My relationship with Turkish literature started off belatedly and in a somewhat idiosyncratic fashion. I was born in Germany and raised there until I was of school age, and the first books my parents read to me were in German, as were my first story records I listened to over and over again. My parents were understandably concerned that I learn this language, of which they themselves had only a rudimentary grasp; they knew that, living in a foreign society, the easiest way to get yourself excluded is to resist or to be unable to learn the local language, and “exclusion” was very big in Germany. The strategy worked – I remember switching back and forth with ease between German and Turkish at home, and holding my own at the kindergarten with my German friends and teachers without having to think about it. In the process, I became much better acquainted with the tales of Brothers Grimm and Andersen than the Turkish folk tales such as Keloğlan, or the stories of Nasreddin Hoca.

Then we moved to Turkey, and I went to primary school in İzmit, an industrial city close to İstanbul. Even though I lost most of my German due to disuse during those years, I started reading voraciously in Turkish – the same sound strategy, I guess, applied to new circumstances. One thing I didn’t quite realize at the time about my reading list, however, was that most of the books I read were in translation – only a handful of them had been written by Turkish authors, and those mostly by Aziz Nesin, the humorist. I did try to read Ömer Seyfettin and Kemalettin Tuğcu but was bored to tears by their sentimentality.

After primary school I attended an American high school in İstanbul as a boarding student. One of the reasons why I have fond memories of Robert College (it’s a complicated story, but yes, many high schools in Turkey, especially those providing education in English or French, are called “colleges”) was its rich library. I started reading books in English and soon turned into a veritable book junkie, but again, Turkish writers were not very popular with me at that tender age.

So by the time I decided to take a serious interest in books written originally in Turkish, when I was about 16, I had already formed a taste based almost entirely on literatures written in languages other than my mother tongue. I did my best to make up for lost time during my university years, but it didn’t struck me until much later that the Turkish writers I liked the most were, in some ways, similar to me, hailing as they did from Western influences, setting up a web of references that were not limited to, or even shaped by, parochial experience or Turkish literary history. Their “world” had strong and organic links to world literature, and to world culture in general.

It is perhaps only natural, then, that as a writer I now find myself to belong to this category, and that I have an instinctive tendency to situate all Turkish writers on one or the other side of a dichotomy – writers with an “international sound” versus writers with a “Turkish sound”. And I believe this very dichotomy is at the root of the predicament of contemporary writing in Turkey.

The predicament is this: although it boasts (mostly to itself) of a magnificent past and a vibrant present, and except for the few works of an unbelievably small number of writers (Nazım Hikmet, Yaşar Kemal, Orhan Pamuk, and, in France, Nedim Gürsel), Turkish literature is not on the map. This despite the fact that there has been an explosion in the number of writers and the range of styles and subject matter during the last two decades. A new generation of fiction writers have started to fill bookstores with novels and collections of short stories ranging from science fiction and fantasy to pulp fiction and suspense, from first-person accounts of life in the city, in the ghettoes, life as a clubber, a transvestite, a hacker or an artist to accounts of abortion, loneliness, divorce, gay & lesbian love, etc. True, most of these are nondurable goods, designed for quick consumption, but there exists a considerable amount of good writing easily on par with similar works of fiction produced in Europe or the States.

A number of explanations have been offered. If your are a publisher interested in publishing books written in a language you can’t read, what would you do? One thing to go by would be sales figures. You won’t be able to go far with that in Turkey. The publishing industry is “shallow”, in the sense that people in general don’t read books – the average print run of novels is three thousand copies (in paperback - hard cover books are not popular in Turkey); a typical bestseller hits the 15-20 thousand level; it is extremely rare for a novel to exceed 100 thousand copies in sales. Another thing you might want to do is take a look at reviews; unfortunately, almost no magazines publish reviews in English or French, and as far as reviews in Turkish go, there is very little of that as well. You might try to take the advice of literary agents, but there are no literary agents in Turkey, only copyright agencies who work one way, selling the Turkish rights of foreign books to Turkish publishers. You would have to be a pretty determined sob to overcome all the obstacles and to actually read a sample translation of a Turkish novel.

But that’s not all, and this brings us back to the predicament and the dichotomy business. I find that the international audience –including publishers- is not that much interested in reading, say, a cyberpunk novel written in Turkish, or anything that does not offer a unique taste of the “local”. Why read the novel of a Turkish writer if the book has nothing that is unique to Turkey and Turkish culture? If it could have just as well been written by an American novelist? There goes all the “international sound” output. There is a lot of good writing in the “Turkish sound” category, but here there is another problem: most of it is too “Turkish”. Either the language or the cultural references or both are difficult to translate, and they lose their meaning, color and significance in another language and cultural milieu. This leaves us with what I call the “Grand Bazaar” literature – products designed for the tourist who doesn’t want the real thing itself but a sanitized, tamed, watered down version of it that looks like the real thing but would never fool the locals, like the artifacts tourists buy at the Grand Bazaar in İstanbul. It’s like Chinese food in a way – what you eat at Ollie’s has little to do with what people eat in China. And that’s what gets translated and passed off as Turkish literature, and has only that much to do with the real thing.

Having said that, let me introduce a caveat: I would hate to give the impression that, on the average, Turkish writers today produce better works than English or French writers. Not at all. A lot of tepid stuff gets regularly published in Turkey, and it is a popular pastime to complain about how today’s writers lack the power to move the masses, etc. Just like anywhere else. In addition (and this I’ve always found very interesting), the Turkish scene peculiarly lacks “normal” literature (as opposed to “avant-garde” or “great” literature) dealing with social realities. I am by no means an exponent of “social realism”, but I still happen to think that the vast majority of readers everywhere turn to literature in the hope of finding something that makes sense of their experiences, something that lends them insight about their lives, and helps them cope with what they have to endure. So much happens so regularly in Turkey that the appearance of tranquility, a kind of disinterestedness, in literature on the whole is deeply intriguing: there are problems arising from social rupture, poverty, religion and the military; there is the “Kurdish problem”; there is the plight of children living and working in the streets of big cities; there is the fear of death by earthquake hanging since 1999 like Democles’ sword above people’s heads – very little of this ever finds its way into regular fiction. No wonder book sales are so low.

There is, nonetheless, a saving grace that validates talk about “Turkish literature” as a category: on both sides of the dichotomy, among both “international sound” and “Turkish sound” writing, there are enough specimens to fill the reader with awe, stories and novels that distill the essence of what it means to be human, explore untrodden areas of means of expression, and bring out rare embodiments of a refreshing aesthetics. These I like to call “firecrackers”.

While assembling this issue of Descant, I wanted to bring together all my favorite firecrackers and blast them off; I wanted to introduce all the wonderful writers to the English-reading audience. This, of course, was not possible. Some of the best stories –like Leyla Erbil’s and Tahsin Yücel’s- were too long; some writers deserved to be included with more than one piece – I was forced leave these out in order to make room for a greater number of writers. For similar reasons I decided not to include excerpts from novels – first because most Turkish novels don’t lend themselves to such extraction, second I have a personal dislike for the practice, and third we ran out of space. Sampling all the major trends in contemporary Turkish writing also proved to be beyond the doable. My sincere apologies to all those who should have been represented in this volume but are not.

Still, notwithstanding these shortcomings, I would like to believe that all is not lost – the stories that have finally made it into the issue sufficiently demonstrate, I think, what Turkish writers are up to, what they are interested in, and what they are trying to accomplish. More than anything else, I hope this collection offers enough and variegated literary enjoyment for discerning readers.

***

It was as a result of a series of coincidences that I met Karen Mulhallen in the summer of 2002, in the heat of İstanbul. I remember vividly the story she told me and a mutual friend about how she had been trying to put together a Turkish literature issue for the past seven years, and how several attempts had failed. I would like to thank her for her perseverance and the great job she did in enriching the issue with original submissions from Canada. Thanks are also due to Mary Newberry and Alex Campbell for all the effort they put in to make this issue possible.