Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Accentuation, Reference and Referent: A Few Thoughts on Murat Nemet-Nejat’s Poetics
The poetry of Murat Nemet-Nejat is dynamic, associative and linguistically complex. Words collide with words, and often with worlds, attenuative signs have multiple signifiers; history, literature, film and personal experience form an intricate weave in which the weft knots the warp, and vice versa. For a good many years I have been utterly enthralled with Nemet-Nejat’s ability to push narrative and ideation to the limits. This little essay is not an attempt to explain what the poet is doing; rather it seeks to explain how the poet does what he does by examining the system by which he creates his richly textured poetics.
A good place to start is with Nemet-Nejat’s own comment on language:
Accent in writing has little to do with explicit theme or semantic context; it rather has to do with texture, structure, the scratches, distortions,
painful gaps (in rhythms, syntax, diction, etc.) caused by the alien relationship between the writer and his/her adopted language. Accent is
cracks (many unconscious, the way a speaker is unaware of his or her accent when speaking, does not have to create it) on the transparent
surface.”1
This seems to me a way into understanding Nemet-Nejat’s poetics: a poetics of disjunction which because of its very nuanced series of “texture, structure, scratches, distortions and painful gaps” creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The referent is the reference. The reference, at times, is also the referent
In Animals of Dawn 2, for instance, the ostensible reference is Hamlet. But Hamlet is also the referent that links a myriad of concerns in which Sense and Non-Sense converge. Opposites, in fact, attract. Tautologies can express truth. Appearances have an existence within disappearances; radical erasures, substitutions, subtractions and additions confuse the very discourse itself but also yield startling new possibilities for understanding how words can be seen and felt and intuited. Reality and unreality mingle, take bows together on a shape-shifting stage. The result is a new way of reading, of perceiving how language, itself, is the major player that can catch even the king. Or as Wittgenstein so perfectly put it: “The world is all that is the case.”3
In The Spiritual Life of Replicants4 a similar signifying apparatus is at work in the fragmentary assemblage of scenes and internal commentaries. Blade Runner is both reference and referent. As reference it acts as the linking designator to the film; as referent, it denotes, through associative conjuring, a host of other possibilities which the I (eye) sees. At times, the denotation resembles a black hole in which a periphery is continually changing as it gets sucked into the inner poetic mass. The effect is that of disorientation, where edges are blurred, where distinctions between the actual and the imagined, the referenced referent and referring reference become, at times, impossible to decipher. Or as Nemet-Nejat writes: “Poetry is ants crawling on the spine of my soul.”
The poet takes a somewhat different approach to referencing in Io’s Song.5 Io is, quite naturally, the reference but the referents and references are multiple, beginning with the poet himself (the origo), who injects himself into the discourse, thus functioning as both author and reference. This device, in turn, produces a dazzling array of referents. Indeed, like Prometheus, who gave Io hope of re-transformation, Nemet-Nejat, through his expansive associations which include Greek mythology and writers such as Ben Hollander, Holderin, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Seyhan Erözçelik, Walter Benjamin and so many others, pushes referents and referencing into a disjunctive but nonetheless cohesive narrative. Additionally, the typographical shifts reinforce this multiplicity of characters, story and concern, echoing the leaps from form to form. The ear must keep traveling to decipher the accentuation, the eye keeps alighting on one possibility of meaning, and then another and another. In the end, the retelling and the telling create bursts of energy that self-referentially fuse together the multiplicity of meanings and ways of reading. It is a masterful manipulation of referencing and referring.
What unites all three of these major books is Nemet-Nejat’s ability to use fragmentary discourse as a way of referencing and referring. Layers peel away only to reveal new layers. The experience is not so unlike what happens when a true translator, such as Nemet-Nejat, undertakes the task of unravelling one idiom so that it can be rewoven into another. His years of translation have assisted him in understanding how to make the language of poetry breathe anew.
References
The poetry of Murat Nemet-Nejat is dynamic, associative and linguistically complex. Words collide with words, and often with worlds, attenuative signs have multiple signifiers; history, literature, film and personal experience form an intricate weave in which the weft knots the warp, and vice versa. For a good many years I have been utterly enthralled with Nemet-Nejat’s ability to push narrative and ideation to the limits. This little essay is not an attempt to explain what the poet is doing; rather it seeks to explain how the poet does what he does by examining the system by which he creates his richly textured poetics.
A good place to start is with Nemet-Nejat’s own comment on language:
Accent in writing has little to do with explicit theme or semantic context; it rather has to do with texture, structure, the scratches, distortions,
painful gaps (in rhythms, syntax, diction, etc.) caused by the alien relationship between the writer and his/her adopted language. Accent is
cracks (many unconscious, the way a speaker is unaware of his or her accent when speaking, does not have to create it) on the transparent
surface.”1
This seems to me a way into understanding Nemet-Nejat’s poetics: a poetics of disjunction which because of its very nuanced series of “texture, structure, scratches, distortions and painful gaps” creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The referent is the reference. The reference, at times, is also the referent
In Animals of Dawn 2, for instance, the ostensible reference is Hamlet. But Hamlet is also the referent that links a myriad of concerns in which Sense and Non-Sense converge. Opposites, in fact, attract. Tautologies can express truth. Appearances have an existence within disappearances; radical erasures, substitutions, subtractions and additions confuse the very discourse itself but also yield startling new possibilities for understanding how words can be seen and felt and intuited. Reality and unreality mingle, take bows together on a shape-shifting stage. The result is a new way of reading, of perceiving how language, itself, is the major player that can catch even the king. Or as Wittgenstein so perfectly put it: “The world is all that is the case.”3
In The Spiritual Life of Replicants4 a similar signifying apparatus is at work in the fragmentary assemblage of scenes and internal commentaries. Blade Runner is both reference and referent. As reference it acts as the linking designator to the film; as referent, it denotes, through associative conjuring, a host of other possibilities which the I (eye) sees. At times, the denotation resembles a black hole in which a periphery is continually changing as it gets sucked into the inner poetic mass. The effect is that of disorientation, where edges are blurred, where distinctions between the actual and the imagined, the referenced referent and referring reference become, at times, impossible to decipher. Or as Nemet-Nejat writes: “Poetry is ants crawling on the spine of my soul.”
The poet takes a somewhat different approach to referencing in Io’s Song.5 Io is, quite naturally, the reference but the referents and references are multiple, beginning with the poet himself (the origo), who injects himself into the discourse, thus functioning as both author and reference. This device, in turn, produces a dazzling array of referents. Indeed, like Prometheus, who gave Io hope of re-transformation, Nemet-Nejat, through his expansive associations which include Greek mythology and writers such as Ben Hollander, Holderin, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Seyhan Erözçelik, Walter Benjamin and so many others, pushes referents and referencing into a disjunctive but nonetheless cohesive narrative. Additionally, the typographical shifts reinforce this multiplicity of characters, story and concern, echoing the leaps from form to form. The ear must keep traveling to decipher the accentuation, the eye keeps alighting on one possibility of meaning, and then another and another. In the end, the retelling and the telling create bursts of energy that self-referentially fuse together the multiplicity of meanings and ways of reading. It is a masterful manipulation of referencing and referring.
What unites all three of these major books is Nemet-Nejat’s ability to use fragmentary discourse as a way of referencing and referring. Layers peel away only to reveal new layers. The experience is not so unlike what happens when a true translator, such as Nemet-Nejat, undertakes the task of unravelling one idiom so that it can be rewoven into another. His years of translation have assisted him in understanding how to make the language of poetry breathe anew.
References
- https://jacket2.org/commentary/murat-nemet-nejat-questions-accent-what-then-accented-writing
- Animals of Dawn, Talisman House, 2016.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1)
- The Spiritual Life of Replicants, Talisman House, 2011.
- Io’s Song, Chax Press, 2020.