Nerdspecial The Bard of Turkish Alienation
It was a shock to be taught that the author Oğuz Atay was solely forty-three years outdated when he died in 1977, of a mind tumor. The eight tales in “Ready for the Worry,” first printed in 1975 and reissued, this month, by New York Assessment Books, evoke the rancor and the loneliness of a a lot older man—the beneficiary of a lifetime’s price of disappointment. For individuals who knew Atay, nothing might have been farther from the reality. He was reputed to be even-keeled, modest, largely content material along with his life as a professor of engineering who, in non-public, occurred to jot down among the funniest and most enigmatic fiction in Turkey. Images present a boyish, handsomely dressed man with laughing eyes and a trim little mustache, sitting at his desk or standing by the seashore along with his daughter. “Ben sanıldığı kadar karamsar değilim,” he preferred to insist. “I’m not as pessimistic as folks assume.” How one can clarify the absurdism and the despair of his writing, which stands as one of many crowning achievements of Turkish literature?
His biography gives a number of clues. Atay was born in 1934, close to the Black Sea port city of İnebolu—town the place Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic, had donned a jaunty Panama hat to provide a speech decrying the barbarism of the fez and different Ottoman fashions. Atay’s mom taught at an area college. His father, a decide, had been elected to parliament as a member of Atatürk’s Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—the one occasion on the time—which oversaw the huge autocratic challenge of modernizing the brand new nation. When Atay was 5, the household moved to the capital metropolis of Ankara; there, the boy was educated within the main establishments of the Kemalist élite, bastions of rationality, effectivity, progress, and different eagerly adopted European values. He was a precocious reader, however his grades in science have been so good, he claimed, that he had had no alternative however to check engineering on the prestigious İstanbul Teknik Üniversite. His first e-book, “Topoğrafya,” was a textbook for college kids of cartography.
His success, the obvious ease with which he navigated Kemalist enclaves, should have aroused some irritation, some discontent in Atay. His favourite writers have been the creators of delicate outcasts, monstrous antiheroes—writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, who, in 1863, had marvelled at how his cussed countrymen had not “metamorphosed into Europeans,” regardless of being subjected to their “overwhelming affect.” The same admiration for the intransigence of 1’s folks runs via Atay’s first novel, “Tutunamayanlar.” Its protagonist, an engineer named Turgut, is set to piece collectively the final years of his long-lost good friend Selim, who has taken his personal life. On his quest, Turgut encounters Selim’s many unusual, ungovernable acquaintances and discovers that Selim had begun to assemble an encyclopedia of tutunamayanlar—“those that can not maintain on,” or, extra lyrically, “the disconnected.” Like Gustave Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” “Tutunamayanlar” is a powerful and exhausting work, patched collectively from epistolary fragments, diaristic screeds, mock-epic poems, courtroom testimonies, allusions, riddles, and puns. At moments, it looks as if a rebuke to that different nice Turkish trendy novel, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü” (or “The Time Regulation Institute”). Tanpınar burrows into the bureaucracies of the state, establishing a story world that grows ever extra labyrinthine and totalizing. Atay lingers on the outskirts, preserving the corporate of staff and wastrels, poets and drunks—all those that refuse the monumental transformations of Turkish society.
Atay wrote “Tutunamayanlar” in a single, feverish 12 months, 1968. He spent the subsequent 12 months revising it, chopping 5 hundred pages, then including 600 new ones. When he informed professors within the college’s literature division that he was writing a novel, they checked out him with pity. When he informed publishers what he deliberate to name it, they laughed. In 1970, he submitted it to the Türkiye Radyo ve Televizyon Novel Prize, which it received; by then, one imagines, the publishers had stopped laughing and the professors had slunk again to their workplaces. But by the point Atay wrote his second novel, “Tehlikeli Oyunlar” (“Harmful Video games”), a few disenchanted Turkish mental, the dream of changing into a novelist had misplaced a few of its romance: “After I was younger, I assumed writing a novel was thrilling; now, I simply assume it’s tiring.” Even when he began to publish the tales that may be collected in “Ready for the Worry,” he held out hopes of changing into a terrific scientist. “Perhaps we reside within the nation the place everybody desires to be completely different from what they’re,” he wrote.
The characters in “Ready for the Worry” have no idea what or who they’re; their self-estrangement is the supply of their drama. The primary story, “Man in a White Overcoat,” is the one one narrated within the third individual. 4 tales (“The Forgotten,” “Ready for the Worry,” “Picket Horse,” and “Railway Storytellers”) are first-person internal monologues. Three tales (“A Letter—Unsent,” “Not Sure Not No,” and “Letter to My Father”) take the type of letters. There’s nearly no distinction between how Atay’s narrators assume and the way they write, which supplies the gathering a exceptional unity and a way of momentum. The standard Atay narrator is clever, brash, self-conscious, and male. More often than not, he stays nameless, by no means revealing his title or the place he comes from. He speaks in an outpouring of language, a confession that anxiously attracts consideration to its personal anarchy and extra—to “this chaotic succession of concepts we name ‘stream of consciousness,’ ” as one narrator places it. He interrupts his personal ideas to interrogate a poorly chosen phrase or a clichéd phrase. He can not settle for, as many people do, the important artifice of phrases—the truth that they have been invented by folks for use in widespread. “Phrases refused to explain me,” one other narrator laments. “If solely I might have had some phrases of my very own, my very own sentences and ideas.”
There’s an aggressive intimacy to Atay’s model, a perverse hospitality to his postmodern tales of indignation and woe. To learn these tales is to be forcefully ushered into the house of a good friend, to take heed to him rant, but to search out his weird efficiency endearing, even lovable. Each the movement and the fragmentation of the Turkish is tremendously troublesome to render in English. Atay’s translator, Ralph Hubbell, performs a near-miracle. He re-creates the frantic twists and turns of Atay’s sentences—their slow-building claustrophobia, their persistent self-negation, their blunt humor—with out making an attempt to breed their diction or syntax. He workout routines a marvellous restraint, too. Turkish is a densely metaphoric and accretive language. Take into account a sentence from the primary paragraph of “The Forgotten,” by which the narrator is looking out the attic for some outdated books. Her lover or husband fingers her a flashlight. “Fenerli elin ucundaki ışık, rasgele, önemsiz bir köşeyi aydınlattı; bu eli okşadı. El kayboldu,” Atay writes. Or, unpoetically, “The sunshine on the finish of the hand holding the flashlight randomly illuminated an unimportant nook; she stroked this hand. It disappeared.” With some rearrangement and compression, Hubbell streamlines the sentence with out sacrificing its uncanniness: “The beam strayed in direction of an empty nook and lit it up. She touched the hand; it disappeared.”
The interpretation makes clear that the power of Atay’s fiction emerges from the stress between the purposive exercise of his language and his narrators’ “state of imprecise revolt” towards it. The principle character of “Man in a White Overcoat” is a beggar who has “failed at begging,” possible as a result of “he had no harm, expertise or pathetic deformity.” Atay compares him to a stain, featureless and misshapen. Wandering round a mosque and its close by market, the beggar finds his method into an overcoat. This isn’t Nikolai Gogol’s completely tailor-made overcoat. It’s a lady’s garment, with “outsized buttons and a flared skirt.” Why does the person put it on, smiling? Who’s he? The thriller deepens as he roams aimlessly via town, mingling with its pushy, sweaty, inexhaustible venders: simit sellers, corn sellers, comb sellers, lotto-ticket sellers, shirt sellers, yogurt sellers, beltmakers, shoe shiners. Simply as they peddle their acquainted wares, Atay peddles the acquainted tropes of alienation. The beggar observes his wandering reflection in an “huge engraved gilt mirror.” The overcoat resembles “a ghost.” A material salesman poses the beggar as a “reside manikin” within the retailer window, attaching cloth and string to his arms like “a puppet.” Slipping out and in of the group, harassed and mocked, he’s directly a person of the folks and a martyr to their misunderstanding. “Two boys sat on high of the park entrance wall watching him. ‘Check out this,’ stated the one in a flat cap, ‘he appears to be like like a statue.’ ‘Or a crucifix,’ stated the opposite, and so they each laughed.”
The reader has no entry to the thoughts of the person within the overcoat, making him the proper foil to the narrators of the seven tales that comply with. These narrators provide us glimpses of pure consciousness, their fearful minds splayed out on the web page. Within the extraordinary title story, “Ready for the Worry,” a person receives a clean envelope containing a letter written in a dialect that he can not decipher. His personal language, nevertheless, is simply as garbled and mysterious:
Hubbell’s translation chimes superbly with the rhythm and the repetitions of the Turkish. The lengthy sentence that particulars the gadgets on the shelf—the vase, the lighter, the e-book, the ashtray—is comically over-elaborated; its particularity permits us to share within the narrator’s familiarity with these objects. But this sentence yields to a collection of shorter sentences that focus the narrator’s consideration on an unfamiliar object—the envelope. It short-circuits his thought, turning it again on itself. All his pondering turns into in regards to the language by which he thinks—about “as a result of” (çünkü) and “which meant” (demek); phrases that suggest and conclude, respectively, however which haven’t any that means in and of themselves. The narrator is aware of that there’s something cheapening and peculiarly hole about all this cogitation. “I might get so obsessed over one thing that the very variety of my ideas would lower,” he thinks. “It was as if the items of my thoughts had gotten blended up with all of the junk in my drawers, the closets, within the storeroom.”
Atay’s narrators are obsessives. They don’t select particulars; they fixate on them. Amongst their essential fixations is trendy Turkish, a language made up of flashy imports—French and English cognates, a brand new alphabet—and vintage idioms. “My nation and its folks infuriated me,” the narrator of “Ready for the Worry” complains. “I didn’t exist; I didn’t even occupy a spot the place I might say I didn’t exist.” The place he’s furious, the narrator of “A Letter: Unsent” is apologetic, obsequious even, in his handle to the cultivated man with whom he works: he doesn’t need “to burden you with my troubles utilizing a dated vernacular and old school expressions, and so I’ve positioned a dictionary and am preserving it shut at hand whereas I write these phrases.” The narrator of “Letter to My Father” is extra rueful. He needs that his deceased father had made his peace along with his tradition’s borrowed phrases and left behind a piece of significance: “It’s simply that on this nation the place nobody actually is aware of a lot about something, I ponder when you couldn’t have used the outdated scissor technique and brought just a little of this and just a little of that—from the works of overseas writers, after all—and left us with a textual content or two.”
0 Comment