Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize), Elif Shafak (best-selling writer of The Bastard of Istanbul) … That’s as far as many English readers go in their knowledge of Turkish literature. A few might have heard of Yasha Kemal. It’s the equivalent of thinking that English literature consists of George Orwell, Jeanette Winterson and Julian Barnes.
Working on our Istanbul anthology is proving both a great pleasure and a truly enlightening experience. With the help of our Turkish contacts I am becoming aware of the vast, largely untapped wealth of contemporary Turkish writing. It’s true that a little more is beginning to trickle through to our bookshops, thanks to some excellent and hard-working translators – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s lovely 1949 novel, A Mind at Peace, is now available from Archipelago Books in a 2008 translation by Erdağ Göknar, and Mario Levi’s Istanbul was a Fairytale will, I believe, soon be available from Dalkey Archive Press ... just the very tip of an enormous iceberg. And I was delighted to see Maya Jaggi’s review of Oya Badar’s The Lost Word in the Guardian on 16th December (read it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/lost-word-oya-baydar-review?commentpage=last#end-of-comments ). Oya Badar is certainly a writer to watch. I have been privileged to read part of her novel Warm Ashes Remain and to thus be reminded that Turkish writers don’t just write about Turkey! This novel, for example, contains some wonderful writing about Paris, especially in the protagonist’s evocation of the city in 1968. As a schoolgirl soixante-huitard myself, I particularly warmed to this section (see below).
There are signs that Anglophone readers are finally waking up to how much they’re missing by not reading enough work in translation: the recent founding of publishing houses And Other Words and Pereine Press, both dedicated purely to work in translation, along with a number of other initiatives gaining in strength and national profile (such as the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) are hopeful signs. But come on, readers, clamour for more! – and especially more from Turkey ...
From Warm Ashes Remain by Oya Badar
Autumn in Paris: “Les Feuilles Mortes”, Yves Montand, Brassens, “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, Sartre, “Ne Me Quitter Pas”, “Bonjour Tristesse”, love without restraint, revolution which overflowed from hearts onto the streets, Lautrec posters with black cats, onion soup in Les Vieilles Halles, oysters and white wine, “Forbidden to Forbid” and “The Street Is Beautiful” posters, Marcuse, “One-Dimensional Man”, Marx, Althusser… The banks of the Seine, the boulevards, the parks where the yellow-red autumn leaves whirl around just like in the song. The huge city gives the impression of being one single dry leaf. The rain that pours down suddenly, the famous cafés on Boul-Mich’, on Saint-Germain where one runs to take refuge… When we had money, we usually went to Café de Flore; we used to wait for Sartre and he would come… September in Paris: Les Halles, with its heavy odor of the mixture of fish, oysters, onion soup, flowers, spices, sausages; the Flower Market and its chrysanthemums, dahlias, carnations, white mice, rabbits, birds; the Bateaux Mouches carrying tourists on the Seine; the bouquinistes on the left bank of the river, the clochards under the bridges, gradually becoming more rare and touristic.
‘We used to rummage about, going through the books, papers, etchings and postcards in the stalls of the bouquinistes which lined the two banks of the river, looking as if they had come out of a Paris poster, and we would shout with joy when we found something we had been searching for. The restaurant of Madame Sophie, an Armenian who had migrated from Turkey, had only seven tables and was on a side street off Saint-Germain. As she placed the food in front of us, she would say “Eat, eat, it’s bon, it’s bon” in Turkish, which she had almost forgotten throughout the years. Candles of different colors stuck in empty wine bottles, covering the bottles drop by drop as they melted… The smell of butter spread into warm, crisp baguettes in the mornings; the fresh croissants bought at the neighborhood bakery opposite our building… Everything that makes Paris what it is; everything that we love in spite of ourselves, and despite all the deterioration, the staleness, the commonness, all that still retains its magic, resists our pseudo-intellectual snubs…’
She is crossing Saint-Michel on a rainy September day; she is wearing an old, light raincoat. Her hair, her face, her hands are getting wet. She is in no rush to take shelter at the students’ café where she usually meets her friends. She is not bothered by the rain; on the contrary, she wants the raindrops to seep under her skin, all the way to her heart, and to cool the revolt, the grief inside her. She will be leaving this city in a few days. Is it only leaving the city that hurts so much? ‘I was twenty-three, I was in love; I was hopeful about life, hopeless about my love and naturally I was sad.’
Autumn in Paris: All these, our youth and much more.
