The Future of the Past

The strongest piece in the book is the first. Anday recalls how the critic Nurullah Ataç would recite Divan couplets to himself while walking down the street, and asks: how do you translate a poem written in the Arabic-Persian 'aruz' metre into modern Turkish? His answer is firm: a poem's metre, rhyme, rhythm and sound pattern are its content, so 'simplifying' an aruz poet into unmetred, unrhymed lines is as wrong as forcing free verse into a syllabic mould. He argues that in Tanzimat-era translations French poets lost their personalities and 'came to resemble us', while Rumi was turned into a modern young poet who 'curses and shouts'. He offers his own version of a Rumi couplet, in the original's metre and rhyme, as a counterexample.

The essay also contains a well-known observation of his: the more successful a translator of poetry is, the more thoroughly he erases himself and leaves the stage to the poet — success means being forgotten. It ends with the scholar Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı telling Anday that 'the whole world will hear this' about his Rumi translations, followed by the dry punchline: 'Not a sound came from the world.'

'The Easy and the Difficult in Writing' answers critics who attacked Anday for once saying 'we need difficult writing'. His point, he explains, was not to make things obscure but to oppose shallow treatment of important subjects. His reply to a university lecturer who told artists 'Who do you write for? For me, of course!' is memorable: writers, scientists and philosophers write not for the reader's comfort but to surpass themselves, and a reader who wants to enjoy art must make an effort. The piece closes with a short but intriguing reflection on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the limits of language.

'Suicide Poems' contains the book's heaviest pages. Anday cites the figure of 1,068 suicides in Turkey in 1986, then quotes from Ahmet Oktay's poems about twelve writers and poets who took their own lives — Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, Mayakovsky, Walter Benjamin, Beşir Fuad and others. 'What Is Europe?' starts from Pär Lagerkvist's novel 'Barabbas' and asks: if the French saw even a Swede as an outsider, which European gets to decide whether Turks are European? The question has lost none of its edge.

The book's weakness comes from its genre: most pieces introduce specific translations published at the time, and one or two pages rarely allow deep analysis. Some simply end with long quotations. Still, the final pieces on Plato's hostility to artists (via Iris Murdoch's 'The Fire and the Sun') and on Feyerabend's critique of science show that Anday can make the reader think even in a short form. For anyone interested in translating poetry, the first essay alone is worth the book.

• Each piece ends with its source and date (Çerçeve, Cumhuriyet Kitap)
• Theoretical points are illustrated with concrete couplets, lines and quotations
• Personal memories — encounters with Ataç and Gölpınarlı — bring the pieces to life