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Tag: turkish literature

  • The Greatest Turkish Novel?

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    I belong to a generation that often measures the success of authors not by their literary achievements but by their political stance. Since my school days, I saw how the artistic sins of a writer could be readily forgiven as long as the author in question had progressive views. After all, we believed, it was their politics, rather than their artistic talents, that mattered most. This category mistake is still made today. When my friends ask me to name the best contemporary author in Turkey, I sense their actual question is: “Which Turkish contemporary author has the views you accept/like the most?

    So imagine the surprise when my generation of young Turks discovered the works of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, an author who had made a mockery of the idea of progress in his comic novels and who had found little to like in the culture of modernity. For Tanpınar, this dissatisfaction was the starting point of a number of books which fed on the discrepancy between the traditional and the modern.

    Tanpınar is not an easy writer. Reading The Time Regulation Institute (translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe in a handsome edition by Penguin Classics) provides ample evidence of that. This comic novel features the adventures of a group of ‘institution men’, who, heroically and absurdly, try to synchronise all the clocks of Turkey. The result is a challenging and hilarious read and, for me, perhaps the best Turkish novel of the 20th century alongside Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book.

    Tanpınar’s language is rich with Turkish, French and Ottoman words. The narrators in his books are carefully planned and richly imagined by a novelist, rather than an ideologue. Tanpınar excels at parody, psychological realism and dramatic irony. He is also a poet, but most critics believe that his prose is much superior to his verse.

    Tanpınar’s grammar is nothing like the proper, neat Turkish grammar taught at school. Unlike his contemporary Turkish social-realists, for whom language was merely a tool with which to educate the ‘ignorant masses’, Tanpınar’s prose is impressionistic and musical. It glows and echoes, and one never quite forgets the strange taste of his sentences after reading them.

    He has no patience for the kind of reader who has no patience with the complexities of history and culture. His books are a living challenge to the cultural policies of the modern Turkish state, which has long demanded that writers use language ideologically and for political ends. Tanpınar’s other major novel, A Mind at Peace (also available in English), provided an antidote to the soulless ‘modern’ novels taught to us in academic curricula. In those ideological novels, an eternal and clichéd struggle takes place between preachers and adversaries of modernity. In Tanpınar’s novels things are a bit more complicated. The spiritual characters are cherished rather than demonised. He carefully handles fragile traditions rather than breaking them into pieces.  

    Belittled in his time for his unfashionable intellectual interests, Tanpınar was called Kırtıpil (shoddy) Hamdi by the cultural elite and earned himself a rather tragic image. He came to be seen as a sort of sacred but forgotten figure because of his acute interest in tradition. New studies on Tanpınar and his recently published memoirs (Günlüklerin Işığında Tanpınar’la Başbaşa, 2007) challenge that tragic image. Not only a brilliant author, but also an energetic politician and a member of the establishment, he served in parliament during the single party era and never stood on the sidelines. His critique of modernity owes most of its insights to the fact that he had been a servant of its institutions.

    In my school years, when Tanpınar quickly rose to academic and literary hipness, it was increasingly the norm, rather than the exception, to question the process of modernisation. Modernity’s obsession with progress and efficiency had been largely embraced by the earlier generation of authors who treated them like sacred objects. For Tanpınar, a break with history and tradition was not a cause for celebration. On the contrary, that rupture provided him with a sense of duty about the importance of recollecting the past. I first read his works in black-covered Yapı Kredi editions where he was in good company. The same publishing house published the first complete Turkish translation of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

    Like Proust, and Pamuk, Tanpınar opens doors to other books and ideas. I am curious about what thousands of new readers (some of whom must have first heard his name on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club where the Institute was recently recommended) will make of him. I think Tanpınar’s crowning success was that, unlike his progressive or conservative contemporaries, no political organisation or school can claim him today. Perhaps the only institute he can be a member of is his own Institute of Time Regulation.

    Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. His work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the London Review of Books blog, Salon, Guernica Magazine, Sight & Sound, the Millions, the White Review, the New Inquiry, The Rumpus, Index on Censorship, the Guardian Weekly, HTMLGIANT, Songlines, and Pank. L’Avventura (Macera), his first novel, was published in 2008. He is the Istanbul correspondent of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

    You can follow Kaya Genç on Twittter.

    For more on Kaya Genç and his writing visit his website.

    Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar was a beloved Turkish novelist and essayist and a member of Turkish parliament. Born in Istanbul in 1901, Tanpinar came to be educated in several Turkish cities and and travelled widely throughout Europe. The Time Regulation Institute is his most celebrated novel, followed by A Mind at Peace.

    The Time Regulation Institute, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, is available from Penguin Classics.

  • PEN Atlas: literary dispatches from Turkey

    Maureen Freely introduces an exclusive new e-book from PEN Atlas
    , collecting some of the best dispatches from Turkey, at a moment when the country is in the midst of great changes, both political and literary

    There was a time, and it was not very long ago, when even our best-informed and most outward-looking readers could not name a single Turkish writer. In 2004, when Orhan Pamuk achieved quite sudden world fame with his sixth novel (his fourth to be translated into English), more than a few of his reviewers expressed astonishment that a country ‘like that’ could produce a writer of his sophistication. His subsequent prosecution for insulting Turkishness only served to encourage the belief that he must be an aberration, owing nothing to the cultural void from which the knights of world literature had rescued him. This illusion was disrupted by the arrival of Elif Shafak who, though writing in a very different vein, with very different takes on religion, feminism, and indeed literature, was just as good at taking stories rooted in Turkey to world audiences.That and the growing popularity of Turkey as a holiday destination made readers more curious.  The number of Turkish authors being translated into English went from 11 in the last decade of the last century to 41 in the first decade of this one, and 25 in the last three years alone.In the past year, more than 20 Turkish writers have come to this island to launch or speak about their work. Most came under the auspices of the British Council, working in conjunction with the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the London Book Fair, English PEN, and other dedicated partners. There were more than 30 events in 15 venues across 4 UK cities. Most were about literature, not politics, though politics is never far away in the lives and works of Turkish writers. For those who wished to engage more deeply with such questions, there was a roundtable on freedom of expression hosted by English PEN at which a diverse group of Turkish novelists, poets, publishers, and journalists met an equally diverse group of London-based novelists, lawyers, and activists.At this and the many other events I attended, either as a participant or a member of a standing-room only audience, there was one question that kept coming back. Why has it taken the English-speaking world so long to notice Turkey? There is, of course, no single answer. You might say that – especially since the end of the Second World War – it has been very hard to read. Like many of the new nations in the Cold War era, it was economically weak, but it never had to liberate itself from an empire. Before becoming a republic, it was an empire. It was also, officially, a democracy, but with a military that was not shy to step in and shut it down whenever it deemed necessary. It was staunchly anti-Communist, and staunchly authoritarian. It is still authoritarian, except that now the enforcers are not secularists but Islamists.In Turkey today, as in Turkey yesterday, you pick up a pen at your own risk. Though the tradition of speaking truth to power is old and rich, the conversation was until very recently constrained, even kettled. The penal code is still full of laws that can send writers to prison. The new anti-terror laws and the expanding definitions of terrorism now allow for the indefinite detention of writers viewed as dangerous. But that has not silenced Turkey’s dissenting writers, who continue to speak out for democratic change with ever greater ingenuity, imagination, and force.During the recent Gezi protests, the Turkish mainstream media stayed at home. The media moguls were too deeply involved in the ruling party’s development deals to risk angering an increasingly autocratic prime minister. It was the social media that kept the protesters in touch, and (thanks to the efforts of a spontaneous army of Twitter translators) it connected them with the outside world as never before.So today we are publishing an e-book containing our first collection of dispatches, commissioned and posted by PEN Atlas over the past year. Some come from writers who have already seen their books published in English; some are appearing in English for the first time. Some have been translated; some were composed in English. Quite a few were written from the heat of the Gezi protests; others offer quiet reflections, mining the past, or imagining the future. All are open letters, inviting us to write back.From Mario Levi and Hakan Gunday to Kaya Genc and Ayfer Tunc, this collection offers many riches and insights and invites you to read further.About the authorMaureen Freely is the author of seven novels (Mother’s Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca, Enlightenment and – most recently – Sailing through Byzantium) as well as three works of non-fiction (Pandora’s Clock, What About Us? An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot, and The Parent Trap). The translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours and The Museum of Innocence), she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She also works with campaigns aiming to promote world literature in English translation. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. 

  • Living by the pen

    What is the cost of going on the payroll for a writer in Turkey? Kaya Genç weighs up the rewards and risks of working for a major paper, the trade-off between authorial freedom and institutional backing, and his simple solution for protecting free speech In April 2007 I was forced to make a decision which seemed important to me at the time.I was trying to make up my mind about whether I should work full time at Newsweek magazine’s Turkish edition. My attempts at convincing the magazine’s editor that I would be more valuable if I worked freelance had failed. His offer was a full time job. ‘I am not interested in hiring a freelancer, I want to pay you a proper wage,’ he said, clarifying his position. This would have been an easy choice had money been my sole concern. It was not. I cared for what I used to think at the time as my ‘authorial freedom’ and this was why I wanted to work as a freelancer.Write for Newsweek, earn money, buy time, and finish your novel, my inner voice said.But the editor reminded me that the category of freelance writers simply didn’t exist in Turkey. Freelance writers couldn’t earn enough money to pay their rent. They were not taken as seriously as their formally employed colleagues. If you wanted respect you needed to become part of your publication’s institutional structure. Simply feeding it from the sidelines wouldn’t do.You were either with them in the office getting paid, or against them in your living room not getting paid. With a handful of notable exceptions, the individual writer devoid of any institutional affiliations didn’t really exist in Turkey.So I reconsidered the situation and my decision became a no-brainer. I accepted the offer, moved into the office and started working.Only a few days had passed behind my new desk before I got a call from the editor of a Turkish literary magazine where I had been publishing essays and short stories for the past few years. The magazine had come to symbolise my pre-Newsweek existence. It paid its contributors little but provided them with a valued literary space.When I received the call that day I wondered whether the editor would ask for a new contribution or inform me about a fan letter.It turned out to be quite a different matter.’The state prosecutor has received a complaint about one of your short stories,’ he informed me in a nervous voice. ‘We went to a preliminary meeting with the prosecutor yesterday. You’ll need to visit him first thing tomorrow. This is serious business, Kaya. The plaintiff wants you to be tried in court.’In 2007 a political court case could very easily become a death warrant. Only a few months had passed since the assassination of Hrant Dink, an independent, Armenian journalist who was murdered by a gang of ultra-secular nationalists in central Istanbul after receiving a prison sentence. His assailants believed that Dink’s views were treacherous and decided to silence him.Dink was part of a group of writers whom the mainstream media had dubbed variously as ‘liberals‘, ‘renegades’ or ‘traitors’. At the time I couldn’t see the curious bond connecting all those authors. They were independent; writers who couldn’t rely on big institutions to protect them. They worked as editors or publishers or academics or columnists but in spirit they were all freelance.They were different from intellectuals who were closely affiliated with powerful institutions. When a writer from the latter group wrote an inflammatory piece about, say, the customs of Turkey’s Kurds, his newspaper would immediately pay the legal costs of the libel case that followed. In Turkish we define their situation with the expression, arkası sağlam, which means you’re well-connected: powerful people have your back. Because they were arkası sağlam people, those nationalist columnists could continue penning their articles without having to worry about their future.But if you were a freelancer with no real connection to a major institution and no wings to protect you, you would be made to pay the legal costs on your own. This was a nice tactic which served to destabilise the financial positions of freelancers, and keep them silent. In this country when a group of institutionalised intellectuals want to dominate the political discourse, the first thing they try to get rid of is the independent writer. This had long been the case: in 1932 after the launch of a magazine called Kadro (‘Cadre’), Turkey’s free thinkers were employed by the state. Their new status as defenders of the state apparatus and its reforms changed not only their intellectual careers but also that of Turkey’s left.By accepting Newsweek’s offer I felt as if I, too, had become an institutionalised intellectual. My independent wings had been severed. The freedom they had provided was no more. Of course, the severing had its advantages, too. My editor reassured me that the magazine would stand by me if a court case was indeed opened.This was good news. If the Turkish state decided to come after me, a news magazine would protect me. I took the dummy issue of the magazine, which had my name printed on one of its pages and headed to the offices of the state prosecutor. There I had the very unpleasant experience of having to defend a fictional story.The narrator of my story spoke ironically and so only the complete opposite of what he said could be attributed to me, I explained. My explanation was as curious as the situation that demanded it. The narrator of my story was an occidentialist who adored western civilisation beyond all measure. I said I was making fun of him by way of using him as my narrator. His voice was designed to outrage the reader. That someone had filed a complaint was proof of the story’s success.And, after all, wasn’t it a work of fiction? What the characters said represented their views, not mine.What the characters said in this particular story was intended to be ironic. My pontifications about the meaning of irony and its rhetorical use seemed to have convinced the prosecutor. He seemed to accept that I was simply a well-meaning young man who had been gravely misunderstood. As I left his office I felt as if I had talked shop with a literature professor rather than defended myself before a state prosecutor.A week passed.No word from the prosecutor.On Monday I learned that the prosecutor decided against opening a case. I felt relieved and yet I couldn’t really tell whether it was my rhetorical skills that had saved me from the wrath of the law. I sensed that something else might have played a role. As I thought more about the matter I became convinced that had I not brought along the copy of Newsweek which bore my name and that of the Washington Post company on its pages, the result might have been different. So the moral to draw from this episode was quite clear. I had been saved thanks to  my decision to stop freelancing.

    * * *

    In countries like Turkey where the literary market offers you only a flimsy hope of living by your pen, being a professional author places you in a very curious position. The road to authorship, when you first enter it, feels like a dead end. Nobody seems to dream, let alone seriously consider, that making a living by one’s pen can become a person’s goal in life.  Consider, for example, how my generation of prospective Turkish writers had the traumatic experience of witnessing the older generation of authors being tried and then killed in broad daylight. Consider how we witnessed their fate as the Turkish state and ultra-secular nationalists came after them and bullied them and threatened them and forced them to flee their country and live in exile in fear of their lives.Consider how we witnessed them being bullied by political columnists who in desperate attempts to control them and force them into changing their views leaked details of their personal lives. I still remember how a newspaper columnist questioned a leading novelist’s sales figures, claiming that it was impossible for such an author to make a living by his pen: the implication was that the novelist’s popularity was a fabrication and that he was in pay of some shadowy institution in a western country.This was the lesson we were forced to learn: being an individual voice in this country would have the automatic result of labeling you as a traitor, a greedy liberal, an enemy of the holy state. Become anonymous and pen nasty articles about free thinking intellectuals, a voice seemed to tell us, destroy the reputations of those who dare start literary careers under their real names. The same voice said that the honourable craft of literature belonged to those who devoted their labours to national leaders or ideals or symbols without asking anything in return. Devotion and duty were the things that really mattered. Literature was a calling, writing was a duty, speaking the national tongue was an obligation. Why did we even ask to be paid for those patriotic acts?Selling your work to editors and publishers also had the sinister implication that words could be exchanged, that they had material value, that they could be used for something other than propaganda.Tragically, the first generation of republican authors accepted these views willingly. But things didn’t change much by the time I made my way into Turkey’s literary market. When people attempted to make a living writing essays and reviews following a path well-trodden by many in London and in New York, they were immediately branded as hacks or suspicious figures who paid too much attention to materialistic, instead of idealistic values.Again, the implication of this bullying was clear. The writing business belonged and should continue to belong to the wealthy —to those who never needed money. The elite had the right to write and speak; others were silenced through this moralistic mirror in which they were portrayed as greedy and decadent figures.There is no better way of showing your gratitude and appreciation for a writer’s work than paying them properly. For more than ninety years of republican history Turkish freelancers had been silenced either by state institutions which employed them or by the lack of a proper literary market. But as I look around and try to see how other authors from my generation are doing nowadays, I see how they no longer share the old state ideas which make freelance authors suspect in the eyes of the intellectual community. On the contrary, they are increasingly joining the ranks of independent writers. I know, from experience, that it won’t be state patronage or employment by special institutions that will save them from the cold realities of pessimism, poverty and prosecution. No, don’t make them part of the state apparatus or turn them into ideologues or employ them as editors: if you want those writers to succeed, just pay them. This is an edited version of Kaya Genç’s speech delivered for the International Authors Forum which met in Istanbul on 1st November 2013. The International Authors Forum is a forum for discussion, debate and collective action between authors’ organisations worldwide. Its focus is on protecting authors and ensuring that legislation, particularly in the area of copyright and related rights, enables authors to be paid fairly for the use of their work.  About the authorKaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. His work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the London Review of Books blog, Salon, Guernica Magazine, Sight & Sound, the Millions, the White Review, the New Inquiry, the English PEN Atlas, the Rumpus, Index on Censorship, the Guardian Weekly, HTMLGIANT, Songlines, and Pank, among others. L’Avventura (Macera), his first novel, was published in 2008. Kaya has a PhD in English literature. He is the Istanbul correspondent of the Los Angeles Review of Books and is currently working on his second novel.

    Additional Information

    You can follow Kaya Genç on Twittter.

    For more on Kaya Genç and his writing visit his website.

  • The Silk Road

    In the run-up to London Book Fair 2013, for which Turkey is the market focus, Murathan Mungan writes for PEN Atlas about how East and West view each other, what Henry James could have learnt from Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil and the building of a new Tower of Babel

    When talking about Turkey and Turkish literature, I’m going to have to evoke a few commonly used metaphors. For a long time, it’s been the case that when the topic of Turkey is under discussion, it’s spoken of as the bridge between the worlds of the East and the West. However fed up we are with this cliché, of course it’s true that we are at the geographical juncture of Europe and Asia, and it’s important to bear in mind that we are a country built on the rich cultural heritage of a 600-year empire, which once spread across three continents and encompassed an array of different languages, religions, peoples, cultures and traditions.

    The second of the metaphors I’d like to put to use is a tower: the Tower of Babel. According to the ancient myth, as you well know, all humanity once spoke a common tongue. With the destruction of the Tower of Babel, this shared understanding collapsed as different languages, cultures, and beliefs were spun off into different corners of the earth. Everyone has become incapable of understanding one another. Everyone is now somebody else’s Other. All of the ruptures of communication between people and peoples, all kinds of discord, can be traced at source to the tale of the destruction of the Tower of Babel. I would like to describe contemporary international book fairs as another construction similar to this Babel metaphor; I see them as effort to recreate a common mission, a common heritage for humanity.

    Of course, book fairs are not only a meeting place for literature. But I’d like to put literature at the forefront for a moment and venture this: that insofar as literature is the art of knowing ourselves, it is also the art of knowing the other. However much it seems that a writer is telling the story of their own geography and own people, their work still opens up an arena for others to find themselves and their own narratives within it. Anywhere in the world, divisive politics and ideologies can emphasise the differences between people, and bring their misunderstandings to the forefront. They try to keep people in a certain position within a hierarchy. Whereas, literature and art, which share the same human values, bring out our similarities, reminding us that we are all children of the same Tower.

    It is not just stories that travel from person to person and from nation to nation but also the ways of telling them. What makes us citizens of the World is our power to know and embrace others.

    I’d also like to talk about the differences in the mutual regard of the worlds of East and West. For those of us who look atthe West, we appear to display many of the traits that belong to it. I’m of the opinion that unfortunately those who look back at us from that perspective don’t really see very much at all. A good example of what I’m trying to say is the fact that two out of every three books that are translated from Turkish must have either a mosque or the figure of a veiled woman on the cover. Cinematic scenes of Turkey in which men walk around in fezzes are another subject altogether. You can elaborate on these examples with your own. When we read a book by a Western author today, as readers and writers from Turkey, we can more or less place them in the cultural and literary tradition that belongs to them; we know that an English person knows something of a German or French writer’s forebears. But when the Western world encounters the work of a writer from, let’s say, Turkey, they know hardly anything of that writer’s literary traditions.

    They know nothing of the old masters who cast their shadows over the writer’s pen. They don’t know the colours and variety of our literature. Take a modern English writer, for example. We can closely follow their story, having devoured several of their previous books. Whereas the Western World can still only name perhaps one or two writers from Turkey. If only we could be on the same page, or at least read over one another’s shoulders we could understand each other more. I wish, for example, that Henry James could have known of Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, who is considered the creator of the Turkish novel. I wish that Tanpınar could have been read by Forster, Bilge Karasu by Iris Murdoch, Sait Faik by Lawrence Durrell, Nahit Sırrı Örik by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sevim Burak by Jeanette Winterson. I could name names from Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar to Oğuz Atay. And I’m not even mentioning the poets. Turkish poetry doesn’t only consist of Nazim Hikmet. I can say with pride that we have world class poets, but poetry having a language of its own renders translation somewhat more complicated.

    As far as I can see and understand, Western publishing rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture has, despite spreading all over the World, closed in on itself at the same time. Looking at the statistics on translated works can give you an idea of what I’m talking about. The things you cook in your own kitchen can sustain you so you may not feel the need to open yourself up to the world. But without sampling the different meals and flavours every now and again, you don’t have a very exotic kitchen. We can assume that in many countries around the world, books of universally high standards are being written. Another issue is that for the books of both large and small countries from around the world, achieving translation and publication relies on receiving a seal of approval from Western centres. They’re not free to make their own discoveries. For example, if a Norwegian or Spanish or Japanese or Egyptian writer is to encounter a Turkish writer, that writer has to have already been encountered by the West. In the end, this situation creates a vicious cycle. Since they look out at the world in order to find original material, what they are bound to find is not the world staring back at them but their own reflections in the mirror. Instead of seeking anomalies or eccentricities from the around the world, the epicentres of Anglo-Saxon culture seek only those works that fit into their own literary currents and trends. They seek works that have been designed to safeguard an understanding of the universe with the West at its centre. And I don’t even want to enter into a discussion of the Orientalist nature of readers’ expectations. I hope that my putting so much emphasis on the West hasn’t led you to believe that I think the West is the centre of the whole world. It’s precisely that view that these fairs are designed to deconstruct, wherever they are taking place. I see them as an opportunity to draw the world together in some sense, and to refract some of its differences.

    Today in Turkey, as in much of the world, one of the most basic preconditions to the possibility of literary creation is freedom of thought and expression. The pressures on freedom of speech and thought aren’t the internal issue of just one country; these things aren’t at the disposal of just one nation’s leaders. Freedom of expression is a problem for the world and for humanity. There was a military coup every ten years throughout my childhood and youth: my country experienced a coup when I was 5, when I was 15, and when I was 25. Books were rounded up, banned and burnt. The book was an object of guilt and fear. Many writers from the generation before me were thrown into prison, tortured, and maimed. They were killed like Sabahattin Ali, or forced out like Nazim Hikmet. They all have a part in our being able to say any of these things today. We took a difficult path to get here. And what’s worse is that we’re not yet at the end of it. Instead of suppressing internal differences,  and effacing all variety, if we were to embrace everyone with genuine warmth the world would be a much more liveable place. So instead of protecting ourselves in whichever corner of the earth we are scattered, if we are all to make progress towards a new Tower of Babel, we need each other’s books, languages and stories. 

    About the Author

    Murathan Mungan was born in 1955 in Istanbul. He worked for the State Theatre as a dramaturge then Arts and Culture Editor for the daily Soz newspaper. He then became a full time writer and has been living in Istanbul since 1988.He has written over fifteen poetry books, among them Osmanlıya Dair Hikâyat (Stories on the Ottomans), and Metal and Yaz Geçer (Summer Too Passes) which has attained the status of a cult book due to its enduring popularity. A selection of his poems were translated and published in Kurdish as Li Rojhilatê Dilê Min (In the East of my Heart). His latest publications in Turkish are Kâğıt Taş Kumaş (Paper Stone Fabric) a play in three parts; Büyümenin Türkçe Tarihi (The History of Growing Up in Turkish), a volume of short stories from the history of modern Turkish literature.

    About the Translator

    izzy finkelIzzy Finkel is a writer and translator based between London and Istanbul. She co-edits BÜLENT, a quarterly journal which aims to foster new ways of thinking and writing about Turkey

     

     

    Additional Information

    Murathan Mungan will be  in conversation with Maureen Freely at London Book Fair on 16th Apr 2013, 14:30 – 15:30 at the English PEN Literary Café.

    Murathan will be in conversation with acclaimed writer Moris Farhi and translator Ruth Christie, for the event ‘Insanbul: Writing from a Cosmopolitan Perspective‘, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, on 17th April 2013, 18.00-20.00. 

    He will also be appearing at the ‘Writing Turkey’ event at the Arcola Theatre, 18th April 2013, 19.00.

  • What is Official? Turkish writing, from state discourse to civil literature

    As part of our ongoing series of PEN Atlas dispatches from Turkey, Kaya Genç describes the struggle for the soul of his country’s literature between state officials and independent creative writers

    During my teenage years I was strongly opposed to Turkish literature. The reason behind my dissent was that the books we were assigned to read in secondary and high school literature classes belonged to a particular branch of literature which I can today describe as official state discourse. In those classes there was almost no reference to great humorists of the Middle Ages, like Nasreddin Hoca, nor were we acquainted with the works of Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi, the influential mystic and poet. We didn’t know much about Divan poetry, the elaborately composed verse poems that existed for almost half a millennium, and great folkloric poets like Yunus Emre were not properly studied. Instead what we had were the founding texts of a particular ideology which I found boring and out of touch with the reality around me. It was sometime later, in the final years of high school that I discovered that a very different kind of literature had also existed in Turkey’s culture, however suppressed and exiled to margins. This is what I came to see as my country’s genuine, civil literature.

    The official literature was produced by a particular generation of writers whose backgrounds were often quite similar. Here I am thinking of writers like Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, Namık Kemal and Tevfik Fikret: all of them well-educated, influential, prolific men with successful careers as state officials during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. Among those it was Kemal and Fikret who worked at a place called the Translation Bureau and who were the most influential. The Bureau was part (and arguably the core) of the Ottoman ministry of foreign affairs. It was there, while working in a professional capacity as state translators and clerks that those authors discovered the political power of the written word and the prestige of possessing western knowledge. Knowledge was power and thanks to their foreign language skills they were well placed to make use of it in their efforts to give shape to Ottoman society. Literature became for them a tool which helped mediate and spread their political beliefs.

    The shadow of the so-called Regulation Period, where the Ottoman Empire underwent a period of modernization, fell heavily on their works. Widely known as Tanzimat, this era introduced policies of centralisation and a new imperial identity (Ottomanism) to a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population. The same period saw the introduction of uniforms, the modernisation of the army, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the strengthening of individual and property rights.

    Some intellectuals found grave faults with those reforms. Ahmet Mithat’s Felatun Bey ve Rakım Efendi (1875) and Recaizede Mahmud Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (1898) were, in essence, arguments against what their authors considered to be the “wrong-Westernisation” of Ottoman society. The authors wanted to control the westernisation process and replace it with their own understanding of modernisation. This was what they had in mind when they started producing literary characters, or types, who personified the ills of modernisation: those characters were too liberal or too conservative, they didn’t fit into their authors’ understanding of a proper citizen and so they were portrayed as dangerous and suspect figures.

    In their highly schematic works, the authors made distinctions between the liberal/degenerate and nationalist/virtuous veins of western culture, supporting the latter through idealised characters. Their fight against effeminacy, religiosity, bodily pleasures and bohemianism were later used as justification when the state attempted to label certain sectors of the society as its enemies.

    The most extreme defender of this modernising school was Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, a diplomat and Member of Parliament for most of his life. His book Yaban (The Stranger) frankly expressed, or even confessed his generation’s fury against what they saw as the regressive people of Anatolia. Yaban’s protagonist Ahmet Celal travels to an Anatolian town where Ankara’s efforts to secularise and westernise the country’s culture seem to be ignored entirely by the villagers. Much to his surprise and chagrin Celal learns that only a tiny minority of his beloved people share his generation’s Enlightenment beliefs, showing even less interest in the policies imposed on the country from the capital.

    More than seventy years after it was first published Yaban epitomises this historical disconnect between Anatolian people and the early republican government’s modernising policies. In 1925 a law called Takrir-i Sükûn Kanunu (Maintenance of Order Law) was introduced and used to trample any form of dissent against the state from “reactionaries and rebels”; i.e., socialists, conservatives, ethnic and religious minorities. Implemented by the one-party state, the law was used to send dissidents to the so-called Freedom Courts where they could face torture, imprisonment and execution (the poet Nâzım Hikmet, for example, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison by the same court).  In order to understand the ideology which justified such drastic measures, one needs to look at the kind of Turkish novels that continue to be taught at schools. The villains of those books and those convicted by the one party state of the early republican era, after all, were more or less the same.

    It was only later, when I was eighteen or nineteen years old that I began to see that almost no one (apart from wannabe civil servants) enjoyed reading those books. This is why, unlike books by Flaubert, Wilde or Proust written approximately in the same period, nobody would read those novels had they not been assigned to them at school. Instead people have discovered, over the last decades, another vein of literature which gave voice to the ideas of the writer instead of the state.

    If so many readers have changed sides and turned from teenage opponents of Turkish literature to its mature and genuine admirers, it is thanks to individual authors like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, Şavkar Altınel, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Latife Tekin, Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak and Perihan Mağden who showed us that there is indeed an alternative to speaking with the voice of the state. The voice of the creative individual, often at odds with high offices and political power, triumphed in the end.

    About the Author

    Kaya Genç is a Turkish novelist and essayist. He specializes in late-Victorian authors and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Conrad, Wilde and Stevenson. Newsweek Turkey named him as one of Turkish literature’s 20 under 40. His essays appeared, both in print and online, in the Guardian, London Review of Books, Songlines, Sight & Sound, Index on Censorship, the Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Millions and many others. He translated ten books into Turkish (Tom McCarthy’s C, among others), writes both in his native tongue and in English and lives in Istanbul.

    Additional Information

    Kaya Genç will be in conversation with Maureen Freely on Friday 19 April at 7.00 p.m at the LRB Bookshop.

    You can follow Kaya Genç on Twittter.

    For more on Kaya Genç and his writing visit his website.

     

  • Literature rises in the East

    Ayfer Tunç writes for PEN Atlas about the importance of looking beyond the clichés so that Turkish literature is seen in the context of World Literature. This is the first in a series of reports from Turkey, a focus both for London Book Fair, and for English PEN

    From the West, Turkey marks the start of the East, while from the East it’s the beginning of the West. The country possesses a vivid, vibrant literature which captures all the key dynamics of our age, and its ranks of talented young writers make me hopeful. However, even if they carry fewer prejudices than their forebears, even though they are more curious and more enthusiastic, still this is a literature that the western gaze either cannot see, or does not wish to.

    It pains me to point out that a neo-orientalist mind-set holds sway over Western publishers, and therefore over Western readers. They don’t expect works of great distinction from us or from those to our East; they don’t expect us to have shaken off the bonds of adolescence. Western writers expect us to write novels that show them more clearly as Westerners, and us more clearly as Easterners; they want us to make them feel happy and secure in this regard. Putting the many concrete examples to one side for a moment, I know that we bear some of the responsibility. For we are just the same. We burden our own eastern neighbours with the same expectations, because every contemporary society approaches its own East through a more or less orientalist prism.

    Western publishers sit up and pay attention if you write novels which deal in the Ottoman histories and histrionics that appeal so much to the Western reader. They want stories of abject penury: about lives ruined under the weight of customs and traditions, about the unbreachable chasm between Muslim and Western lifestyles, and tales of ethnic strife. The doors open all too swiftly if you’re telling a tale of damsels in the distress of being Muslim – or alternatively about their pains on adopting a Western lifestyle. Of course, these themes can be treated in ways that are literary. But the problem is this: most publishers are more often interested in examples of these themes that are tawdry, clichéd, and that barely trouble the intellect of the average reader.

    Yet alongside these works which fulfil Western expectations, in Turkey there is a real literature, which looks seriously at the past and present of both Turkey and the wider world, and deserves to be judged by more universal criteria. Works are being written that fully deserve to be understood as part of the shared riches that, after Goethe, we term Welt Literatur. Instead of trading in ‘Muslim’, ‘Westerner’, ‘villager’, ‘urbanite’, ‘minority’, ‘woman’, ‘man’ or similar categories of identity, these books are interested in people’s  existences, ontologies, philosophies, intellectual faculties, their unconscious and every shade of their selfhood. The Turkish writers of such literary texts display a nuanced engagement with the world around them and they use very sophisticated narrative techniques.

    For years I was referred to as a ‘young writer’. On the eve of turning fifty, it pleases me to see that the younger generation coming up after us are braver, more strident, more innovative and more at peace with the world than we are. My own generation was crushed under the fist of the 12th September 1981 military coup, which ripped Turkish democracy to shreds. We sustained heavy injuries, and it took us a long time to pull ourselves back together. In a country whose democracy is still battered and where attempts to trim back freedom of expression are still very much underway, we have a new generation who have learnt from our experiences. A great many of them are vaulting the constraints of barren ideologies, and now take the stage as world writers. This is why I have a request to put to the Western literary world, both in my name and in the name of my generation and in that of the next. It’s a request for equality. We’re also a valid piece of the story in our collective Welt Literatur.

    Of course I’m not going to make the case that every work that gets written in Turkey is of inestimable value, but I can be sure in saying this: both in my generation and the younger one, Turkish writers are working in a way that will stir up the stagnant waters with new and exciting literary currents, and their number should not be underestimated. Certainly they deserve to be taken seriously in this endeavour. Those at the vanguard of this new generation are aware of the development of high literature across the world, they follow it closely and they expend considerable effort understanding and analysing it. Furthermore, most of them are women. Young, smart women. Some are religious, some are not. Some of them feel an affinity with Eastern philosophies, some prefer the exegesis of Western literature. Furthermore, despite the vicissitudes of the publishing industry and the cruelty of marketing techniques, some of the very best of them do realise some successes, and they manage to make themselves heard in the places they wish to be heard. Amongst them are poets and writers of short stories. They may not boast the sales of the novelists, but they still manage to capture the attention of readers interested in serious literature. They are broadening the ambit of our rich poetic traditions and reviving the short story, previously declared dead by so many publishers.

    I’m aware that my words seem too shiny, too portentous. You’re going to say, ‘If Turkish literature is really this special, why isn’t it obvious?’. Well, it’s actually not that great at all. Dulling this sheen and obscuring it from view are two simple issues. One is the barren state of our cultural climate. Here, literature of a high quality directs itself at a pitifully small minority of readers. Although book sales in Turkey have increased over the last ten years by a staggering measure, the sales of literary works have not kept pace. That’s because in Turkey, there isn’t such an appetite for literature and culture as there is in the West – in fact for a large segment of the population there isn’t even an appetite at all.

    The other issue is that we’ve come to find it hard to believe in our own quality. This is because the history of our republic is the history of our complex about the West. We imported from the West, but we couldn’t believe we could send anything back in the other direction. This is the issue at the heart of our literature. But I’m keen to believe that young writers from this country can overcome this complex.

    As a middle-aged writer from this country, I’d like to put forward many names from both my generation and the next. But I don’t want to do an injustice to those who deserve to be remembered by forgetting to count them in that number. Suffice it to say that in the internet age, all ways are open to those who want to learn the names of the writers who are driving Turkish literature forwards.

    About the Author

    Ayfer Tunç was born in the city of Adapazari in northwest Turkey in 1964. While still a student of political science at Istanbul University, she wrote articles for various literary and cultural magazines. Her first collection of short stories, titled Sakli, was published in 1989. It was followed by her debut novel, Kapak Kizi, in 1992. In addition to novels and short stories, Tunç also writes reports, radio plays and scripts for TV series. Her works have been translated into several languages and honored with the Yunus Nadi Short Story Prize (1989) and the Balkanika Award for Literature (2003). 

    Her new novel, The Aziz Bey Incident will be published this March in the UK by Istros Books. It is translated by Stephanie Ateş.   

    Additional Information

    Ayfer Tunç will be in the UK in April as part of the British Council’s Cultural Programme as part of the Turkey Market Focus at The London Book Fair. She will launch her new book, The Aziz Bey Incident at Belgravia Books in London on Monday 15th April 2013.

    www.ayfertunc.com

    http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1908236116

    izzy finkelAbout the Translator

    Izzy Finkel is a writer and translator based between London and Istanbul. She co-edits BÜLENT, a quarterly journal which aims to foster new ways of thinking and writing about Turkey.