Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Second New work would need to situate itself in
opposition to other works within the canon of
Turkish literature in English. Given the obvious fact
that not one translator at any one time is working on
translating the whole corpus of what is Turkish literature,
this strategy is seemingly difficult. When the
particular features that situate the Second New in
relation to other movements in Turkish are considered,
however, transporting a similar system into
English seems more conceivable.
Second New poetics can be identified by the
following features set out by Bezirci. First, it is a
movement that breaks from the forms and structures
of traditional poetry. 4 The movement “strives for an
immeasurable, pure Turkish.” 5 It approaches formalism
6 in its structures, giving priority to form
over content. Poet Ilhan Berk writes:
Actually, poetry doesn’t say anything./ The
poetry of our time is no longer written for the
purposes of saying something./ The topic of
poetry is nothingness, it grows from nothingness./
The Second New is on the side of poetry
which isn’t made to be understood./
Anyone who wants to understand something
may read prose./ Poetry must be the absence
of topic and narration. 7
The poetry of the Second New strives for the deformation
8 of the spoken language and of the standardized
images in literature. Another defining feature
of the Second New is synaesthesia, 9 to cross
the wires of the aspects of sense, to appropriate
them by image or form. Next is free association, 10
not only to challenge and stretch traditional associations
of image and form but also to break them. The
Second New poetry’s next feature is abstraction, 11
the move away from the many in favor of the one,
from the whole to the part. Another aspect of the
Second New is the absence of sense, 12 an attempt to
remove any rhetoric, commentary, or narrative from
poetry. Next is imaging, 13 that is, bringing image to
the fore over content. “It is necessary that a poem
which distances itself from meaning must secure the
‘anticipated joy and especially the effect and impres-
sion’ by way of image.” 14 And finally, the Second
New poetry strives to lean away from reason, to
reach outside the boundaries of logic. 15 Although
many of these defining principles may be collapsed
into broader concepts than what Bezirci has outlined,
this detailed mapping is valuable to the translator
of Second New literature in that it succinctly
provides the black outline drawing within which the
translator may color in the poem. It may be appropriate
now to move on to a case study of a Second
New poem, to evaluate to what extent these defining
features are preserved in translation.
Case Study: The Rose
Cemal Süreya’s poem “The Rose” is one of the bestknown
Turkish poems in English translation, but it is
not known specifically for being a Second New
poem (although the poet is recognized as being a
leading figure in the movement). There are, I
believe, two reasons why this poem is one of the
most widely available Turkish poems in English
translation. 16 The first is the fame of the translator.
Talat Sait Halman has published over 2500 Turkish
poems in English translation and is both a poet and
an academic scholar of Turkish literature. Thus, his
authority as a translator who is both familiar with
the source literary culture and is a poet in his own
right gives him the status of producing what many
consider to be authoritative translations. The second
reason is the distribution of Halman’s translations.
Given the limited number of translators working in
the field of Turkish literature and the absence of
other “voices” translating “The Rose,” for instance,
Halman’s translation gains canonic status. Although
Halman himself has written in various sources that
no one translator can produce the authoritative translation
of any work, 17 this nevertheless does not
negate the fact that in the field of Turkish scholarship
today, his work is considered to be the source to
consult when seeking a translation of any Turkish
literary text. It is important to keep this in mind,
because it leads to some important questions. For
instance, what happens to a literary culture represented
in translation when many of its works are
represented by one translator? And how well is our
60 Translation Review