I
began Amy Spangler’s newly-published translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti (Noontime in Yenişehir) (1976)[i]
today. A vivid recollection of Ankara in
the Seventies, it brought to mind places and emotions that have been part of my
adult life for decades now: the small businesses, the rhythms of daily life and
the need to survive against sometimes difficult odds.
As
I read on, however, I became aware of a peculiar
sensation that made rethink much of what I believed about translation in the
past. Despite Spangler’s fluid and
extremely readable rendering of Sosyal’s text, I felt the translator lacked an
instinctive grasp of the complex social, cultural and familial negotiations
that dominated the city then and continue to now. She did not broach the complex networks of
honor, duty, the need to provide and social responsibility that permeate the
small business person’s life. The need
to please customers is accompanied by what might appear as an antediluvian
respect for feminine passivity: women need to be looked after, whether they are
at home or on daily shopping. Hence the
employment of rituals of customer service which to westerners might seem
cloying or over-intrusive.
Capitalist interests are
part and parcel of the shopkeepers’ raison
d’être, but they also have a loyalty to one another that is publicly
displayed. Only today while grocery
shopping I saw some of the staff embracing one another before asking whether
they needed any help in making pre-holiday purchases, or anything else. This is part of the desire to ensure that
their close friends are not cheated in any way.
Such overt displays of affection are inevitably treated suspiciously by
less passionate westerners, who ask – often entirely superfluously – “what’s in
it for the seller?” We have to add
another layer of complexity to this structure: sometimes westerners expect as
of right that they should be helped by a local, especially while in positions
of power. Help is freely given with no
questions asked or expected if you need it.
Spangler’s translation could
neither communicate the complexities of the homemaker as she browses from shop
to shop looking for the best for her family dinner. This ritual is entirely different to the
helter-skelter dash to the supermarket and back for frozen dinners. It comprises a complex interplay of social
and conversational thrusts and parries, where the homemaker talks to the
shopkeeper and asks for the best on offer.
Naturally the keeper might want to extend the truth, but their desire
for profit is tempered by the knowledge that the homemaker only wants the best
for her family on a limited budget. This
knowledge leads to a civilized negotiation based on give and take, both
participants secure in the knowledge that no sale might occur. Even if it doesn’t, the respect between the
two remains undimmed.
Noontime in Yenişehir does not know where to begin in recreating a landscape where each
district old and new has stories to tell – of longstanding communities who
moved in when the Republic was established, who have lived cheek-by-jowl for
generations, and who respond to the inexorable progress of change both through
adaptation as well as appealing to the past, as manifested in social and/or
marital rituals – for example, desiring to protect all family members from
harm. We might term such moves ‘traditionalist’
or, more abusively, ‘ostrich-like,’ but Soysal has a lot to tell us about the
power of the past as a living entity and source of strength affecting all of
our lives.
Ankara has changed
immeasurably since Soysal’s day, but that ineffable quality persists in Kızılay. The big government-owned department stores
might have departed now, replaced by concrete shopping centers, but the covered
markets (çarşılar) remain, their
networks of small shops offering the quirky, the different and the
beautiful. Families still run them; the
owners sit communally outside, while their spouses move from adjacent street to
adjacent street in search of the best deals.
Youngsters gather in Kızılay’s tree-lined boulevards to chat, drink
lemonade, or eat lunch at the Ankara University restaurant, just as their
immediate ancestors did in the past. The
atmosphere is redolent with the ghosts of those who took to the streets in days
of yore –not necessarily to protest, but to express that ineffable air of
belonging to an ancient city. The
inexpressible past is mediated through the present, even if no one says so: why
should they? To them it is part and
parcel of their upbringing, their souls, and their beings.
So where does that leave the
translator? For the first time in my
too-long career as an academic, I understood her limitations. Spangler might be highly proficient in both
languages but she can never empathize with Soysal’s haunting prose. There is an ontological core of personality
remaining closed to her. I cannot claim
to any superior knowledge in this respect, as my Turkish is not good enough,
but I can taste the text underneath as I read the translation and use that
experience to reflect on my life as a domiciled Ankaran. I am forced to turn in on myself and consider
what “translation” denotes; is it an expression of inadequacy as well as a
facilitating process; or is it a complex mode of enlightenment that prompts
often inexpressible speculation on my state of being? In a recent Guardian article, Jonathan Freedland likens this state of mind to
that of religion, a feeling that “cannot be explained or justified in the
clear, stainless-steel language of pure reason.”[ii] I think we can think beyond that binary of
reason/ unreason into a more profound mode of being in the moment, where
nothing else – not least worldly thoughts of explication – really matters.
Insofar as Spangler’s work
forced me to sit up and reconsider Ankara past and present, it was a highly
suggestive text. But I am skeptical that
it will achieve the publisher’s purpose of rendering the source-text accessible
to emotionally ring-fenced westerners.
Laurence Raw
11 Sep. 2016.
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