Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

sentence fragments. Not surprisingly, there is little sense of
place in Death in Troy. Nor, in general, do the characters
have lives much beyond their relationships with each other.
How Mushfi k earns money, for example, isnʼt mentioned.
But Karasu excels at bringing these distinct voices to life,
and, as intimately as one writer might describe a given city
street, Karasu lays out labyrinthine passages of emotion.
Disjointed, elliptical, and offering an impression of
incompleteness even after the last page has been turned—
like a painting in which sketch lines and blank canvas show
through—Death in Troy is fl awed, yes, but still a gem.
The Garden of Departed Cats, published in translation
by New Directions in 2004, is perhaps the crowning
achievement of Karasuʼs oeuvre. Bound to draw
comparisons with the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo
Calvino, and Julio Cortázar, it is eccentric, high-brow and,
at times, nearly impenetrably surreal. Touted as a novel,
it is composed of twelve fairytales—really eleven capped
by a kind of epilogue—interspersed with a seemingly
independent storyline told in thirteen brief, italicized
episodes.
The continuous narrative begins in a medieval
city on a peninsula “that stretches like an arm into the
Mediterranean.” Tourists have fl ocked to this unnamed
city to watch a game of chess—a tradition left over from
centuries previous—in which the pieces are fully armed
human beings (one team is chosen from among tourists
while the opposing team is made up of town folk) and the
board is a circular courtyard. Before the game commences,
the narrator, who is a tourist, and one of the locals are
already being moved toward one another as though by an
invisible hand. The connection between them becomes
manifest when they fi nd themselves on opposing teams.
Karasu sets himself a number of Herculean labors
in this book. Among them is his attempt to re-route our
thinking, to get us to take less for granted, to break our
dependence on a web of preconceptions which, like a glove,
covers the hand with which we reach out to handle the
world and its various phenomena; Karasu wants us to press
bare skin against the textures of our lives. Nakedness—the
removal of that glove—is explored in “Hurt Me Not,” “the
tale of a man who longed to be naked in a world where all
people … live and toil to clothe themselves ….” Karasu
quickly takes the literal meaning to another level: “After
all, teaching as many disciplines as he could and giving
away his knowledge was also part of becoming naked.” A
variation on this theme is presented in “Red-Salamander,” in
which eating the leaf of a certain plant makes it impossible
to lie. It doesnʼt take much imagination to perceive complete
truthfulness as another form of nakedness.
Karasuʼs most quixotic quest, perhaps, is to break
our Western infatuation with chronology and sequence.
“[C]aught in the dream of a goal,” he writes, “we donʼt
notice in the slightest the singularity, the unchangeable
and irreplaceable nature of every moment in the string of
moments that later—after our death—will be called our
life, and even more encompassing, our destiny.” The goal
in “Another Peak” is apparently intimated by the title, but
during the ascent of a mountain surrounded by a nearly
impassable plain, the narrator articulates his longing to rid
himself “of the habit of sorting everything, stacking one
thing on top of another like food boxes ….” He adds: “Itʼs
time now to learn that all things are inside one another.”
(Here we hear an echo of an earlier story in which the
narrator chastises himself for being deceived by surfaces:
“I listened to the noise in vain, I should have tried to listen
to what was inside.”) The mountainʼs summit affords the
protagonist the opportunity to see his surroundings from an
all-but-impossible perspective.
Karasu also excels at reversals. In “The Prey,” a
fi sherman is “caught” by a fi sh that swallows his arm
and becomes a kind of extension of himself. “In Praise
of the Crab” tries to give the reader a crabʼs-eye view of
an incident in which the crab is “humiliated” while “In
Praise of the Fearless Porcupine” is a look at how humans
and their cities have impinged on the lives of a porcupine
family. These turnabouts in the hierarchy of things we
have all come to expect seem to be motivated by a desire
to obliterate boundaries—such as those between the hunter
and the hunted or the lover and the object loved—and to
establish a balance, an equality so that neither dominates
the other. (This is refl ected, to some extent, in the balance
of power exhibited in the very game the tourists have come
to see.)
While some of the stories hold together on their own
(“ʻKill Me, Master!ʼ” could easily be lifted out of the
collection and its ending would still be heartbreaking),
most seem allegories that not only need the framework
narrative if they are to be fully appreciated, but also require
us to read to the very last page of the book. Like the lemon
juice or candle fl ame used to reveal the text of a longawaited
love letter written in invisible ink, the fi nal words
bring out the more elusive strata of meaning within the
text. This technique, however, forces us to put up with a
certain amount of bewilderment, induces us to scratch our
heads at the end of many of the stories and wonder where
weʼve been stranded. Truth be told, even when Iʼd fi nished
the book, some of the stories still seemed insoluble. And,
after one or two of them, I felt the way Kafka claimed one
should feel after reading a novel: “as though we had been
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