READIN

Monday, June second, 2008

🦋 Turkish lit

I just found out about this: a new translation by Maureen Freely is out, not of Pamuk but of another Turkish author named Fethiye Çetin -- the book is a memoir of her grandmother, an Armenian Christian kidnapped by a Turkish officer. This sounds interesting on any number of points, and Mr. Pope's review makes it sound like captivating reading.

See also this longer review and interview with Çetin, by Fréderike Geerdink.

posted evening of June second, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, June 7th, 2008

🦋 Doğum günün kutlu olsun, Orhan!

Today Mr. Pamuk turns 56 years old. (And it has been nearly a year since I first started reading his books.) I wish him a long and happy life of writing.

posted morning of June 7th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 23rd, 2008

🦋 People vs. Pamuk

I'm making my way through chapter 1 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk, which deals with the events around Pamuk's being prosecuted in 2005 for "hostility to Turkishness" and his eventual exile. Man this is confusing stuff -- not McGaha's fault, his writing is pretty terse and straightforward. But there are a lot of conflicting issues competing for my attention as I try to figure out what's going on. Pamuk is hoping to win the Nobel prize for literature (he did not, but won it the following year, at which point I think the prosecution had already happened -- I don't know if he was still living in Turkey at this point); Turkey is hoping to be considered for admission to the EU, and busy revising its laws (including the one under which Pamuk is charged) to abide by international human rights law; Turkish nationalists are opposed to the EU and see the prosecution as an avenue for preventing it. Erdoğan, a moderate Islamist, who was prime minister in 2005, had been prosecuted some years earlier (if I understand correctly) by Turkish nationalists for expressing hostility to secularism; and he could not have been prime minister if it were not for the liberalization going on to further Turkey's chances of acceptance into the EU. I want to make a timeline of events but I don't think I'm up to that point yet.

I totally want to make a hypertext version of this book's bibliography* -- it is chock full of useful articles, a lot of which are available on the web. Loving this line from Pamuk's acceptance speech when he was awarded the Friedenspreis of the German Book Trade:

Even as [the novel] relates our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people's lives as if they were our own.

Note: it seemed funny at first, for Pamuk's trial to come at the front of the book, which is otherwise arranged chronologically; but as I read it is making some sense to me to have this before the novels rather than after -- it gives a sense of the environment in which Pamuk is writing and coming to write, and a context for his cosmopolitanism and Turkish identity.

*And, update: Dr. McGaha has granted me permission to post the bibliography. I hope to put it up tonight or tomorrow.

posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

🦋 Pamuk: a bibliography

This is the bibliography from Michael McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk: The Writer in his Novels, which professor McGaha has graciously allowed me to reprint here. I am hoping to extend it as time goes by, and to keep the links up to date. Contributions in the comments section are of course welcome.

Note: I have added some entries that are not in McGaha's bibliography. To differentiate these I have enclosed anything I add in square brackets.

posted morning of June 25th, 2008: 2 responses
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Tuesday, July first, 2008

🦋 Pamuk in 2005: a chronology

These are the events leading up to Pamuk's trial in 2005, as related in Chapter 1 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk. I've converted them into tabular format for easy reference.

posted evening of July first, 2008: Respond

Wednesday, July second, 2008

🦋 Bad things happening in Turkey

The Independent reports that two officers retired from the Turkish army have been arrested over a plot to assassinate a number of targets* including Orhan Pamuk. Commentators are speaking of this as a coup d'état.

The prosecution is apparently calling for Islamicists (including Prime Minister Erdoğan) to be banned from politics in Turkey.

* (In the context of Turkish politics it is difficult to find the correct adjective to qualify the targets. I was going to say "liberal" but that is not correct as I'm sure their list included some Islamicists.)

posted morning of July second, 2008: Respond

Friday, July 4th, 2008

🦋 Orhan growing up

To the extent that he had been exposed to [Sufi mystic] literature in school, he had found it boring, antiquated, and irrelevant to his own interests and concerns. Furthermore, he had always associated those texts with fanatical Islamic obscurantists and right-wing Turkish politicians. Now, as he immersed himself in three of the greatest masterpieces of the genre -- Farid ud-Din Attar's Conference of the Birds, Jelal ud-Din Rumi's Mathnawi, and Sheikh Galip's Beauty and Love -- he was shocked to discover in them all the qualities he most admired in the best Western literature (and which were so sorely lacking in modern Turkish literature): dizzying intellectual complexity, sophisticated self-consciousness, playfulness, and the most refined stylistic elegance.

Chapter 2 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk concerns the actual story of Pamuk's childhood and young adulthood -- the story which has been transformed in various ways in many of his novels. Much of it seems very familiar to me -- mainly from The Black Book and from the essays in Other Colors. It is useful, I think, to see the ways the stories are rooted in reality; and I must say I'm liking McGaha's prose a lot -- it is elegant and easy to digest.

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2008: Respond

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

🦋 Omission

At the end of the second chapter of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk I learn that Other Colors, ostensibly a translation of Pamuk's 1999 collection Öteki Renkler: Seçme Yazılar ve Bir Hikaye, is actually a separate collection, with only about a third of the contents taken from the older book.*

All the essays on Turkish literature and politics were omitted from the English version. Replacing them were... assessments of the works of authors he admires -- ranging from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Salman Rushdie -- ...others are autobiographical or contain thoughtful reflections on his own novels.

This is surprising to me. I like the selection in Other Colors; but I'd be very interested to read Pamuk's essays on Turkish literature and politics as well. McGaha quotes a passage from Pamuk's essay (which he had written in 1974, at the outset of his career) on the Turkish author Oğuz Atay:

Pamuk argues that critics were bewildered by the novelty of Atay's novels, in which the author's voice and attitude, his peculiar tone of intelligent sarcasm, were more important than plot or character development. What is most distinctive about these novels is their style:

When the novelist puts the objects that he saw into words in this or that way, what he is doing is a kind of deception that the ancients called "style," manifesting a kind of stylization. There are deceptions every writer uses, like a painter who portrays objects. This is the only way I can explain Faukner's fragmetation of time, Joyce's objectification of words, Yaşar Kemal's drawing his observations of nature over and over. Talented novelists begin writing their real novels after they discover this cunning. From the moment that we readers catch on to this trick, it means that we understand a little bit of the novelistic technique, what Sartre called "the writer's metaphysics."

This passage seems pretty key to an understanding of My Name is Red, and how it fits in with Pamuk's other novels. I'm sorry to see neither of Atay's novels has been translated into English.

* A little thought makes it obvious that many of the essays in Other Colors could not have appeared in the earlier collection, dealing as they do with events occuring in 2005 and later. My grasp of Pamuk's timeline was not as firm when I first looked at this book as it is now.

I also went back just now to reread the preface, which makes clear that this is a separate work from the earlier collection. Look at its beautiful final paragraph:

I am hardly alone in being a great admirer of the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. But to anger one friend who is too much in awe of him (she's an academic, of course), I sometimes ask, "What is so great about this writer? He managed to finish only a few books, and if he's famous, it's not for the work he finished but the work he never managed to complete." My friend replies that Benjamin's œuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this was why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I smile and say, "One day I'll write a book that's made only from fragments too." This is that book, set inside a frame to suggest a center that I have tried to hide: I hope that readers will enjoy imagining that center into being.

posted afternoon of July 6th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, July 7th, 2008

🦋 Something to check

My Name is Red is set in 1591 -- I am reading Pamuk's essay on "Bellini and the East," from Other Colors, and find out about Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, dated 1480. I don't remember any specific reference to this painting in My Name is Red, but I am sure now that there must have been some -- I must have passed over it as something unfamiliar, not bothered to look it up.

Pamuk says,

The portrait has spawned so many copies, variations, and adaptations, and the reproductions made from these assorted images have gone on to adorn so many textbooks, book covers, newspapers, posters, banknotes, stamps, educational posters, and comic books, that there cannot be a literate Turk who has not seen it hundreds if not thousands of times.

(I see that with this entry, Pamuk becomes the first author about whom I've written 100 posts. Not exactly sure what to make of that, beyond that I'm totally gaga about his writing.)

posted morning of July 7th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, July 26th, 2008

🦋 -- Ohhhhh......

So I'm reading the third chapter of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which concerns The Silent House) and thinking, the family name Darvinoğlu sounds awfully familiar -- was it the name of one of the characters in The Black Book? And then I start reading the fourth chapter, which concerns The White Castle, and get to the following passage, which makes the scales fall from my eyes:

It was Don Quixote that inspired [Pamuk] to present his own novel as an old manuscript found and translated into modern Turkish; once that was decided, it occurred to him that it would be amusing to have the manuscript found in the archives at Gebze and translated by none other than Faruk Darvinoğlu, the historian of The Silent House.

Oh! So the characters I was wondering about in the winter have earlier roots. Wild -- I wish The Silent House were available in an English translation.

McGaha also says that some critics faulted Holbrook, in her translation of The White Castle, for including the references to The Silent House without any explanation -- this seems a little weird to me. I can't see how she could have provided any explanation within the text; maybe an afterword should have been included. Doesn't seem like it would have made a huge difference in the reading experience.

posted afternoon of July 26th, 2008: Respond
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