It might very well be claimed that translating literature is a thankless task. Translators rarely take the spotlight; their names rarely grace the front pages of the books they toil so diligently to render into another language, and in some quarters the view lingers that translators are, as the Italian idiom “traduttore, traditore” has it, traitors.
Yet without the act of translation, most of us would be, as the late George Steiner put it, “living in provinces bordered by silence”. There are few among us so linguistically gifted that they can read Tolstoy, Racine, Confucius, the Bible, Goethe, Cervantes, Rumi and Dante in the original. Yet the silence Steiner spoke of still cloaks a huge number of languages, those that fall outside the comfortable zone of what has become the western canon.
One of those languages is Turkish, a language rarely studied in western countries. Indeed, there are many who assume, for some strange reason, that Turks must speak some form of Arabic, a notion guaranteed to draw nothing but ire on the streets of Istanbul. It almost goes without saying that if a language is not widely studied, its literature will not feature on canonical lists or be awarded a substantial share of the major world literary prizes.
In March 1995, after some time spent on the building sites of Berlin, I ventured to Istanbul and immediately fell in love with the chaotic layers and depths of the city and its language. Turkish was syntactically and grammatically unlike anything I had encountered before. The very first thing that struck me about the language was how melodic and soft it was. It could, of course, be harsh in the mouths of irate traffic policemen and frustrated football fans, but that is true of any language. Later, when I began to learn it, I realised that it was an exceptionally elastic means of communication, allowing the speaker to shift meaning by altering word order in ways impossible in English or Irish.
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One evening, over a beer, I made this observation to a friend who had been helping me with aspects of the language, and he replied, “Yes, and that’s what makes it so suitable for poetry”. We went on to speak of how few Turkish poets were known in the West, and he added, “And what’s sad is that poetry contains the best of us. The novel is something we came to a lot later, but poetry goes through everything we do and think here.”
Once I had learned enough of the language to begin reading its poetry, I felt as if I were exploring territory where few before me from Ireland had ever set foot. Accompanying that thought was a sense of anger that these poets were, for the most part, unknown outside Turkey. Why were poets from the former Eastern Bloc so eagerly sought out, while poets who wrote in Turkish were ignored? Various answers suggested themselves over the years: the gatekeeping of large publishing houses in the Anglosphere, which determine which literatures are acceptable; an Orientalist worldview that continues to see Turkey as either irrelevant or incapable of a higher art form like poetry, however fanciful this may seem, it has had its proponents; or the insularity of poetry scenes within various Anglosphere countries.
The more I read and understood figures like Nazım Hikmet, Oktay Rifat and Gülten Akın, the more frustrated I became. Some twenty years ago, I began to translate. I shared my work with friends and online; as positive feedback arrived, I committed myself more fully to translation. This resulted in an invitation to participate in the Cunda Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature, where I came into contact with others toiling at the same coalface.
It was after this that I first began to think seriously about getting work published. Until then, I had not imagined that many publishing houses outside Turkey would have any interest in publishing its poetry. Even Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Prize win did little to change the western view of Turkish literature, and, as is well known, it is far harder to get poetry published in any language.
In 2016, the translator group met again to translate the work of Enis Batur, a leading poet, essayist and intellectual. Over the subsequent years, our small group kept in contact and, from time to time, worked on Batur’s poetry until we had enough for a collection. In late 2023, I sent an email to Dedalus Poetry in Dublin to see if they had any interest in publishing it. The very next day, the editor, Pat Boran, wrote back asking for my telephone number, saying he would ring me the following day and we would chat. And we did.
Pat explained that Dedalus could not commit to a single-author collection in translation but asked if I would be interested in producing an anthology, a sampler, so to speak, of Turkish poetry. Was I interested? To say I was would be a gross understatement. For years, this is what I had been waiting for. I replied in the affirmative, scarcely believing it was true. Pat very kindly left the selection of poets up to me, and over the course of the two years we worked on the project, he offered steadfast support and excellent editorial guidance.
In July of last year, before the book had even gone to press, Trevor Joyce, Feargal Gaynor and Ellen Dillon extended an invitation to me and two of the poets from the book, Gökçenur Ç and Gonca Özmen, to read from the anthology and talk about Turkish poetry at the SoundEye Festival in Cork. Hearing those poems spoken aloud on Irish soil before an audience who might never otherwise have encountered them brought home to me that the work already had a life beyond manuscript and email attachments, that it had begun to travel.
In October then, Fog Bells: Eight Contemporary Turkish Poets was published. The poets represented in the book are all still with us and offer a flavour of the depth and richness of the poetry currently being written in Turkish. In some ways, too, it is a kind of letter home, saying: this is what first drew me in and, more importantly, what has kept me in Istanbul all these years.
Fog Bells: Eight Contemporary Turkish Poets, published by Dedalus Press.
