Turkish Literature

[Daniel del Real]

Thanks a lot. I'll research more about these authors you tell me.

[anoush]

Another Turkish writer I've seen appear in English, thanks to a few edition from Marion Boyars, is Latife Tekin. From what I can gather, she's some sort of Turkish magical realist. Any thoughts?

In other news, I've stumbled acros this site which lists Contemporary Turkish Literature in Translation. I suppose, unless you know who to look for, the genre section (Novel is listed as a genre), is the best to get a list of such translations to English.

I've read the english translation to Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills. The book is very clever. It tells the story of a slum created by country migrants who come to the city in search of work. The text follows the development of this slum's society over time and shows how folklore, songs and traditions are created from the experiences of everyday circumstances. There is a sense of magical realism in the way nature is personified, but not I think as much as there is in her other books. There is a strong sense of nihilism in the book as well and it deals with the darker elements of society. It's not an easy read, in part I think caused by there being no main character all the way through. The narrative follows the stories of multiple characters and how they impact the on the garbage hills. I could see people either loving or hating it. So perhaps it's one to check out from the library. Basically this type of writing is never going to be a best-seller in the UK and does not have the commercial appeal that Orhan Pamuk has.
I also have the translation of her first Dear Shameless Death which I have yet to get round to reading.
anoush

[Omo]

The last book by a Turkish author I read was Ferit Edg?'s O. It was a poetic story about a teacher who spent one year in Kurdistan, trying to teach in a small village while he couldn't even understand their language. I can recommend it.

For a while I have been sneaking around the works of Nazim Hikmet, specifically the prose, his literary biography The Romantics, since I shy away from reading poetry in translation. Can anyone recommend it?

[Eric]

Although Orhan Pamuk is mentioned a lot, this thread seems to have died a death almost three years ago. Can Turkey really have no more literary authors than Pamuk?

In the Swedish cultural magazine Karavan, I found a list when looking though back numbers, of things translated from Turkish into Swedish. So how many of these same names can we find in English (I can't do the accents):

Halidé Edib Advar
Subahattin Ali
Cetin Altan
Melih Cevdet Anday
Ahmed Arif
Gülten Dayioglu
Bülent Ecevit
Asli Erdogan
Asiye Güzel (Zeybek)
Nazim Hikmet
Güngör Dilmen Kalyoncu
Yasar Kemal
Özkan Mert
Aziz Nesin
Osman Sahin
Osman Türkay
Orhan Veli
Tahsin Yücel
Hamdi Özyurt

Plus a few collections and anthologies.

No, I know nothing about these authors either, their quality, when they wrote, what they wrote. But it does make you wonder why only Pamuk seems to be noticed, when the country must be big enough to support a whole literature.

[Stevie B]

Yasar Kemal is the only author on your list I've read. He's probably had a dozen or so books translated into English over a 40-year period. My favorite Kemal novel is Iron Earth, Copper Sky followed by Seagull. I didn't care for Memed, My Hawk, which is perhaps his best-known novel in the West.

[Eric]

There are certainly a few Turkish writers, apart from Pamuk, who have appeared in English, and the quality and volume of the Swedish list is not obvious at a first glance. But I don't get the feeling that Turkish literature as such is translated systematically into English. It has taken a Nobel Prize to focus people's attention on only one contemporary Turkish author.

As for Yaşar Kemal, I see from the Wikipedia that 19 of his works (novels? short-stories?) have appeared in Swedish translation, so there must be, as you say Stevie B, maybe a dozen available in English. But I think that his name is not seen as much nowadays in book lists.

Looking at then English Wikipedia, it is hard to tell which of his books have actually been translated into English. Actually, he is a Kurdish writer by ethnicity, but presumably wrote all his works in Turkish, as Kurdish has been frowned upon for a long time by the Turksih authorities.

He is still alive so he could be a Nobel candidate this year. You never know.

[Stevie B]

I'm not sure about Kemal's earlier books, but his more recent works have been translated into English by his wife Thilda. I wrote to the author when I was teaching at a Japanese university to inquire about a possible Japanese translation of Iron Earth, Copper Sky. Thilda responded that a couple of his books were available in Japanese, but that they had been translated from English editions. She said that she never liked it when an already translated text was used as a base for a new translation but that, unfortunately, this happened frequently with her husband's writings.

[Liam]

An interesting new essay on Turkish Literature and its reception in the West: The Silk Road by Murathan Mungan.