The Crowded Room:
an interview with Murat Nemet-Nejat, on translation After a meal with Murat and Karen Nemet-Nejat at the tablethat dominates their kitchen --and after reminiscing about our days in Istanbul and other writers we knew there-- Murat and I began to dance around the subject of translation. Having put together a special issue of contemporary Turkish literature forAbsinthe: New European Writing, a few years ago, I became ever more acutely conscious of the difference a good translation can make.
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BM: It is my contention that the loss of Cedric Belfrage as translator nearly killed the later work of Eduardo Galeano; his subsequent translators just didn't have that "swing." More to the point here, had Orhan Pamuk not replaced his earlier translator with Maureen Freely, would he have gotten the attention that he received subsequently? Personally, I doubt it. Translating from Turkish into English is not an easy task.
Murat: English is a subject-predicate language. It means either yes or no—you have to decide. Whereas Turkish is like walking into a crowded room.
Freely, in her introduction to Snow in relation to a quote from me says she had to make compromises to balance the agglutinative "crowd" of the Turkish sentences with the relative regularity of the English syntax to create a more "readerly" text. As a translator of poetry, I do not feel I need to do that. I alter the original text to bring its essence to the target language, in my case English.
BM: At the very least, I am aware of the difference regarding syntax. You know, I remember my students who had studied English, many for some time: like anyone learning a new language, you tend to arrange what you want to say according to the syntax of your first language; and so when some of them tried to write in English, but took refuge in the familiar syntax of their mother tongue, I couldn't make head nor tail of what they were saying. I have tremendous respect for their attempts at making that leap between two such different languages.
Murat: If you change the word order, the tonality, the word nearest the particular word is the most important but the word is not always in the same place. The shape of the sentence is determined by what you emphasize. It's the form of feelings and ideas—Turkish is a "process language", not ideas but the tissue of thought. What I mean is that a Turkish sentence records thought in the process of occurring.
BM: I've asked several translators what they think about Christopher Logue's translation, War Music, of part of the Iliad.Apparently Logue knew no Greek and just worked from a pony…
Murat: Well, there's translation as style. Transparent translation vs. the traditional. In reading a text you experience something in your own language; reading in a "foreign" language there is a lack, a distance with what you are going to say in the translated language and the original. You translate that lack, that part of that poem that your language doesn't have. What part of this poem do I want to translate? The translation "misreads" the original—breaks down its unity. What is it that Benjamin says? You are translating fragments of a vase.[1] Texture, not a transaction, but part of the performance.
In terms of language, A being translated into language B, both change. The target has to alter itself—emulation, no, striving towards it, reflects potential in the original that one cannot see in the original. You are trying to make the poem in the target language "unweird."
In my translation of Ece Ayhan's A Black Cat Black is an example of dealing with the way Turkish gender pronouns blur—one accepts the space it creates.
BM: I know you wrote the afterward for A Black Cat Black in '97, and some readers, I suppose, get all hung up on dates/chronology, but I was intrigued by the prose poem format of each piece (was it that way originally or your choice as translator?)
Murat: Yes, the poem is in prose form in the original.
BM: The discussion of "kinar" in the afterword of Ece Ayhan's Black Cat Black as it pertains to the way the Turkish words work…
Murat: I am talking about the way words work in Turkish poetry, particularly in the direction in which Ece Ayhan takes. He discovers and exploits the potentiation in Turkish word sounds.[2]
BM: I suppose that it would be difficult to emulate this in English?
Murat: My book, Animals of Dawn, death in translation, Hamlet as an animal: one can't access its consciousness.
BM: Anecdotally, I have a distinct memory of attending a reading by a friend, Eric Darton, of his first novel, Free City. He read in English and then it was followed up by someone reading a translation of the same passage into Spanish. What struck me was that the English was witty; but the Spanish version was hilarious. It wasn't a mockery; it just underlined some subtle differences in the two languages. What, if any, such "transformations," or natural mutations, have you experienced in the translation from Turkish into English or vice verse?
Murat: Particularly in my Orhan Veli book (I, Orhan Veli), translating Veli's melancholy humor. The tonality of the humor, the mixture of the colloquial, everyday and something very profound is crucial in his poetry.
[1] The quote in Benjamin enjoins, “Instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of significance, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.” (Illuminations, 78.)
[2] The text, here, is well worth quoting: "Miss Kinar's Waters is a lyric poem with no unifying I, but atomized appearances of he's, she's, it's [sic}; proper and common names merging, weaving themselves into a mournful, raging, elusive melody of the suppressed. The melody of the poem is the music of the Turkish syntactical cadence responding, bending being distorted by this pronoun dissolution." (72 – 73)
Murat: English is a subject-predicate language. It means either yes or no—you have to decide. Whereas Turkish is like walking into a crowded room.
Freely, in her introduction to Snow in relation to a quote from me says she had to make compromises to balance the agglutinative "crowd" of the Turkish sentences with the relative regularity of the English syntax to create a more "readerly" text. As a translator of poetry, I do not feel I need to do that. I alter the original text to bring its essence to the target language, in my case English.
BM: At the very least, I am aware of the difference regarding syntax. You know, I remember my students who had studied English, many for some time: like anyone learning a new language, you tend to arrange what you want to say according to the syntax of your first language; and so when some of them tried to write in English, but took refuge in the familiar syntax of their mother tongue, I couldn't make head nor tail of what they were saying. I have tremendous respect for their attempts at making that leap between two such different languages.
Murat: If you change the word order, the tonality, the word nearest the particular word is the most important but the word is not always in the same place. The shape of the sentence is determined by what you emphasize. It's the form of feelings and ideas—Turkish is a "process language", not ideas but the tissue of thought. What I mean is that a Turkish sentence records thought in the process of occurring.
BM: I've asked several translators what they think about Christopher Logue's translation, War Music, of part of the Iliad.Apparently Logue knew no Greek and just worked from a pony…
Murat: Well, there's translation as style. Transparent translation vs. the traditional. In reading a text you experience something in your own language; reading in a "foreign" language there is a lack, a distance with what you are going to say in the translated language and the original. You translate that lack, that part of that poem that your language doesn't have. What part of this poem do I want to translate? The translation "misreads" the original—breaks down its unity. What is it that Benjamin says? You are translating fragments of a vase.[1] Texture, not a transaction, but part of the performance.
In terms of language, A being translated into language B, both change. The target has to alter itself—emulation, no, striving towards it, reflects potential in the original that one cannot see in the original. You are trying to make the poem in the target language "unweird."
In my translation of Ece Ayhan's A Black Cat Black is an example of dealing with the way Turkish gender pronouns blur—one accepts the space it creates.
BM: I know you wrote the afterward for A Black Cat Black in '97, and some readers, I suppose, get all hung up on dates/chronology, but I was intrigued by the prose poem format of each piece (was it that way originally or your choice as translator?)
Murat: Yes, the poem is in prose form in the original.
BM: The discussion of "kinar" in the afterword of Ece Ayhan's Black Cat Black as it pertains to the way the Turkish words work…
Murat: I am talking about the way words work in Turkish poetry, particularly in the direction in which Ece Ayhan takes. He discovers and exploits the potentiation in Turkish word sounds.[2]
BM: I suppose that it would be difficult to emulate this in English?
Murat: My book, Animals of Dawn, death in translation, Hamlet as an animal: one can't access its consciousness.
BM: Anecdotally, I have a distinct memory of attending a reading by a friend, Eric Darton, of his first novel, Free City. He read in English and then it was followed up by someone reading a translation of the same passage into Spanish. What struck me was that the English was witty; but the Spanish version was hilarious. It wasn't a mockery; it just underlined some subtle differences in the two languages. What, if any, such "transformations," or natural mutations, have you experienced in the translation from Turkish into English or vice verse?
Murat: Particularly in my Orhan Veli book (I, Orhan Veli), translating Veli's melancholy humor. The tonality of the humor, the mixture of the colloquial, everyday and something very profound is crucial in his poetry.
[1] The quote in Benjamin enjoins, “Instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of significance, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.” (Illuminations, 78.)
[2] The text, here, is well worth quoting: "Miss Kinar's Waters is a lyric poem with no unifying I, but atomized appearances of he's, she's, it's [sic}; proper and common names merging, weaving themselves into a mournful, raging, elusive melody of the suppressed. The melody of the poem is the music of the Turkish syntactical cadence responding, bending being distorted by this pronoun dissolution." (72 – 73)