Translator's Note

These seven poems, which will form part of a future anthology of 42 poets, are from Gonca Özmen’s second book, Belki Sessiz (Maybe Quiet, 2008). Özmen’s early publishing success and the prizes she received soon thereafter led to this book’s publication by the Yapı Kredi Publications. The numerous essays and interviews on Belki Sessiz, the translations of her poetry into several languages, her international poetry readings, along with her strong persona^* furthered Özmen’s reputation both at home and abroad, catapulting her to the status of one of Turkey’s most distinctive and eloquent young voices today. Not surprisingly, both of her books are now in their fifth editions. Özmen has said, “Poetry is a footpath and poets should be stubborn goats.” She clearly has followed her own advice.

The poems are terse and deceptively simple, as is typical of Özmen’s output. And therein lies their beauty. Özmen is adept at creating mood, painting vivid scenery, and evoking emotion with the fewest of words. She uses the most unlikely and surreal, but in retrospect logical and realistic, combinations of words—her poems are powerful and convincing. They are replete with abstractions behaving as concrete objects, taking on tangible form (“Oh, to place a rain beside morning,” “May I now pause to touch a loneliness,” “our pain was a curtain”) and vice versa (“your mouth, a leafy bitterness”). People are likened to inanimate objects or plants (“I will spring forth from a tree, all green,” “I was a mere house interior / Dust on a table”), while inanimate objects and plants might behave in personified ways (“We were the sounds the rivers heard,” “worry of branches,” “seed’s pangs,” “windows go and return,” “A staircase winds around a loneliness”).

In addition to the usual challenges of translating poetry, associated with wordplay, (multiple) meaning(s), rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and character/mood, Turkish-to-English translation presents additional difficulties, owing to significant differences in language structure. Turkish is a null-subject language; that is, sentences can lack an explicit subject (though a subject pronoun is always encoded in the verb conjugation), unlike English, which requires an explicit subject. In Turkish, the third-person singular pronoun “o” can mean he, she, or it. Couple these differences with the greater flexibility^** of Turkish word order, and the difficulty of capturing the ambiguities of Turkish verse becomes clear. Other translation challenges stem from Turkish being an agglutinating language—compact words can become longwinded when translated into English. (So, “yakalanabilmeli” in Turkish translates to “(he/she/it) should be able to be caught”). Subtle cultural differences come into play as well, making translations like “alınganlık” (in the first poem) rather awkward. My^*** eventual choice of “sensitivities” for “alınganlık” over such alternatives as “thin skin”, “touchiness”, and “sensibilities” required careful consideration, informed by aesthetics and frequency of use, among other factors.

Aside from these general language-related and cultural hurdles, capturing Özmen’s lucid, laconic style was itself a demanding, but hopefully not impossible, task. At times, she bends grammar in ways that are hard to mimic in English and make translating doubly difficult. For example, she will often omit the verb in the second line of a couplet if it repeats the verb from the first line. This can lead to ambiguities as nouns are not declined in English to indicate case, whereas declension features prominently in Turkish. In such instances, I chose not to fill in the verb (e.g., “Through us silences, daydreams” in the first poem).  Similarly, in other instances where she used unusual wording (“crying leaves a stain”, “I was a mere house interior”), I opted to retain the deliberately peculiar, rather than normalizing, correcting, explaining, or polishing (by not modifying “crying leaves a stain” to “tears leave a stain” or “I was a mere house interior” to “I filled the hallways”).

* The first time I saw Gonca, she was on stage at a poetry event in 2013. When it was her turn to talk, she took a large piece of black cardboard and held it in front of her face for a minute or two, sitting in silence all the while. It soon became clear this act was in protest of the violence the police were committing during the then-unfolding Gezi protests.

** The following may not be the best example of word order flexibility because there is a shift in meaning, yet it is a striking example nevertheless: in the poem “Donuk An” from Belki Sessiz, Özmen completely inverts the first line, “Susarsın bir ırmak durur bir an”, to derive the last line, “An bir durur, ırmak bir, susarsın”. Miraculously, that last line still has meaning, albeit somewhat altered from that of the first line.

*** I say “my”, but at this point, I should like to acknowledge the contribution of my long-time friend, Daniel Scher, who has an impeccable sense of language and who, luckily for me, has kindly edited my translations for many years now.

Buğra Giritlioğlu
Daniel Scher

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