Elinor Nauen
Half-Illicit Love: The Early Work of Murat Nemet-Nejat
Murat Nemet-Nejat has always been between rather than of. The music between his words is the language of the outside, the unnameable, a bridge crossing the treacherous waters of homelessness. Yet being homeless in language gives him the whole world.
His later experiments are surprisingly foreshadowed in The Bridge, his first published book (1977). That is, I went back to The Bridge thinking he had started as a narrative poet and mutated into something quite different. That’s not entirely untrue, and the stories and outcomes are there. But the bridge between The Bridge and recent books mainly is that he was interested in molecules and now he’s interested in atoms: it was words and now it’s the syllables that make up the words, the words that make up the lines. It was always thus, except now he trusts the reader to be an equal partner in the work of fission and fusion.
I am, of course, oversimplifying.
Simplifying is something that concerns him deeply. As with his brilliant, satisfying translations of Turkish poet Orhan Veli (1914-1950), he strips away all flourishes, leaving an open-ended, transparent immediacy. That’s what hasn’t changed in 45 years.
Everything with him is in fact translation. Maybe that’s true of every poet and why so many poets are drawn to other languages. Most poets have done the exercise of translating from a language they don’t know using sonic correspondence. Translating from a language one does know may add the bells and whistles of meaning. (I’m only being partly flip in saying this.) His language, wherever he gets it, is first of all precise; pretty when it needs to be but not distractingly or misleadingly; and always holds together in the larger world that he also inhabits. He thinks and then he gets out of his own way.
~ Elinor Nauen
Murat Nemet-Nejat has always been between rather than of. The music between his words is the language of the outside, the unnameable, a bridge crossing the treacherous waters of homelessness. Yet being homeless in language gives him the whole world.
His later experiments are surprisingly foreshadowed in The Bridge, his first published book (1977). That is, I went back to The Bridge thinking he had started as a narrative poet and mutated into something quite different. That’s not entirely untrue, and the stories and outcomes are there. But the bridge between The Bridge and recent books mainly is that he was interested in molecules and now he’s interested in atoms: it was words and now it’s the syllables that make up the words, the words that make up the lines. It was always thus, except now he trusts the reader to be an equal partner in the work of fission and fusion.
I am, of course, oversimplifying.
Simplifying is something that concerns him deeply. As with his brilliant, satisfying translations of Turkish poet Orhan Veli (1914-1950), he strips away all flourishes, leaving an open-ended, transparent immediacy. That’s what hasn’t changed in 45 years.
Everything with him is in fact translation. Maybe that’s true of every poet and why so many poets are drawn to other languages. Most poets have done the exercise of translating from a language they don’t know using sonic correspondence. Translating from a language one does know may add the bells and whistles of meaning. (I’m only being partly flip in saying this.) His language, wherever he gets it, is first of all precise; pretty when it needs to be but not distractingly or misleadingly; and always holds together in the larger world that he also inhabits. He thinks and then he gets out of his own way.
~ Elinor Nauen