A dual intelligence
By Maureen Freely
Review published in Cornucopia 30
The Visible
Poets series from Arc Publications comes with a lofty and rather alarming mission statement. It aims to challenge the view that poetry in translation should sound vaguely like English. According to
its editor, Jean Boase-Beier, translators should work not to hide but to reveal the original text. Their own labours should be just as evident. Above all, they should not worry about putting off the
punters. The true devotee of poetry is a sophisticated animal who turns to verse “to experience the strange, the unusual, the new, the foreign”, who “delights in the stretching and
distortion of language that makes any poetry, translated or not, alive and distinctive”.
That’s the
theory, anyway. I can’t imagine what would happen in the wrong hands. But only the best hands are in evidence so far. The great virtue of this series is its emphasis on active collaboration
during the drafting stage. This gives the poets more control over the translator’s choices while also freeing the translators to take greater liberties than they might have allowed themselves
had the poets not been involved.
Cevat Çapan and Michael Hulse first met in 1993 at a symposium on poetry
and translation organised by the British Council in Istanbul. Their first collaborative task was to translate a poem called Tas Baskðsð. Hulse has no Turkish; Çapan has a Cambridge
degree. Çapan provided Hulse with a literal version of the text and Hulse played around with it. Hulse, a distinguished poet in his own right, dared to give the English version a different
shape, a different beat, a different title and a different logic.
But it was by taking these liberties that he was
able to convey the melancholy music of the original. Çapan was so pleased that he suggested they continue the collaboration. This they did in dribs and drabs for the better part of a decade.
Hulse was forever mindful of the limitations of their method. He encouraged Çapan to be severe
if he felt
Hulse had lost too much in translation or strayed too far away from the original. They would then work together to come up with solutions that suited them both. To read this dual-language edition is
to get a real and very pleasurable sense of a dual intelligence.
The spirit of the original is evident in
Hulse’s English, but it never overpowers his own poetic voice. It pays close attention to Çapan’s tricky modernist surfaces without ever losing the Anatolian rhythms that underpin
it.
Çapan has been one of Turkey’s leading literary lights for going on two decades. Bejan Matur is a
new arrival but has already won two prizes. She was born in southeastern Turkey and went to school in Gaziantep, moving on to take a degree at the University of Ankara.
It is easy to see how she took the literary set by storm when she arrived in Istanbul: the music she creates is
too powerful to ignore. The beat is mesmerising, impossible to resist. We never discover why the wind is howling through the mansion, or who made the queen unhappy, or who sent the storm that blew
childhood away, or whose bones languish in the black biers. We have no choice but to let her voice carry on from one mythic death-scape to the next.
In her preface to this collection, due out in spring, the translator Ruth Christie speaks of Matur’s intense engagement with sound and rhythm: she
reads early drafts of her poems to friends who are not poets to make sure she has every beat exact, every sound strong enough to the non-specialist ear. Christie achieves the same magic in her
English translation: to do so she had to make big changes in punctuation and word order. But here again, she was able to do so in consultation with the poet. Now everyone’s happy. Why
aren’t collaborations like this the norm?
The simple answer, I suppose, is that they don’t happen unless
the institutions of culture make them happen. Çapan would never have met Hulse if it hadn’t been for the British Council. Matur and Christie would never have found an English publisher if
the Centre for Translation Studies at University of East Anglia had not joined forces with Arc to promote a new approach to world poetry. In this age of global paranoia and nationalist
fence-building, we could see the funding for such programmes dwindling.
This only serves to increase my admiration
for Milet, a heroic London-based publishing house that specialises in dictionaries and dual-language children’s literature. Last year it launched a series of dual-language books by well-known
Turkish fiction writers, and this summer it moved beyond the big names of yesteryear to publish a (single-language) translation of Perihan Ma€den’s The Messenger Boy Murders. Set in a city
that feels Russian but is populated with Chinese names, full of nineteenth-century languor but speckled with Hollywood references and overshadowed by a villainous fertility expert, it is difficult to
categorise, impossible to put down.
© Maureen Freely
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