Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Life Story (Yaşam Öyküsü)
Edip Cansever
translated by Richard Tillinghast
A child with light sandy hair, thin—really thin—whose
ribs you could count. I ask his name. First he turns his
head away and after keeping quiet for awhile he answers
my question: “Edip!” Where were you born? I say. Not a
word. His father and mother probably know. But he does
know the street where he lives very well. Row after row
of wooden houses with small or large gardens. He pushes
open a wooden door with his foot. Look, itʼs our garden.
On the right side was a withered quince tree. On the other
side a well. Around the well, morning glories. Then other
houses, other gardens.
Countless windows, balconies with zinc fl oors. People
have lived for thousands of years in these houses, almost
all in the same way. On the left side a trellis, or something
sticking out that imitates a trellis, which keeps the fruit
from ripening. We go outside. Opposite is a long, really
long and really high wall. A pavilion runs alongside it with
huge trees and towers. The place is fi lled with secrets.
Who lives inside? How is Edip supposed to know! Is this
the mansion Ruhi Bey burned in the book called How I
Am Ruhi Bey. “Is this the mansion Ruhi Bey burned?” He
looks at my face. The longer he looks, the number of Edips
increases. The last Edip breaks in, “Yes, this pavilion,” he
answers immediately, recalling a period in a childhood and
early youth which he hadnʼt liked.
He was born in August 1928 in Beyazit, in the
Soğanağa District. Then they moved to a house in Haseki.
But in those days Edip didnʼt know Edip at all. His
beginning to get acquainted with himself happened in the
above-mentioned house in Saraçhanebaşı. The theft of
plums, riding rented bikes inside the Şehzade Mosque,
summer days in vacant lots, acrobats rehearsing their
performances, the museum in the fi re station . . . But in
rainy weather Edip loved, most of all, cinema tickets, the
doors of cinemas. May he continue to love them! Suddenly
one day he will be 56. He fi nds himself in fi rst grade, in
elementary school, with a short apron and strong-smelling
leather schoolbag. Even today when he smells the smell of
leather, he remembers his face burning from the beating he
got his fi rst day in school.
I mentioned stealing greengage plums. There was
a garden adjoining ours. And inside, a plum tree and a
house that looked like ours. In those days all the houses
in the neighborhood and in the narrow streets resembled
each other. From many things that happened, the childʼs
memory can only recall tiny little fragments from the
overall perspective of events that occurred. There in that
house with its plum tree we had a neighbor, Nigâr Hanım,
whose face I have largely forgotten but whose jokes and
imitations I can never, out of a long series of events, forget.
Nigâr Hanım, who had twenty or twenty-fi ve cats. Nigâr
Hanım who entertained guests with the sherbets given to
new mothers when the cats had kittens (actually it was a
house made gentle by cats). She had two brothers as well as
a husband. Did she have a husband? Yes she had, but it was
as if she didnʼt. He was never seen, he didnʼt like to be seen
and it was as if she had fabricated him in order to seem
ordinary. One of her brothers was Kenan Bey. He was to
be my guardian at the Kumkapı Middle School. The other
brother was Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. One of the rooms was
full to the brim with books. I canʼt be sure at this point
whether the books were Kenan Beyʼs or Tanpınarʼs. But
our best neighbors were Gülsüm Hanım and her husband
Riza Bey. They were immigrants. When no one answered
the garden gateʼs little bell I would go to Gülsüm Hanımʼs
house. Riza Bey probably chain-smoked. And there was a
stove that never stopped burning, that stood in a corner of
the room like a planet that hadnʼt cooled down. Anyway . . .
In the days when the Second World War was beginning,
we moved to a fl at in Fatih. My mother, father and three
sisters all together. I remember the doorman İsmail Efendi.
He also worked as an ice-cream seller. In the evening
when he was making ice cream, it was one of my greatest
pleasures to watch while he decked out his cart. His cart
was dazzlingly white. Even the reds and purples were
dazzlingly white. Itʼs as if I learned white from it. In
addition, along with my friends from the neighborhood it
had become an addiction for me to go into the sea from
the sand and charcoal pier at Yenikapı. The sea! For such a
long time it was missing from my life. Later I used to make
the Seven Dwarves by cutting them out with a jigsaw. Also
the streets being watered by the municipal truck and the
leafy boulevards in the middle of the streets would affect
me like a different country. There was so much land, so
many gardens, that it is as if I smell the fragrance of the
grass and trees in the neighborhood even today. If I fall, if
a part of me bleeds, undoubtedly a green stain would be
found next to the red.
After studying for a year at Gelenbevi Middle School,
I was enrolled at Kumkapı Middle School. I began to write
Translation Review 47