Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

A great mind can change the way time is organized in
language by, in effect, drawing circles with language,
reasoning circularly (as İlhan Berk does sometimes), or
by compressing information, which is what Ece Ayhan
calls a “hermetic” or “algorithmic” way of conveying a
message. According to Websterʼs, “algorithm” has to do
with fi nding solutions through a fi nite number of steps that
frequently involves the repetition of an operation; the poet
does not have to repeat the linguistic operation himself. The
attentive reader can do that for him/herself.
In one of his poems, Ayhan says “fi nger kid question,” but
he says this only after having established in earlier poems
how, simply by raising a fi nger when other kids remain
silent, a particular kid can ask a daring question in order
to challenge authority. Think of a single fi nger in a class.
If it is the teacherʼs, the meaning is one thing; if it is a
studentʼs, itʼs another. You see, this kind of relationship is
made possible in an ongoing way in Ayhanʼs poetry, and
the reader is never surprised when she or he sees the phrase
“fi nger kid question.” But this kind of relationship requires
a vertical understanding of the information as given in the
language. The poet is there more to provide the materials
and context for oneʼs personal reading than to write poems
suffi cient in themselves.
Great poets never provide too much language. They depend
on the readerʼs use of language; they leave language to
him or her. It seems to me that poets are interested in
constructing new relationships in language, and if poets
need relationships that have already been registered, they
simply allude to them. And that, precisely that, is what I
fi nd diffi cult in translating poetry.
Translating a poem is, for me, part of the broader
experience of understanding it. I translate poems because I
am a literary critic, not because I am a translator.
EF: But what about deep cultural differences? I should
think that moving a text written in Turkish into English
would require adjustments no less profound than bringing
Americans to a recognition of the difference between life in
Dallas and life in Istanbul.
ÖO: Translation serves one of the most challenging of
human minds — the one that wants to read, to think about,
and to understand what is written in a foreign tongue.
The translator has to assume that — geographically,
culturally, linguistically, psychologically, individually
— different people have minds that are equal, equivalent,
and compatible. The need to communicate has always gone
hand in hand with the need to be different. At the risk of
sounding like a post-modernist, I would say that cultures
are in fact as incommensurable as are individuals, even
those who belong to the same culture and who speak the
same language.
When you say “adjustments,” though, I take it that you
are referring to the mental processes that take place in
the translatorʼs mind, in his or her own unique solitude.
With that, we are at the heart of William S. Burroughsʼs
“interzone,” the ultimate space between two totally
abstract, transhistorical, all-embracing, supercultural forms
of existence. For example, the distinctions between “he,”
“she,” and “it” in English are a major problem for the
Turkish translator, since Turkish has only one pronoun,
“O,” for all three. When one translates “O” from Turkish,
one has to sexualize/genderize it in English. In other words,
when a writer and/or poet says, “I love O,” s/he could do
so without revealing his/her sexual orientation. “I love O”
in Turkish is, furthermore, never the equivalent of “I love
him” or “I love her” in English, since if one were a man
and said the former, he would be indicating a broad social
category, whereas in Turkish he would simply be talking
about his feelings of compassion and/or desire. In Turkish,
he would be talking about himself, not a “him” or his
“lover.”
To cite another example, in Norwegian there is only one
word for being “alike” and “equal,” while in Turkish
“equal,” “alike,” “similar,” and “matching” are all different
words. As a result, in Turkish, but not in Norwegian, one
can have an experience that is “not like” another but, in
another sense, is equal to it.
Ernest Hemingway, in “Fascism is a Lie,” his speech to
the American Writers Congress in 1937, summarized the
question succinctly: can my experience in this culture,
language, and mind be made to feel like your experience in
your culture, language, and mind. In the preface to my book
of translations of İlhan Berkʼs poems, I use the metaphor
of unlocking doors from inside to describe the process
of translation. The translator moves “like a cat-burglar”
between languages, and the more effective s/he is, the less
visible s/he becomes; in turn, the less visible s/he is, the
better the translation overcomes differences.
EF: Given the profoundly different readings among
English-speaking critics of even canonical, widely studied
writers, I wonder what it is, really, that can survive in all
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