Interview by Mamdouh Farrag al-Nabi
When I thought of interviewing one of Türkiye’s leading intellectuals, there was only one name in my mind and in the mind of everyone I asked: Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, academic and professor at Gazi University in Ankara. All the reasons for choosing him came down to this: he works with seriousness, dedication and perseverance to build bridges between Turkish and Arab cultures, regardless of the ebb and flow that Arab–Turkish relations have recently undergone. So there was no alternative but to host him in Al-Jadeed for the Arab reader. I wanted to wait a little, especially amid the rising political tension between the two sides. But he did not grant me the breathing space I wanted for myself to see where escalating events would lead. While the intellectuals of both sides stood cautious and expectant, he surprised everyone, instead of waiting on the quiet bank of the river for what tomorrow might bring, by launching Şurfa (Balcony), the first magazine to bring Arabic and Turkish texts together between its covers — as though wagering that soft power, which has lost its role in many countries of the world, could play a positive role far from politics. Indeed, its first issue contained texts by Arab poets and story writers alongside Turkish writers of diverse poetic and narrative styles; the magazine came as a first step in extending threads of acquaintance and communication between the two cultures. Its timing was like a stone thrown into a stagnant lake awaiting a tomorrow laden with clouds whose rain no one knew where it would fall, or where the wind would carry it. Not long after the first issue appeared, a thread that had been timidly stretched between the two cultures snapped when politics cut the bridges of communication: Turkish television drama, a window through which Turks looked into the homes of their Arab brothers, even if a somewhat distorted image prevailed in it, after the owner of MBC decided to ban the broadcasting of Turkish series. At that point the need for dialogue became more pressing than ever; open windows were closing one by one, and the only hope left for light to pass through was the opening offered by culture and the dream of the role it might play: Şurfa, edited by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin.
Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s presence in Arab culture is prominent and impossible to overlook. It shows in many fields, from his authored works to his participation in international conferences on translation and other subjects — above all through his fluency in spoken and written Arabic, which has given him a wide command of Arab culture, an interest he has put into practice by bringing many treasures of this heritage into Turkish through the writings of Yahya Haqqi, Khalil Mutran, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and many others. Curiously, his interest in Arabic arose by chance, as we shall learn in this interview, conducted by Al-Jadeed in Ankara. Dr. Suçin’s position within the Turkish academy is also prominent and influential: he headed the Arabic department at Gazi University between 2012 and 2014; he chaired the committee that prepared the Arabic curricula for primary and secondary schools in Türkiye in line with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2010–2012); and, commissioned by the Avicenna Institute of Human Sciences in Lille, France, he prepared an A1–A2 curriculum for teaching Arabic to non-native speakers for use in Europe. He has also directed the Arabic–Turkish literary translation workshops held annually at international level to discuss theoretical and practical questions of literary translation. Here is the text of the interview conducted with him in Ankara.
Al-Jadeed: In an interview with Turkish television you said something that caught my attention — in effect, “I did not choose Arabic; Arabic chose me,” if I have translated your words correctly. How did this happen? And what motivated you to continue studying Arabic?
Suçin: Thank you for this kind invitation to Al-Jadeed, which has made a notable contribution to deepening cultural, intellectual, artistic and other questions concerning the Arabs’ relationship with the world and the world’s with them. I said “Arabic chose me” to stress that my choice of Arabic was not a deliberate one. After entering the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Ankara University, I was thinking of changing my field. I did not expect to fall in love with Arabic and its literature. But after a year of study, circumstances forced me to continue, and that only increased my love for the language and my passion for its literature.
Al-Jadeed: What motivation did you find in Arabic that made you continue your academic studies in it, even though, as you said, it was at the bottom of your university choices?
Suçin: The most important motivation was reading Arabic literature, at first, in Turkish translation. I read some works by Khalil Gibran and Naguib Mahfouz. It was modest knowledge, but it encouraged me to continue my studies in order to learn Arabic. At university we took courses on every branch of Arabic literature — poetry, short story, drama — and the deeper I went into the field, the more I loved it.
Al-Jadeed: According to my information, the first work you read in Arabic as a student, in the library of the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography, was “Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter” by the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said (Adonis), published in Fikrun wa Fann, a magazine published in Germany. I have two questions; the first: your relationship with Arabic was limited at the time — how did you receive the poetry of Adonis, known in Arabic as one of the most important poets of Arab modernism, at such an early stage?
Suçin: That is exactly what happened, with a small correction: I had already read other short texts as course material. But this time I took it upon myself to read this long poem. It was a challenge for me. I was living in a student residence at the time, along with some students from Sudan. They helped me a great deal, at least in deciphering phrases and learning some words I could not find in the dictionary. Access to sources in Arabic was limited then. The library was rich in classical books, but we rarely found books of contemporary Arabic literature. So I took advantage of the library’s subscription to Fikrun wa Fann to read contemporary Arabic texts. As soon as I encountered Adonis’s text, I felt I was facing something different from the classical Arabic poetry we had studied. I found a language close to prose and a different design for the poetic text. This poetry and others like it led me to try to decode the text. I sought help from some Arabs, but most of them also said they did not understand it. Then I tried to translate the text, challenging myself and aiming to develop my skills in learning Arabic.
Al-Jadeed: I think there is — if the description is permissible — a kind of “intellectual mobility” here: after Adonis came Khalil Gibran, with Spirits Rebellious, your undergraduate project in 1993; then for your master’s you turned to Yahya Haqqi, with “Narrative Art in Yahya Haqqi.” Don’t you see a certain disparity? One is a patron of classicism in literature, the other a modernist poet who sought, through his poetry and criticism, to demolish classicism with the pickaxe of modernity. How did you bridge this gap between the two styles?
Suçin: In fact, at the time I did not have a strong, precise background in the currents of Arabic literature. We did not have enough books; I read everything I could lay my hands on. Adonis was pure chance, when I found his poem in Fikrun wa Fann in the university library. I began reading Gibran in Turkish, then obtained a photocopy of his complete Arabic works from one of my teachers. That is how I came to choose Gibran as my undergraduate research project. In this context I translated his story collection Spirits Rebellious into Turkish and presented a study of his works and philosophy. As for my relationship with Yahya Haqqi, I read an article in English about him by the critic Sabry Hafez, from which I learned that Haqqi had played a major role in establishing the Arabic short story in its modern sense, so I chose his narrative work as the subject of my master’s thesis.
The adventure with Yahya Haqqi
Al-Jadeed: You translated Haqqi’s The Lamp of Umm Hashim in 1998. Given my acquaintance with Turkish, I would like to ask: Turkish relies on the standard language, whereas Arabic writing combines the colloquial and the standard. How did you deal with the colloquial in The Lamp of Umm Hashim, given that the blending of standard and colloquial is one of the beauties of Haqqi’s text?
Suçin: This novella combines a realistic and a symbolic style. This skilful blend of realism and symbolism, through the spiritual and Sufi element, gives it vitality, movement and a beautiful poetic rhythm. His description of events and places makes you feel you are watching a painter at work on a canvas; his style is also marked by humour and wit, and he uses the colloquial in a refined way, as he notes in some of his writings. All of this, of course, poses challenges for the translator.
Suçin: Yahya Haqqi does not overuse the colloquial; he uses it functionally — that is, it lends the text a local character, which confronts the translator with cultural challenges. In such cases the strategy of “domestication” is adopted, subjecting the text to the cultural values prevailing in the target language in order to lessen the strangeness of the target text. The translator must be aware of the nature of the colloquial used in the text when translating into Turkish, since diglossia is a feature of Arabic, unlike Turkish, in which written and spoken language are close. So it is not a practical solution to render every Arabic colloquial word with a colloquial Turkish one, unless the colloquial has a specific functional role.
Standard and colloquial
Al-Jadeed: The question of colloquial and standard Arabic raises another. I know you take a firm stance on teaching dialects in university classes. In your view, what is the benefit, and what are the dangers for standard Arabic, especially for beginners?
Suçin: Unfortunately this is an issue that has been politicised in the Arab world. There are those for the colloquial and those against it. But the reality is not that simple. Diglossia in Arabic is a sociolinguistic matter, as in all the world’s languages, even though the distance between some dialects and the standard language is vast. Learners of Arabic must first be aware of this fact, so that they are not disappointed later when they cannot communicate with real people in the street. I do not advocate teaching one of the common Arabic dialects at the expense of the standard. I advocate a balanced position between the written language, the standard, and the everyday spoken language, the colloquial — because Arabs generally write in the standard language and speak in the colloquial. That is the reality of the language. So curricula for non-native speakers should include integrated approaches that make students proficient in reading, writing and speaking standard Arabic in formal contexts, as well as able to understand at least one common Arabic dialect. There are successful integrated models in America; but Arabic programmes in Türkiye, although they teach dialects, do not do so within an integrated, planned framework.
The adventure of translation
Al-Jadeed: In one of your studies you noted that the translation movement in Türkiye at first focused on translating from French. My question: why French in particular, when the Ottoman state’s ties with the Arabs were closer and stronger, and Türkiye’s ties with Islam older and more solid? And when did interest in translating Arabic literature begin, and which genres most occupied translators?
Suçin: The movement of literary translation into Turkish went through two major stages: the first after the founding of the Translation Chamber in 1832 in the Ottoman period, and the second after the founding of the Translation Bureau in 1940, seventeen years after the founding of the Turkish Republic. Since French literature was rich in new genres — the novel, drama and creative texts that did not exist in the Western sense — the emerging modern literatures, including Ottoman (Turkish) and Arabic literature, opened up to it. Given the literary production of the West, especially in French, it was natural for Turkish literature, as an emerging literature, to be in the position of consumer and importer rather than producer and exporter. The same applies to all emerging literatures that became acquainted with modern literary genres by first “adapting” works so that the new environment could adjust to the new genres, and later translating them in the true sense.
Suçin: In the period of “adaptation” — the period of the Translation Chamber — three literary genres were brought into Turkish: Western poetry, the philosophical dialogue and the novel. But about twenty years after the founding of the Republic, the movement of translation into Turkish took on an organised, programmed character, with a thousand literary works translated by 1967, including Arabic and Islamic classics, whose translation into Turkish goes back, if timidly, well before this movement.
Al-Jadeed: Anyone following the translation movement between Arabic and Turkish finds that Arabic is open to Turkish, while the reverse holds for Turkish only within the narrowest limits. Is the explanation the persistence of the condescension that prevailed in the past, in keeping with the old saying that “the East is rich in its political and social problems,” and hence the earlier distance from its sciences, philosophy and literature?
Suçin: I do not think the movement of translation into Arabic is more open than that into Turkish, despite the increase in translations from Turkish into Arabic in recent years. If we take a quick look at literary translation from Arabic into Turkish, we see that it took place from the thirteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth: the translation of al-Zamakhshari’s Atwaq al-Dhahab, the life of ʿAntara ibn Shaddad as the Antarname, Kalila wa Dimna, Ibn Zafar al-Siqilli’s Sulwan al-Mutaʿ, al-Hariri’s Maqamat, The Thousand and One Nights and Ibn Khallikan’s Wafayat al-Aʿyan, in addition to philosophical and religious works in all their branches. So we cannot overlook these translations. But real, methodical translation from Arabic took place after the founding of the Translation Bureau in the Republican period, when the great classics of philosophy, literature and even religion and Sufism were translated from Arabic into Turkish.
Al-Jadeed: How do you explain the multiple translations of a single book? Kalila wa Dimna, for example, has been translated into Turkish more than 28 times, and there are five translations of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
Suçin: Yes, this is a good illustration that Turkish is not closed to translation from Arabic, contrary to the prevailing idea. We see numerous translations of Kalila wa Dimna, The Thousand and One Nights and other works — some selections, some complete texts, translated via intermediary languages or directly from Arabic. Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan has another story. The translator Babanzade Reşid translated it into (Ottoman) Turkish in 1923. From the 1980s onwards, various editions of this translation appeared, simplified and transposed into the Turkish of the Republic. I am currently translating the work anew. When finished, it will be the first translation into contemporary Turkish.
Taha Husayn and his contemporaries
Al-Jadeed: One thing puzzles me: Taha Husayn, known as the “dean of Arabic literature” and the author of revolutionary ideas, has had only two works translated, while some Egyptian poets of the younger generation have three works translated into Turkish. Are Taha Husayn’s ideas not current in cultural circles in general?
Suçin: Taha Husayn’s The Days was published in Turkish, via French, in 1994. Then two different translations of his novel al-Waʿd al-Haqq appeared directly from Arabic, one in 2004 and the other in 2009. A Turkish translation of On Pre-Islamic Poetry was also published about six years ago. As you see, all the translations came late, considering that The Days was translated into English in 1932 and retranslated in 1943. As for the second part of your question, there are several reasons, foremost among them the lack of accurate information about Arabic literature in general and Egyptian literature in particular, apart from a few internationally known names such as Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal al-Ghitani, Bahaa Taher, Youssef Ziedan and Alaa al-Aswany. These writers have been published by good publishers — but unfortunately mostly translated via an intermediary language rather than directly from Arabic. It is strange that the books of poets of the stature of Salah Abd al-Sabur, Ahmad Abd al-Muti Hijazi and Amal Dunqul, to name only a few, have not yet been translated into Turkish. This means that Arabs and Turks do not truly know each other in literary terms.
The woman translator
Al-Jadeed: On translation from Arabic into Turkish, in one of your studies published in the Al-Arabi book Arab Culture on the Silk Road, you gave a list of about 48 major names, professional translators and academics. Only six were women translators, none with more than four works, compared with the men. How do you explain women’s small role in the adventure of translation?
Suçin: Unfortunately the situation is worse than you say. Of the six names you mention, only one translated directly from Arabic; the other translations of Arabic literature were made through an intermediary language, English. The translation community between Arabic and Turkish literature is male-dominated, like Arab and Turkish societies. But happily there are young women translators who have begun to enter the field and will consolidate their role in the coming years. Personally, I do my utmost to help young men and women enter the field of translation, whether by revising their translations and passing them on to publishers or by introducing them in cultural circles. In this respect, I think translation workshops play an important role in discovering new names and bringing professional and emerging translators together.
Al-Jadeed: Your translation of Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove was recently published. Other translators had also brought it into Turkish. What does your translation add?
Suçin: The first translation of The Ring of the Dove was published in 1985 from French. The second appeared twenty years later, directly from Arabic. The others have been published in the last two years. In fact it was not I who proposed translating this work to the publisher; it was the publisher who suggested it to me, through my friend the poet Ömer Erdem. Since this is a major publisher, it means there is demand for new translations — otherwise why would they request a translation and produce it in an elegant colour edition with paintings by the Bahraini artist Ebrahim Busaad? Moreover, every translator, like every writer, has readers. My translations of Arabic literature have earned me a considerable readership that follows what I publish, whether authored or translated. This translation has attracted good interest from Turkish readers, even though it was published only recently.
Mahfouz and Pamuk
Al-Jadeed: Did Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize in Literature play a role in shifting attention to translating modern literature, after interest had focused on translating classical books?
Suçin: Yes, that is true. Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize in 1988 was a turning point in the translation of Arabic literature into Turkish. The same holds for the translation of Turkish literature into Arabic after Orhan Pamuk won the prize in 2006. I think this is natural: the Nobel Prize has the positive effect of drawing the world’s attention to the literature of the winner. Before that, the works of Jurji Zaydan and Najib al-Kilani had been translated by more than one translator and printed many times. These were works of a historical or religious character published by conservative publishers. It seems there was great demand for such novels at the time, given that several translations of a single novel were published, with many editions.
Chance and randomness
Al-Jadeed: How did this happen under secular governments? And this leads us to ask: who controls the translation market now? How are texts chosen for translation into Turkish? Are there particular mechanisms governing the choice?
Suçin: The secularism of the state does not prevent the publication of such religious novels. On the contrary, a truly secular climate creates a kind of freedom to publish all literary, artistic and intellectual genres, whatever their ideological orientation. As for the mechanisms of the translation market, they are largely systematic in the case of Western literatures, because Western writers have literary agencies that represent them, promote them and stay in contact with publishers around the world. This is not the case for most writers of Arabic literature; Turkish publishers know them only if they have made a name in the West or if their works have already been translated into a European language. The selection of other writers’ works is unsystematic, often based on the suggestion of a translator or an acquaintance familiar with Arabic literature. We know that major publishers in Türkiye employ editors with a good knowledge of Western literatures. With Eastern and African literatures, however, the choice has usually not been methodical, and may be made by chance or at random.
Al-Jadeed: Haven’t you noticed that most translations from Arabic into Turkish — Gibran’s and Mahfouz’s works, for example — have come through an intermediary language, English? Unfortunately this keeps happening: Basma Abdel Aziz’s novel The Queue was recently translated by Nil Tuna, also from English. How so?
Suçin: What you say is true of most of these writers’ works, but there are also translations made directly from Arabic, such as those by my teacher the great Arabist Rahmi Er, Dr. Hüseyin Yazıcı, Dr. Bedrettin Aytaç and other academics — though they are few. As for Basma Abdel Aziz’s novel, it was the publisher’s mistake; had they asked us, we would have directed them to someone to translate it, since there is an emerging generation of young academics who have begun to translate, and translate well, especially narrative.
Al-Jadeed: Another question: where do the Arabic professors in Turkish universities stand with regard to translation? Or do the conditions of translation not apply to them?
Suçin: A decade or more ago, Arabic departments were generally focused on the study of classical Arabic literature. Translators were looked upon almost with disdain, and translation counted for nothing in academic promotion. So there were no mechanisms of encouragement — quite apart from the market for translated literature in Türkiye, which turned its attention mainly to Western literatures. After a while some academics, led by the late Azmi Yüksel, Rahmi Er, Hüseyin Yazıcı and Kenan Demirayak, turned to contemporary Arabic literature and supervised master’s and doctoral theses on it. Thus, little by little, modern literature began to be studied and translated into Turkish. Another point that surprises me is that Arabic teaching in Türkiye is usually conducted through language practices based on grammar and translation rather than on communicative methods; yet this orientation has not been reflected in the field of literary translation.
Translating poetry
Al-Jadeed: Haven’t you noticed that the translation of Turkish poetry into Arabic has declined recently compared with the sixties and seventies, when the works of Nâzım Hikmet, Mehmet Akif and later Orhan Veli led the way? Now poetry is rare; there is only the dominance of the novel — Elif Şafak and Orhan Pamuk. I can almost assert that more than ninety per cent of their works have been translated into Arabic, some directly from Turkish thanks to the late master Abdulkadir Abdelli, others by Muhammad Darwish and Khalid al-Jbeili, the latter two from English.
Suçin: In fact we cannot say that there was a vogue for Turkish poetry which then declined. Nâzım Hikmet was an exceptional case, being revolutionary both ideologically and poetically and having spent most of his life in prison and exile. Yet he never gave up his optimism and romanticism, which made him a legendary figure for oppressed lands East and West. The first translation of Nâzım Hikmet into Arabic, a selection of his poems published in Cairo under the title From the Poetry of Nâzım Hikmet, appeared in 1952. The second, Songs of Exile, was published in Cairo in 1971. Both were made via French. No Arabic translation directly from Turkish appeared until 1982, in six small volumes published in Beirut, translated by Fazıl Lokman. All these translations have their problems, which there is no room to discuss here. Orhan Veli has been translated, as you say, through the efforts of the great translator Abdulkadir Abdelli. This poet played no small role in breaking some of the constraints of Turkish poetry, but he was a passing phenomenon of the forties. It is the movement known as the “Second New” that has had, and still has, a profound influence on the development of Turkish poetry from the fifties to the present. I mean poets such as İlhan Berk, Edip Cansever, Ece Ayhan, Cemal Süreya, Turgut Uyar, Ülkü Tamer, Sezai Karakoç and Gülten Akın. None of their poetry collections has been translated into Arabic except one by Sezai Karakoç. Here too there is a significant gap.
Al-Jadeed: What is the reason for the dominance of the novel in translation? Is it linked to the readership?
Suçin: This is natural. The novel has a large readership, not only in our region but throughout the world, and it is natural for publishers to meet this demand. Prizes also play an important role in choosing works for translation. Had Naguib Mahfouz not won the Nobel Prize, would he have been translated on such a scale? I don’t think so. Youssef Ziedan, Bahaa Taher and Saud Alsanousi, too, were translated after winning the Arabic Booker.
Al-Jadeed: Your translations have ranged across poetry, the novel and prose books. In your view, which of these meets obstacles in translation, and how can they be overcome?
Suçin: In all these endeavours I am translating literary works, whether poetry, prose or narrative. A literary work is marked by distinctiveness, particularity and its own style. This requires the translator to emulate the particularity of the source text and recreate it with the same particularity, or a similar effect, in the target text. So every translation has its own problems, challenges and difficulties, perhaps unlike any other.
Suçin: Needless to say, knowing the source and target languages is not enough in translation. The translator must be a voracious reader of literature, able to create and produce texts in the target language. He is a writer, but not a free writer: his creativity is bound by the creativity of the original text.
Al-Jadeed: You served on the jury of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the “Arabic Booker,” in 2014. What criteria do the juries apply? And why are its results always disappointing to many, unlike the British Booker?
Suçin: At first we looked for ways to establish common criteria for evaluating the novels, but after discussion we concluded that such criteria could flatten or oversimplify matters, since we were dealing with literary works. So each jury member had his or her own criteria and taste in evaluating the novels. Even so, when we met to decide the longlist, most of the novels on the jury members’ lists were similar, so it was not difficult to discuss and decide on the novels we agreed on. The process was transparent and honest in the full sense of the word. One sign of the quality of our choice is that Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, the winning novel in 2014, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize this year. This means the results are not always disappointing.
Al-Jadeed: In your view, can the magazine Şurfa, which you recently launched in Türkiye, be a bridge between Turkish and Arabic literature? What is at stake with it?
Suçin: A literary magazine in Arabic and Turkish was a project I had long dreamed of. The Turkish Ministry of Culture supported it for a limited period, and six issues were published. But it has now stopped because the Ministry’s support has ended. Talks are under way with the Ministry to support it permanently rather than for a fixed period. If we succeed in obtaining support, we will resume publication. Unfortunately we did not find ways to distribute the magazine in Türkiye and the Arab world, and the selection of content from Turkish literature was not at the level I had hoped. In any case, the magazine was a training ground for emerging translators — which is what mattered to me as its translation editor.
The image of the Arab
Al-Jadeed: Is there a Turkish view that is culturally unwelcoming towards Arabs, and wants to see them only as refugees, tourists or businesspeople?
Suçin: Unfortunately stereotypes of the “other” exist in both societies, but I don’t think they are the dominant feature of how each sees the other. There is a Turkish saying that the Arabs “stabbed us in the back,” and an Arabic saying that “the Turks are behind our backwardness.” I think both involve excessive generalisation. We cannot strip historical events of their context and judge history on the basis of such generalisations. If there are historical problems between us, we should face them openly, without denying or concealing them. The malady of our Arab and Turkish worlds is that we either glorify historical events and figures or consign them to the lowest depths. But life is not like that; there are shades other than black and white. Still, there is no need for pessimism. There is good interest in Arabic literature in Türkiye from every segment of Turkish society — right, left and centre. I often receive phone calls or emails from publishers or institutions asking about Arabic literature and ways of cooperating with Arab institutions.
Al-Jadeed: In your view, which Arab writers translated into Turkish can be said to have achieved a reasonable readership?
Suçin: Khalil Gibran comes first, followed by Naguib Mahfouz, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Nawal El Saadawi, Ghassan Kanafani, Tayeb Salih and Gamal al-Ghitani. From classical Arabic literature, Kalila wa Dimna, The Thousand and One Nights, the Seven Muʿallaqat, Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove and the tale of Hayy ibn Yaqzan have a reasonable readership. All have been translated more than once and printed dozens of times.
Small print runs
Al-Jadeed: How many copies of a book translated from Arabic are usually printed?
Suçin: It varies from writer to writer and book to book. The names I mentioned usually have print runs of at least two thousand copies. But these are small numbers compared with other literatures. José Saramago’s Blindness, for example, has sold more than twelve thousand copies on the online bookshop Kitapyurdu alone — and there are dozens of sites selling books online, as well as large and small bookshops all over Türkiye. You can imagine the large sales of that book. Unfortunately we cannot speak of such figures for Arabic literature. I think the same is true of sales of Turkish literature in the Arab world.
Who reads?
Al-Jadeed: Who reads translated poetry in Türkiye today — new generations, older generations or university researchers? Who is the intended reader?
Suçin: There is a good readership for Arabic poetry in Türkiye, from older and younger generations and from all political currents. Researchers in departments of Arabic language and literature are, in general, those who read the least poetry. I translate poetry for poets and for poetry readers all over Türkiye, because they are the ones who encourage me to continue. And I have had good results: Nizar Qabbani’s The Book of Love won the translation award of the Writers’ Union of Türkiye last year. Well-known poets and critics such as Haydar Ergülen, Yücel Kayıran, Gültekin Emre and Zeki Kırmızı have written introductory articles on my translations of Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Mohammed Bennis and other Arab poets, which shows the interest of the poetry world in Arabic poetry.
Turkish drama
Al-Jadeed: Would you agree if I said that Turkish television drama has been the bridge between Arab and Turkish cultures, even if it has now been cut off? Is the image of Türkiye presented by these series inaccurate — merely tourist propaganda? How can culture play its role in protecting Turkish identity from this deliberate distortion by the makers of drama?
Suçin: Turkish drama broke down the psychological barriers between Turkish and Arab societies and played a positive role in introducing Türkiye and Turkish society in all its segments to Arabs. The series began to be dubbed in the Levantine dialect, which increased their success given the great similarity between Turkish and Syrian society, so that they seemed almost Arab series. The names of the characters and cultural expressions were Arabised, and scenes unacceptable in Arab societies were cut in dubbing. This whole process made Turkish drama speak to the taste of Arab society. As for the claim that it distorts Turkish identity, I don’t believe so. The events these series deal with exist in society in one form or another, though they may be exceptional cases.
Suçin: It is natural for drama to deal with exceptional events to attract viewers. Contemporary Turkish identity is multidimensional, and these dimensions often coexist in contradictory ways; it can combine religiosity, Sufism and secularism at the same time. So we cannot speak of a pure, typical Turkish identity.
Al-Jadeed: Recently, history has been revived through drama — whether or not we agree with the treatment and its scholarly fidelity — in series such as Magnificent Century, Kösem Sultan, Abdülhamid II, Gazi Mustafa Kemal in You Are My Homeland, and Fatih. Does this tendency to rehabilitate the Ottoman period in Türkiye reflect state policy or social trends?
Suçin: As I said a moment ago, we cannot regard these series as history; they are a kind of fantasy. Of course they contain facts, but these facts are presented in dramatic form, in a different guise, to capture the viewer’s attention and keep them watching. If they relied on pure facts, I don’t think the element of suspense would last. Let us not forget that these historical series come at a time when religious and nationalist currents are rising in Türkiye and globally. So they are the product of a dual demand from the political establishment, the producer, and society, the consumer. Even so, I think they have positive aspects, including leading viewers to read the “real” history of the events in these series. That is why we see dozens of books published that treat the events or figures of these series historically, far from the element of fantasy.
Teaching Arabic
Al-Jadeed: How do you assess Arabic teaching programmes in Türkiye? Have they fulfilled the hopes placed in them by the state and by those who teach?
Suçin: Arabic is taught in Türkiye through three kinds of programmes. The first is the Arabic Language and Literature programme, which has existed from the 1930s to the present. The second is the Arabic teacher-training programme in faculties of education, which focuses on teaching Arabic to non-native speakers. The third is the translation and interpreting programme, founded a few years ago. Altogether these branch into twenty programmes of the three kinds. Their basic problem is the lack of qualified teaching staff. In fact, teaching Arabic in Türkiye is a problematic field in general. There are fundamental shortcomings in teaching methodology. Arabic is seen as a language with a religious dimension, so its literary, artistic and cultural dimensions remain in the shade.
Al-Jadeed: You previously prepared a curriculum for teaching Arabic to non-native speakers in Turkish schools. How was this done, and what were the results?
Suçin: I headed a committee of academics, teachers and educators tasked with preparing Arabic curricula for non-native speakers for primary, middle and secondary schools in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. We completed the project in two years. Then came the turn of preparing textbooks according to these curricula, but changing bureaucratic decisions prevented it. We prepared the curricula within the Board of Education of the Ministry of National Education. Now, however, unfortunately, it is the General Directorate of Religious Education that coordinates Arabic teaching at primary, middle and secondary level, which imposes a “religious” view of Arabic and negatively affects the development of Arabic curricula and courses for non-native speakers.
Al-Jadeed: Are you optimistic in the face of the tragic situation in the region?
Suçin: Although the whole world, our region included, is going through a bad period, we have no choice but to be optimistic. For the absence of hope means the absence of life.
Originally published in Arabic as “Muhammad Haqqi Suçin: Arabic Literature in Turkish”, interview by Mamdouh Farrag al-Nabi, Al-Jadeed, Issue 47, December 2018, pp. 32–41. Translated into English for this site. Arabic original (Al-Arab) ↗ · Magazine pages (PDF) ↗