Neil Patrick Doherty
Eda, or The Herd Writes Back
A Riposte to Joseph Brodsky
“The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world. Bonfire embers doused with urine. That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban. Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?”
Joseph Brodsky, “Flight from Byzantium”
In 1984 the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky visited Istanbul as the result of a somewhat whimsical promise he had made to himself on leaving the Soviet Union to ‘circumnavigate the inhabited world along the latitude and along the longitude (i.e., the Pulkovo meridian) on which Leningrad is situated’ (1). As he had had already explored as much of what lay along the latitude as he cared to he turned his attention to whatever might be found upon the line of longitude. While Istanbul lies some eight degrees west of the meridian in question this erstwhile citizen of the Third Rome, and lover of the First, decided to visit the Second. His time in Istanbul is recorded in an essay which exists in two different versions, one written in his native Russian entitled simply “Journey to Istanbul” and a second translated by the poet and Alan Myers bearing the deliberately anti-Yeatsian title of “Flight from Byzantium”. From the outset Brodsky makes it clear that there was nothing in the modern polis of ‘miracle, bird or golden handiwork’ and the sea was not ‘dolphin-torn’ or ‘gong-tormented’, merely dirty, dated and cheap. In an article on Turkish poetry and translation the poet Necmi Zeka points out that one of the motives Brodsky lists for wishing to visit Istanbul is that “it was in this city that my favorite poet, Constantine Cavafy, spent three momentous years at the turn of the century” (2). Zeka then poses a question: ‘one cannot help but wonder about why such a well-read poet had shown no interest at all in the poetry of a country which prides herself about producing many world-class poets.’ (3) Perhaps the answer to the question is to be found in the essay in question.
“Flight from Byzantium” is written as a series of 46 notes, most of which are oblique criticisms of the anti-individualistic Byzantine culture of Brodsky’s native Russia. The reason, it seems, that Russia never developed along ‘normal’ European lines is that it took up the mantle of Eastern Christianity and all of its irrational and anti-democratic traits. The genesis of the bloodstained Russian despot was to be found in the East; the East, that reservoir of backwardness, fanaticism and physical and metaphorical blindness. Needless to say that every East needs its counterpoint in a West and throughout the essay Brodsky, with no great subtlety, provides one: ‘in Athens Socrates could be judged in open court and could make whole speeches—three of them! —in his defense, in Isfahan, say, or Baghdad, such a Socrates would simply have been impaled on the spot, or flayed, and there the matter would have ended.’ (4) There the matter would have ended, whole schools of Islamic jurisprudence are swept aside in favor of a simple black and white dichotomy in which, as ever, the West, the Greeks are the bearers of whatever light humankind has been granted.
Indeed, Brodsky sneers at the very idea that the East has had any important role to play in human history, in the forming of human culture: ‘There is something amusing, and even a bit alarming, isn’t there, in the idea that the East is actually the metaphysical center of mankind? (5). Well yes, when your notion of the East is one of skin-flaying despots than it truly is alarming. This antipathy to all things Eastern colors the poet’s perception of modern Istanbul. ‘How dated everything is here! Not old, ancient, antique, or even old-fashioned, but dated. This is where old cars come to die, and instead become dolmuşlar, public taxis; a ride in one is cheap, bumpy, and nostalgic to the point of making you feel that you are moving in the wrong, unintended direction.’ (6). One of the main tropes that runs through the essay is the idea that everything in Istanbul is irrelevant, that history has side-stepped the city leaving it wallowing in eastern indolence and dirt. Everything makes the visitor feel like she is moving in the wrong direction, away from the light and back into darkness. The Turkish populace, as to be expected, is to be found in ‘a state of total stupor whiling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up.” (7) Again we have the image of heads looking back; nobody in Istanbul is capable of looking forward, people merely turn around to witness some scene of violence or seediness. Everything is shabby and third rate.
This even applies to those great markers of Istanbul, the imperial mosques, denigrated by Brodsky as ‘enormous toads in frozen stone, squatting on the earth, unable to stir’. The squatting, shitting temples are mired in their own muck. How could one expect such a people, burdened as they are with such notions of art, content to dwell in their crumbling and filthy city, to write poetry? The idea simply does not, will not cross Brodsky’s mind. Turks are shoeshine boys or despots, they while their lives away in unkempt snack bars, tea-glasses in hands. One cannot, surely, expect poetry from them. Instead one turns the entire poetic history of Istanbul into the three years Constantine Cavafy spent in the city. Cavafy, Brodsky’s ideal Cavafy- though not the real Kavafis of Alexandria- would seem to be the product of a pre-Byzantine Greek culture born on the many islands of the Aegean and untainted by Eastern notions of monotheism. The crude reasoning throughout the essay is that Eastern monotheism begat Byzantium which begat the even more despotic Turks who all conspired to put the Greeks of the islands to flight. The few shards that remain shine through the works of Cavafy and perhaps a handful of others. To answer Necmi Zeka’s question, the well-read poet had no interest in Turkish poetry because the very idea of it lay beyond him. One cannot be curious about that which one cannot conceive.
When Murat Nemet-Nejat’s groundbreaking anthology Eda was published in 2004 one of the first things that came to mind on reading it was: here is the riposte to Brodsky that we have been waiting for. Although I have focused on Brodsky he is far from being the only Western poet to either ignore or dismiss Turkish poetry. Even Gibb, the tireless, if somewhat leaden, translator of Ottoman verse often complained that the entire corpus was nothing but a poor imitation of superior Persian modes (8). Nemet-Nejat was not certainly not the first translator to endeavor to bring Turkish poetry to readers of English. One cannot overlook the pioneering efforts of Talat Sait Halman and Nermin Menemencioğlu and the brilliant work done by Saliha Paker, Mel Kenne, Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, Feyyaz Fergar (Kayacan), George Messo, Sidney Wade, and Clifford Endres and Selhan Savcıgil Endres. The corpus of Turkish poetry in English owes much to these dedicated translators. What then caused me to see Eda as a direct response to Brodsky’s diatribe? From the start it seemed that the book was conceived as a single volume biography of both a poetry and a language woven around the presence of the city of Istanbul. The dust ridden backwater of the visiting Russian poet is revealed to the Anglophone reader as something far more radical and far more interesting. Here, the book proclaims, ‘a body of poetry unique in the Twentieth century with its own poetics, world view and idiosyncratic sensibility’ (9) was created.
In the introduction to the volume Nemet-Nejat spells out his theory of the Eda, ‘the cadence of the total allure’ of each poem, the essence of modern Turkish poetry is based around three ideas: the city of Istanbul, the ever shifting syntax of the Turkish language, and a kind of modern Sufi sensibility that allows the poet to unify opposites, to possess as she is dispossessed, to experience the deepest yearning as a kind of homecoming. Located in the center of this knot is the city of Istanbul itself. A city both breathtakingly beautiful and crushingly ugly, both Christian and Muslim, both Asian and European, both radical and conservative, both straight and gay; a city capable of housing the most extreme contradictions. It serves as both subject and object of the poems contained within the book. When Orhan Veli listens to Istanbul, he shuts his eyes and the self of the great metropolis merges with self of the young upstart poet.
‘I am listening to Istanbul with my eyes closed
A bird is flying round your skirt;
I know if your forehead is hot or cold
Or your lips are wet or dry;
Or if a white moon is rising above the pistachio tree
My heart’s fluttering tells me...
I am listening to Istanbul with my eyes closed’. (10).
The pronouns here are unreliable. Is the you the city itself? The poet’s heart flutters and melts into the urban landscape he is listening to. His eyes are shut but he knows the city is there, sweating, loving and waiting. This is the very opposite of the Brodskyian stance. Here we have a clear instance of identification with the object, indeed so total is this identification, that object and subject become blurred, unstable and, as in the last few line of Cemal Süreya’s “Houri’s Rose” totally new. The poet who began to listen to the city and the poet who rubbed a rose that had tumbled onto the street over his face are transformed:
‘My arms are broken, my wings,
In a red, catastrophic music,
At the other end of the reed
A brand new, gold toothed shyster’. (11)
Lale Müldür, in “Waking to Constatinople”, weaves the looker and the city into one whole. There can be no cold observer here, the fate of the city and the fate of those wrapped up in it are one.
‘looking at Byzantium you are sleeping. but your tiredness is very deep.
your tiredness as deep as a long river.
pluck and throw out your heart. that’s all. that’s all. this is you.
you are hearing a sound, dark rain, an anxious sound
becomes his in the yellow moon.
and then? then you are sleeping. you are sleeping inside Byzantium. first drops
falling from votive candles are burning your eyelids. a black tramp steamer
is waiting for you in sleep. a steamer as beautiful as black death. at the edge of sleep.
if you wish from inside sleep cutting like a black wing you can reach
that steamer. but you don’t want to do that. you now on the Golden Horn on the water
are stretching one arm tied to a black steamer the other
to the well lit grief of the Tower of the Maiden. you were going to be torn
into pieces if you hadn’t woken up.’ (12)
‘This is you’, the poet says. Byzantium is not to be fled from, Byzantium is to be slept in, to be dreamed into the poet’s very self. Although the city may drop burning candle wax on your eyelids it does so merely to mingle its essence in yours. At the last minute you can awaken and save yourself but the Byzantium you now see is not simply a city, it is part of your being. In this sense, Nemet-Nejat’s selections and translations function as a map into regions that the visitor burdened with a western sense of superiority has never before ventured into. Close your eyes the Eda poets say, sleep until a raucous music breaks you and then molds you into something you never knew you could be before. This is what Brodsky never even contemplated during his visit to Istanbul. The poet’s pre-conceived notion of the Second Rome, that home to Seraglios and Harems and all manner of decadence, remains, throughout the essay, just that: a pre-conceived notion that the scars of poverty and underdevelopment just served to strengthen. ‘That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban’. (13) The modern Turkish poets wrap themselves up in the smell in order to see where it might take them, Brodsky curls up his nose and moves on, untransformed.
The refrain that nothing happens in Byzantium, that it is a dead site, a place that history has abandoned rings through Brodsky’s essay. Nothing of note happens here he says over and over again. One can’t help feel saddened that this erudite poet and lover of the poetry of Cavafy had no access to the poetry of Ece Ayhan. For in the selections of his work translated in Eda we witness a poet bringing the suppressed histories of Istanbul’s gay communities and criminal underworld and that of the unwanted ethnic minorities, the Greeks, Armenians and Jews into the light. As Nemet-Nejat says Ayhan’s work is “full of the burden of this revelation, simultaneously hiding and revealing, a revelation in the process of occurring” (14) This occurrence is history itself, it is the city in all its depth and darkness moving towards a newer conception of itself. In the poetry of Eda inertia is impossible. Ayhan sees himself as:
‘emerging out of reluctant infinitudes, crossing the threshold
wiping my shoes on the stoop, hatless’ (15)
There is a threshold to be crossed and fresh histories to be evolved. The poet bares his head, wipes his shoes and opens his verse to all that has been sidelined. For Brodsky the people who throng the Istanbul streets are deeply alien though somewhat picturesque: ‘As everywhere in the East, there are vast numbers of shoeshiners here of all ages, with their exquisite brassbound boxes housing their kit of boot creams in round, thinnest-of-copper containers with cupola lids’ (14) attempt is made to view the shoe-shine boys as individuals, as people worthy of a story or history. They remain an object of curiosity and pity. Ece Ayhan, cap in hand, scratches under the surface and steps into a new city, one full of troubling voice and suppressed song:
‘Lost in an Istanbul replete with Saturdays, you are imaging these songs
marching on the side of the union of prostitutes hiding from the republican reforms
really, you are not Turkish, but I can’t quite remember
if you aren’t, why are you a singer belting a song
on Pilar’s gun burnt ass during popular sweet matinees?’ (16)
It seems the shoe-shine boys might not even be Turkish, those eastern faces that clog up “Flight to Byzantium” might be Jewish, Greek or Armenian. They might be Kurds newly arrived in the city bring a forbidden language in their suitcase. They might be running from Atatürk’s reforms seeking an alternative way to exist in a country bent on nationalism, they might be gay, daring to express their love only in darkened cinemas as they sing the songs they learnt in school. Whatever the case they are participants in a history that is still moving, still shifting shape. None would see the city they live in as a place outside time, a place that didn’t mean very much.
‘let us not cry, a tree full of songs
think of us, of children ıf al-Qazar without weeping, a thrush of songs’ (17)
Perhaps the most notable achievement of Eda is to bring together ‘a tree full of songs’ and have them sing in raucous (dis)union. We are here, the voices say, and we will no longer be ignored.
“A normal hot, dusty, perspiring summer day in Istanbul. Moreover, it is Sunday. A human herd loitering about under the vaults of the Hagia Sophia”. (18) Much has been made of Eda and Murat Nemet-Nejat’s approach to translation since the book came out in 2004. Less, however, has been made of the fact that Eda is, among other things, a site where a hitherto ignored poetry takes, in the form of a single volume, center stage and proclaims its uniqueness and importance. And it does this, not as some branch of exotic regional studies or samples of anthropology to be poured over in the classroom, but as living poetry, the kind that protestors scrawl on walls and streets during the many moments of strife that modern Turkey experiences. Brodsky’s nameless human herd is given a gallery of faces and voices and allowed to speak for themselves. No longer are they surly semi-human types that sell foreign poets tea for less than a penny, they are poets deeply wrapped up in the history and character of the city they live in. It seems to me that one of the hidden aims of the Eda project was to counter views like that of Brodsky’s (and while it might seem I have been harsh on him and that some of what he said was uttered tongue-in-cheek he was very aware that what he was writing was close to a form of racism. In his own words: Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy? (19) by offering a selection of some of the best Turkish poetry of the past century in a series of radical translations accompanied by essays that that teased out the nature of its poetics. In this sense one cannot help but see Eda as a flight to Byzantium, a place from where the despised ‘herd’ writes back.
References
A Riposte to Joseph Brodsky
“The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world. Bonfire embers doused with urine. That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban. Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?”
Joseph Brodsky, “Flight from Byzantium”
In 1984 the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky visited Istanbul as the result of a somewhat whimsical promise he had made to himself on leaving the Soviet Union to ‘circumnavigate the inhabited world along the latitude and along the longitude (i.e., the Pulkovo meridian) on which Leningrad is situated’ (1). As he had had already explored as much of what lay along the latitude as he cared to he turned his attention to whatever might be found upon the line of longitude. While Istanbul lies some eight degrees west of the meridian in question this erstwhile citizen of the Third Rome, and lover of the First, decided to visit the Second. His time in Istanbul is recorded in an essay which exists in two different versions, one written in his native Russian entitled simply “Journey to Istanbul” and a second translated by the poet and Alan Myers bearing the deliberately anti-Yeatsian title of “Flight from Byzantium”. From the outset Brodsky makes it clear that there was nothing in the modern polis of ‘miracle, bird or golden handiwork’ and the sea was not ‘dolphin-torn’ or ‘gong-tormented’, merely dirty, dated and cheap. In an article on Turkish poetry and translation the poet Necmi Zeka points out that one of the motives Brodsky lists for wishing to visit Istanbul is that “it was in this city that my favorite poet, Constantine Cavafy, spent three momentous years at the turn of the century” (2). Zeka then poses a question: ‘one cannot help but wonder about why such a well-read poet had shown no interest at all in the poetry of a country which prides herself about producing many world-class poets.’ (3) Perhaps the answer to the question is to be found in the essay in question.
“Flight from Byzantium” is written as a series of 46 notes, most of which are oblique criticisms of the anti-individualistic Byzantine culture of Brodsky’s native Russia. The reason, it seems, that Russia never developed along ‘normal’ European lines is that it took up the mantle of Eastern Christianity and all of its irrational and anti-democratic traits. The genesis of the bloodstained Russian despot was to be found in the East; the East, that reservoir of backwardness, fanaticism and physical and metaphorical blindness. Needless to say that every East needs its counterpoint in a West and throughout the essay Brodsky, with no great subtlety, provides one: ‘in Athens Socrates could be judged in open court and could make whole speeches—three of them! —in his defense, in Isfahan, say, or Baghdad, such a Socrates would simply have been impaled on the spot, or flayed, and there the matter would have ended.’ (4) There the matter would have ended, whole schools of Islamic jurisprudence are swept aside in favor of a simple black and white dichotomy in which, as ever, the West, the Greeks are the bearers of whatever light humankind has been granted.
Indeed, Brodsky sneers at the very idea that the East has had any important role to play in human history, in the forming of human culture: ‘There is something amusing, and even a bit alarming, isn’t there, in the idea that the East is actually the metaphysical center of mankind? (5). Well yes, when your notion of the East is one of skin-flaying despots than it truly is alarming. This antipathy to all things Eastern colors the poet’s perception of modern Istanbul. ‘How dated everything is here! Not old, ancient, antique, or even old-fashioned, but dated. This is where old cars come to die, and instead become dolmuşlar, public taxis; a ride in one is cheap, bumpy, and nostalgic to the point of making you feel that you are moving in the wrong, unintended direction.’ (6). One of the main tropes that runs through the essay is the idea that everything in Istanbul is irrelevant, that history has side-stepped the city leaving it wallowing in eastern indolence and dirt. Everything makes the visitor feel like she is moving in the wrong direction, away from the light and back into darkness. The Turkish populace, as to be expected, is to be found in ‘a state of total stupor whiling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up.” (7) Again we have the image of heads looking back; nobody in Istanbul is capable of looking forward, people merely turn around to witness some scene of violence or seediness. Everything is shabby and third rate.
This even applies to those great markers of Istanbul, the imperial mosques, denigrated by Brodsky as ‘enormous toads in frozen stone, squatting on the earth, unable to stir’. The squatting, shitting temples are mired in their own muck. How could one expect such a people, burdened as they are with such notions of art, content to dwell in their crumbling and filthy city, to write poetry? The idea simply does not, will not cross Brodsky’s mind. Turks are shoeshine boys or despots, they while their lives away in unkempt snack bars, tea-glasses in hands. One cannot, surely, expect poetry from them. Instead one turns the entire poetic history of Istanbul into the three years Constantine Cavafy spent in the city. Cavafy, Brodsky’s ideal Cavafy- though not the real Kavafis of Alexandria- would seem to be the product of a pre-Byzantine Greek culture born on the many islands of the Aegean and untainted by Eastern notions of monotheism. The crude reasoning throughout the essay is that Eastern monotheism begat Byzantium which begat the even more despotic Turks who all conspired to put the Greeks of the islands to flight. The few shards that remain shine through the works of Cavafy and perhaps a handful of others. To answer Necmi Zeka’s question, the well-read poet had no interest in Turkish poetry because the very idea of it lay beyond him. One cannot be curious about that which one cannot conceive.
When Murat Nemet-Nejat’s groundbreaking anthology Eda was published in 2004 one of the first things that came to mind on reading it was: here is the riposte to Brodsky that we have been waiting for. Although I have focused on Brodsky he is far from being the only Western poet to either ignore or dismiss Turkish poetry. Even Gibb, the tireless, if somewhat leaden, translator of Ottoman verse often complained that the entire corpus was nothing but a poor imitation of superior Persian modes (8). Nemet-Nejat was not certainly not the first translator to endeavor to bring Turkish poetry to readers of English. One cannot overlook the pioneering efforts of Talat Sait Halman and Nermin Menemencioğlu and the brilliant work done by Saliha Paker, Mel Kenne, Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, Feyyaz Fergar (Kayacan), George Messo, Sidney Wade, and Clifford Endres and Selhan Savcıgil Endres. The corpus of Turkish poetry in English owes much to these dedicated translators. What then caused me to see Eda as a direct response to Brodsky’s diatribe? From the start it seemed that the book was conceived as a single volume biography of both a poetry and a language woven around the presence of the city of Istanbul. The dust ridden backwater of the visiting Russian poet is revealed to the Anglophone reader as something far more radical and far more interesting. Here, the book proclaims, ‘a body of poetry unique in the Twentieth century with its own poetics, world view and idiosyncratic sensibility’ (9) was created.
In the introduction to the volume Nemet-Nejat spells out his theory of the Eda, ‘the cadence of the total allure’ of each poem, the essence of modern Turkish poetry is based around three ideas: the city of Istanbul, the ever shifting syntax of the Turkish language, and a kind of modern Sufi sensibility that allows the poet to unify opposites, to possess as she is dispossessed, to experience the deepest yearning as a kind of homecoming. Located in the center of this knot is the city of Istanbul itself. A city both breathtakingly beautiful and crushingly ugly, both Christian and Muslim, both Asian and European, both radical and conservative, both straight and gay; a city capable of housing the most extreme contradictions. It serves as both subject and object of the poems contained within the book. When Orhan Veli listens to Istanbul, he shuts his eyes and the self of the great metropolis merges with self of the young upstart poet.
‘I am listening to Istanbul with my eyes closed
A bird is flying round your skirt;
I know if your forehead is hot or cold
Or your lips are wet or dry;
Or if a white moon is rising above the pistachio tree
My heart’s fluttering tells me...
I am listening to Istanbul with my eyes closed’. (10).
The pronouns here are unreliable. Is the you the city itself? The poet’s heart flutters and melts into the urban landscape he is listening to. His eyes are shut but he knows the city is there, sweating, loving and waiting. This is the very opposite of the Brodskyian stance. Here we have a clear instance of identification with the object, indeed so total is this identification, that object and subject become blurred, unstable and, as in the last few line of Cemal Süreya’s “Houri’s Rose” totally new. The poet who began to listen to the city and the poet who rubbed a rose that had tumbled onto the street over his face are transformed:
‘My arms are broken, my wings,
In a red, catastrophic music,
At the other end of the reed
A brand new, gold toothed shyster’. (11)
Lale Müldür, in “Waking to Constatinople”, weaves the looker and the city into one whole. There can be no cold observer here, the fate of the city and the fate of those wrapped up in it are one.
‘looking at Byzantium you are sleeping. but your tiredness is very deep.
your tiredness as deep as a long river.
pluck and throw out your heart. that’s all. that’s all. this is you.
you are hearing a sound, dark rain, an anxious sound
becomes his in the yellow moon.
and then? then you are sleeping. you are sleeping inside Byzantium. first drops
falling from votive candles are burning your eyelids. a black tramp steamer
is waiting for you in sleep. a steamer as beautiful as black death. at the edge of sleep.
if you wish from inside sleep cutting like a black wing you can reach
that steamer. but you don’t want to do that. you now on the Golden Horn on the water
are stretching one arm tied to a black steamer the other
to the well lit grief of the Tower of the Maiden. you were going to be torn
into pieces if you hadn’t woken up.’ (12)
‘This is you’, the poet says. Byzantium is not to be fled from, Byzantium is to be slept in, to be dreamed into the poet’s very self. Although the city may drop burning candle wax on your eyelids it does so merely to mingle its essence in yours. At the last minute you can awaken and save yourself but the Byzantium you now see is not simply a city, it is part of your being. In this sense, Nemet-Nejat’s selections and translations function as a map into regions that the visitor burdened with a western sense of superiority has never before ventured into. Close your eyes the Eda poets say, sleep until a raucous music breaks you and then molds you into something you never knew you could be before. This is what Brodsky never even contemplated during his visit to Istanbul. The poet’s pre-conceived notion of the Second Rome, that home to Seraglios and Harems and all manner of decadence, remains, throughout the essay, just that: a pre-conceived notion that the scars of poverty and underdevelopment just served to strengthen. ‘That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban’. (13) The modern Turkish poets wrap themselves up in the smell in order to see where it might take them, Brodsky curls up his nose and moves on, untransformed.
The refrain that nothing happens in Byzantium, that it is a dead site, a place that history has abandoned rings through Brodsky’s essay. Nothing of note happens here he says over and over again. One can’t help feel saddened that this erudite poet and lover of the poetry of Cavafy had no access to the poetry of Ece Ayhan. For in the selections of his work translated in Eda we witness a poet bringing the suppressed histories of Istanbul’s gay communities and criminal underworld and that of the unwanted ethnic minorities, the Greeks, Armenians and Jews into the light. As Nemet-Nejat says Ayhan’s work is “full of the burden of this revelation, simultaneously hiding and revealing, a revelation in the process of occurring” (14) This occurrence is history itself, it is the city in all its depth and darkness moving towards a newer conception of itself. In the poetry of Eda inertia is impossible. Ayhan sees himself as:
‘emerging out of reluctant infinitudes, crossing the threshold
wiping my shoes on the stoop, hatless’ (15)
There is a threshold to be crossed and fresh histories to be evolved. The poet bares his head, wipes his shoes and opens his verse to all that has been sidelined. For Brodsky the people who throng the Istanbul streets are deeply alien though somewhat picturesque: ‘As everywhere in the East, there are vast numbers of shoeshiners here of all ages, with their exquisite brassbound boxes housing their kit of boot creams in round, thinnest-of-copper containers with cupola lids’ (14) attempt is made to view the shoe-shine boys as individuals, as people worthy of a story or history. They remain an object of curiosity and pity. Ece Ayhan, cap in hand, scratches under the surface and steps into a new city, one full of troubling voice and suppressed song:
‘Lost in an Istanbul replete with Saturdays, you are imaging these songs
marching on the side of the union of prostitutes hiding from the republican reforms
really, you are not Turkish, but I can’t quite remember
if you aren’t, why are you a singer belting a song
on Pilar’s gun burnt ass during popular sweet matinees?’ (16)
It seems the shoe-shine boys might not even be Turkish, those eastern faces that clog up “Flight to Byzantium” might be Jewish, Greek or Armenian. They might be Kurds newly arrived in the city bring a forbidden language in their suitcase. They might be running from Atatürk’s reforms seeking an alternative way to exist in a country bent on nationalism, they might be gay, daring to express their love only in darkened cinemas as they sing the songs they learnt in school. Whatever the case they are participants in a history that is still moving, still shifting shape. None would see the city they live in as a place outside time, a place that didn’t mean very much.
‘let us not cry, a tree full of songs
think of us, of children ıf al-Qazar without weeping, a thrush of songs’ (17)
Perhaps the most notable achievement of Eda is to bring together ‘a tree full of songs’ and have them sing in raucous (dis)union. We are here, the voices say, and we will no longer be ignored.
“A normal hot, dusty, perspiring summer day in Istanbul. Moreover, it is Sunday. A human herd loitering about under the vaults of the Hagia Sophia”. (18) Much has been made of Eda and Murat Nemet-Nejat’s approach to translation since the book came out in 2004. Less, however, has been made of the fact that Eda is, among other things, a site where a hitherto ignored poetry takes, in the form of a single volume, center stage and proclaims its uniqueness and importance. And it does this, not as some branch of exotic regional studies or samples of anthropology to be poured over in the classroom, but as living poetry, the kind that protestors scrawl on walls and streets during the many moments of strife that modern Turkey experiences. Brodsky’s nameless human herd is given a gallery of faces and voices and allowed to speak for themselves. No longer are they surly semi-human types that sell foreign poets tea for less than a penny, they are poets deeply wrapped up in the history and character of the city they live in. It seems to me that one of the hidden aims of the Eda project was to counter views like that of Brodsky’s (and while it might seem I have been harsh on him and that some of what he said was uttered tongue-in-cheek he was very aware that what he was writing was close to a form of racism. In his own words: Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy? (19) by offering a selection of some of the best Turkish poetry of the past century in a series of radical translations accompanied by essays that that teased out the nature of its poetics. In this sense one cannot help but see Eda as a flight to Byzantium, a place from where the despised ‘herd’ writes back.
References
- Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (London: Penguin, 1987) p.341
- Ibid p. 342
- Necmi Zekâ, A prisoner of language: The strange case of modern Turkish poetry, The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3, Spring/Summer 2003
- Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (London: Penguin, 1987) p.358
- Ibid. p353
- Ibid. p.359
- Ibid. p. 349
- Victoria Rowe Holbrook, The Unreadable Shores of Love (Austen: University of Texas Press, 1994)
- Murat Nemet-Nejat (ed./trans.), Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Jersey City: Talisman House, Publishers) p.4
- Ibid. p.75
- Ibid. p.138
- Ibid p.212
- Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (London: Penguin, 1987) p.3
- Ibid. p.14
- Ibid. p. 169
- Ibid. 174
- Ibid p.175
- Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (London: Penguin, 1987) p.351
- Ibid. p.351