrate the three distinct periods in Anday’s writing. A joint effort by the remarkable American poet Sidney Wade, and Efe Murad, one of the most important young poets in Turkey and a figure of considerable intellectual weight, one feels the lapidary movement of these words as they roll through these lines. Though the middle period in Anday’s work is marked by his interest in the epic form, one can generally feel the influence of the Garip school of poets, of which he was a part, as well as French surrealism throughout his work. To my mind his poem “Changes” alone is worth the price of admission. Composed of nine parts, one to a page, it starts with a repetitive poetic structure reminiscent of the ghazal form, though this formal approach comes apart as he struggles with the chaotic interaction of the worlds of his poem that ranges majestically over time, nature and emotions such as regret, despair and faith. “Although we are rich, we’ve gone through all our grain. / We will learn again the most recent word / of the tree inside the tongue.” Always surprising and delighting the reader with the melding of the human and the natural world, Anday is a writer to be read again and again.
Ash Divan: Selected Poems of Enis Batur (2006) Edited by Saliha Paker
Much as I’m a fan of Orhan Pamuk, after reading these poems I wondered if Enis Batur should have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Batur performs a wondrous high-wire act, moving with graceful eloquence across the worldly topography of his poetry. Part of what makes him so compelling is how comfortable he is with his cosmopolitan reality—at home on the underground in Paris, Tokyo, Athens, or New York, thinking of Sâdi of Shiraz, Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Montale, Gide, Rilke, or one of the many other figures of world literature. In stating his influences clearly in his work, Batur has been influenced by Pound, though the structure of his poems, usually written in long lines and often about history, bear the beautiful burdens of Old World concerns such as history. “Poetry is neither order nor chaos. / It may only be a whimsical focal point that lies / between two extremes to trip up time.” A powerful meditation on time/history is what we should expect from a person so deeply in love with the ancient stones of his hometown of Istanbul.
The bad news is this book is now quite difficult to find, even second-hand. The good news is a larger volume of Batur’s work is due out any time.
Selected Poems of Ilhan Berk (2004) Edited by Önder Otçu
Language would be lonely without Ilhan Berk. Once he broke loose and found his voice as a member of the Second New in the early 1950s, Berk became the most restless voice in Turkish poetry, continually pushing the boundaries of accepted form. If there’s any Turkish poet who would have understood the concept of the FIELD made famous in Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse”, I believe it would have been Berk, whose writing runs the gamut of passionate love poems, panegyrics, fables, koans, and an almost pantheistic sense of the universe. Deeply philosophic, his writing probes the images and concepts of how we know the historic and the moment, and he does this with a loving, playful relationship between the words and the page. As Berk says, “I wonder if the sky knows / I am writing about the sky”.
Dirty August: Edip Cansever (2009) Translated by Julia Clare & Richard Tillinghast
Drinking deep from the earlier Garip movement, Cansever is one of the leading lights of its successor generation in Turkish poetry, the Second New movement. His poetry meditates on the mortality of human existence and human aloneness, which stand in his poems in opposition to the timeless, pure existence of nature and its ability to renew itself. Existentialism, the aloneness of the singular figure observing, is a constant motif in the earlier poems here.
Later on in this collection, Cansever’s poetry about the sea makes a particularly remarkable appearance. Leaning on notions of the subjective and creativity, Cansever says he is “both the sea and the man dreamed [dreaming?] of the sea”. His essay “Abstract Concrete” says that poems are like living creatures struggling “to become concrete”, for an abstract poem “is, at its best, the unwritten poem”.
Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (2004)
Edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Nemet-Nejat, the editor of this anthology, is a poet, critical essayist, and translator, one of a handful who have made it a substantial part of their life’s work to transmute Turkish poems into English. Though starting to show its age as a generation and more of young Turkish poets have arisen since Eda was published, no anthology covers 20th Century Turkish poetry so thoroughly. The choices in this book naturally reflect Nemet-Nejat’s taste and biases. He favors poets he’s worked on like Orhan Veli, Ece Ayhan and Sami Baydar, but there’s no shame in this. As long as many other deserving poets are included, why not give pride of place to poets you love?
The last section of the book includes several excellent essays, including the very influential piece Nemet-Nejat wrote called “Godless Sufism”, where he defines the Turkish word eda and explains why it carries a poetic weight as critical to the work coming out of Istanbul, in its own way, as Lorca’s duende.
Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds: Seyhan Erözçelik (2010) Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Nemet-Nejat is a perfect translator for Erözçelik’s writing as his work fits with someone who is interested in experimental writing. There are two sets of serial poems here. The “Coffee Grinds” poems are very much action poems reading fate from “the sky” rather than static coffeehouse meditations between the physical world and conclusions of the mind. They range over an animistic landscape that drinks in our relationship between fate and kismet.
Though I enjoyed “Coffee Grinds”, “Rosestikes” is the series that captured my heart. Using the rose—a famous Sufi symbol—as a symbol of the blooming nature of the fallen world in which we live, Erözcelik traverses a landscape again filled with natural forces, with a personal focus on emotional and erotic love held and lost. The rose here comfortably sits between existence and language, as Erözcelik says, “a movable mecca spinning” like a dervish.