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🦋 Pamuk on the radio

I found a radio interview with Orhan Pamuk -- the January 22nd episode of Robert Harrison's show "Entitled Opinions" on KZSU. The blogger at Coisas do Gomes alerted me to this interview when he posted this quote:

There were unfortunate institutional attempts in Turkey to purify Turkish in mid-thirties and forties but I don't believe in it. My standard for using the language is the language I hear from my grandmother, from my mother, from my father. I am a conservative, in the sense that I want to keep Turkish as it is. In my novels I use the language of my mother, of my grandmother, which is actually the language I also hear on the streets.

When I published my Istanbul book, some four years ago in Turkey, my readers from the younger generation object to the fact that this is not the colorful, happy, sunny Istanbul -- and I agreed with them. I wrote my Istanbul, and that's the Istanbul I like. The Istanbul of long winter nights; black and white, a poor black and white place, where the ruins of Ottoman empire, the ruins of all extravagant, wooden Ottoman buildings, they're in ruins -- that's how I spent my childhood, playing football among the Ottoman ruins, among the wooden houses, which were in the next two decades burned down one by one. My Istanbul, in the fifties, sixties, seventies, was an extraordinarily provincial place, where the sense of community was out, the sense of being outside of Europe, but so close to Europe, and still being poor; the sense of "nothing will change here, there is no future here," was still hovering around; perhaps a place where the presence of the loss of Ottoman empire, that this city had once upon a time, was once the capital of a great, magnamious (?) and very rich empire, now is in ruins and leading a poor, provincial life, hoping to develop a relationship with Europe...

I believe I have read similar sentiments to this in a published article of Pamuk's -- it sheds new light on them, to hear them straight from the horse's mouth.

posted evening of Sunday, August 31st, 2008
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