Interview by Sıddık Ertaş
What is translation, in general terms?
For me, translation is “existing in the other language” — which is also the title of one of my books on translation studies. To exist in the other language is to be born into a new life. Bringing about a new birth in a language means bringing about a person’s birth in another world. In this sense translation is a kind of “linguistic midwifery”.
Recently you have come to the fore with your translations of Arabic poetry and literature. What makes Mahmoud Darwish a great poet read so attentively in both East and West?
Mahmoud Darwish was a poet who personally witnessed a series of events that shook the Palestinian people. He lived through migration, exile and resistance himself. He is the voice and breath of Palestine. Yet he is never someone to be confined to Palestine alone, nor is he merely a poet of resistance. When he writes about Palestine and the Palestinians, he is in fact writing about the human being — and the reverse is also true: when he writes about the human being, he is writing about his own land. He himself is present in every line of his poetry; he is faithful to his feelings. The poet is constantly searching for something new, and this is plainly visible in the course of his poetic production. In modern Arabic poetry Darwish represents a continually innovative vein in both form and content. Almost all his poems carry a powerful sensibility, and when a strong knowledge and aesthetics of poetry are added to that sensibility, a world poet emerges.
How did you realise that Mahmoud Darwish was a great poet?
I became aware of his intellectual depth when I read an interview the Lebanese poet Abdo Wazen had conducted with him. Meanwhile, my wife was eagerly reading Darwish in some translations that I later realised were “crippled”, and she kept pressing me to translate Darwish so that she could read him. That is how my reading of Darwish in Arabic began. I looked at some of the Turkish translations and realised with horror what a crippled birth had taken place. This saddened me greatly. Why does a poet write? A poet writes to make his voice heard — about life, about becoming, about the human being, about his homeland, and, in Darwish’s position, about a people’s struggle to exist. But unfortunately that voice was not being heard. Yes, he made it heard in his own language, but only part of the world benefited from it. In Turkish it was as if we were reading something else entirely rather than Darwish — a “made-up” poetry in which someone had taken a few words and bent them to his own ideas. That amounts to nothing less than the slaughter of Mahmoud Darwish. It hurt me deeply that such an intellectual figure had been carried into Turkish in so crippled a way — leaving aside the successful translations by Lütfullah Göktaş and Hakan Özkan. It devastated me, so to speak. It was with this feeling that I began translating Darwish. In a sense I took on the mission of rescuing Darwish in Turkish. The more I translated, the more I realised how deep his poetry is: how it touches people, how it spreads out under the sun, mile after mile, the wounds — no longer even scabbing over — of a people who have suffered for centuries and have never been able, or never been allowed, to realise their own existence, and how painfully it does so. So I lived through this translation adventure so that all of this could be read, shared and recreated in Turkish with depth and pleasure. I am glad I did. Of all the translation adventures I have had, I can say this was one of the most enjoyable.
What problems did you encounter in the translation process?
My Arabic was good, but I knew the poet only through encyclopaedic information. I needed to know him better. I began to research his personality, his intellectual background, his outlook on life, on humanity and on poetry — his outlook as a whole. I read interviews with him and some of the essays written about him. This allowed me to understand his poetry better and to bring the translation closer to his way of feeling. How far I succeeded is, of course, ultimately for readers and critics to judge. To be honest, Abdulkadir Abdelli, the doyen of translators of Turkish literature into Arabic, told me that when he read my translations he felt as if he were reading Darwish in Arabic. Knowing him to be someone who does not care much for compliments, I trust his opinion. Darwish has a poetic language that holds philosophy, mythology, everyday life, peace, existence and many other riches. It is a rhythmic language; even his texts that come close to prose have a very rich musicality. So recreating in Turkish the musicality Darwish created formally required some serious racking of the brain.
Which of Mahmoud Darwish’s works have you translated? Are you thinking of translating others?
My first translation from Darwish was his long epic poem Jidariyya. In Arabic, jidariyya refers to the art of painting on a wall; in Turkish art circles the word “mural” is used for it, and I chose that word for the title rather than “duvar resmi” (wall painting). The book is almost his muʿallaqa. The Muʿallaqat were poems that, after competitions held at poetry festivals, were hung on the wall of the Kaaba; some of them have reached our time and become immortal. Mural too is an epic work that seeks immortality — a highly intertextual, polyphonic text. That is why I chose it. I had also translated sections from I Don’t Want This Poem to End, the collection found in the poet’s drawer after his death and published by his friends. Mural was published by Kırmızı Yayınları at the end of last year, and I Don’t Want This Poem to End by YKY last month. Two more of his books are currently in the publication process. If they come out too, four of Darwish’s poetry books will have been published in Turkish not as selections but as independent books.
Why does the poet say, in his last book, “I don’t want this poem to end”?
Mahmoud Darwish is aware that everything flows away, and so he grows anxious. He attacks time with the fishing line of words. Just as Don Quixote challenged the windmills with his sword, he challenges with poetry the wings of time that sweep everything away. Let us read from the book:
Bu şiirin bitmesini istemiyorum
bu güz gününün bitmesini istemiyorum
sonsuzluğun doğruluğundan emin olmadan.
Sevmeye muktediriz
sevdiğimizi hayal etmeye muktediriz
ertelemeye intiharı -illaki edeceksek-
başka bir zamana…
Şimdi burada ölmeyeceğiz
böylesi düğünsü bir günde
öyleyse öğlenin kesinliğiyle dol
dol ve doldur beni
basiretin ışığıyla /
[I don’t want this poem to end, / I don’t want this autumn day to end / before I am sure of eternity’s truth. / We are able to love, / able to imagine that we love, / to postpone suicide — if we must — / to another time… / We will not die here and now / on so wedding-like a day; / so fill with the certainty of noon, / fill and fill me / with the light of insight /]
Darwish’s words “I don’t want this poem to end” give the poem an immortalising position. After all, if the poem were going to end, why would it exist? That is why this poem will never end!
Originally published in Turkish in Aydos Edebiyat, 2016, vol. 5, no. 10, pp. 21–24. Translated into English for this site.