Could you tell us about the texts and authors you are working on at the moment, have just finished or have just begun? Every translation is a new experience, just like every new day. Is there anything you would like to share with us?
As you know, because of the pandemic we had to stay shut in our homes for a long time. During this period I was perhaps able to devote more time to translation than in normal times. In the first days of “full lockdown”, my translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s Like Almond Blossoms or Farther had just come off the press. In the poems of this book Darwish uses the taf‘ilat, the feet of traditional Arabic metre, with a very flexible rhythm. A lyrical voice dominates the poems, and we see him drawing on many techniques to create it — dialogue, interior monologue, narration, intertextuality. In short, the poet introduces his reader to a calmer poetic voice that approaches everyday speech and prose. With these features the book represents an important turning point in Darwish’s poetry, but unfortunately it did not receive the attention it deserved in the initial panic created by the pandemic.
Once I had grown used to living with the pessimism, anxiety, uncertainty and sense of confinement caused by the pandemic, I turned from modern Arabic poetry to pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and began translating the Muʿallaqat. Had it not been for Yücel Kayıran’s emails ardently encouraging me to translate them, and Enis Batur’s determination to publish them, I might have postponed my wish to translate them a little longer. In 1993, while still an undergraduate, I had translated the muʿallaqa of Imru’ al-Qays, but I had not continued. To translate the Muʿallaqat with the care they deserve, I first tried to analyse the poems with the help of several well-known commentaries in Arabic literature. Only when I was convinced I had understood the texts thoroughly did I begin translating. In this way the seven Muʿallaqat, also known as the “Seven Suspended Odes”, were rendered into Turkish with a poetic rhythm, in couplet form. Later I translated the remaining three for the second edition, to which I will add them. Thus all the Muʿallaqat known in the sources as “the ten Muʿallaqat” will have been translated into Turkish as poetry.
Another work I translated in this period is another immortal classic, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Although at first it was the literary quality of the text, its fictional side, that attracted me, the deeper I went, the more I realised how open it is to many-sided readings. Hayy ibn Yaqzan began circulating in Europe from the fourteenth century and by the eighteenth had become a text read and studied all over Europe. Even so, this important text was published in Ottoman Turkish only in 1923, in Babanzade Reşid’s translation, serialised in the journal Mihrab. Abandoned to the journal’s pages, that translation was simplified into modern Turkish by N. Ahmet Özalp only in 1985. With our translation, Hayy ibn Yaqzan has been translated into the Turkish of Türkiye for the first time. And the publisher’s own initiative in commissioning special illustrations for the book enriched the work visually as well.
My most recently published translation is from contemporary Arabic literature: Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail (Küçük Bir Ayrıntı). Because the author wished her name to appear on the cover not in its Turkish transcription but as it is known in the international literary world, it was written as Adania Shibli. I am not going to retell the novel here, but I can say it is a truly innovative text in its narration, its construction and its language. The novel consists of two parts. The first, told from a third-person point of view, recounts with a cinematographic technique the activities of the Israeli army in the Naqab desert in 1949 and how an Arab girl’s identity and womanhood are violated, and how she is then raped and killed. The second part, told in the first person, follows the events that unfold in the 2000s as a Palestinian woman journalist from Ramallah becomes obsessed with investigating this incident. The static yet compelling structure of the first part gives way to a more dynamic story in the second. What seem to be two separate stories are masterfully linked. Translating some passages of the novel, my blood ran cold; in others my eyes filled with tears. Though slim in volume, this very realistic and striking novel will earn an important place in the history of Arabic fiction.
Among my translations that are not yet published but ready for publication are Ghassan Kanafani’s novellas Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa. The poems of Riyad Salih al-Hussein, who lived only twenty-eight years and left behind magnificent poetry, are also ready for publication. I am continuing to work on two more books from Syria. The first is a selection from the poet Nouri al-Jarrah. The other is an anthology of Syrian short stories. My late friend Abdulkadir Abdelli, who translated dozens of books from Turkish literature into Arabic, always had such a dream. To keep his memory alive, I want to complete the work he left unfinished. The selection and translation of stories continue so that it will be a quality anthology. Of course, I must also underline here the valuable contributions of my dear wife, the poet Elçin Sevgi Suçin, who eagerly awaits my translations and takes on their first reading and voluntary editing. Without her uninterrupted support and encouragement, I might not have been so productive.
This year, moreover, UNESCO will commemorate Yunus Emre on the 700th anniversary of his death, and in this context I have been asked to translate a selection of his poems. I had previously translated selections from Ahmad Yasawi’s Diwan-i Hikmat into Arabic, but I have always wanted to translate Yunus. I very much want to experience the unique pleasure of recreating in Arabic Yunus’s simple yet profound expression and the natural music of his poetry. Frankly, I too am curious how far I will manage it.
Originally published in Turkish as “Çevirmen Diyor ki: Mehmet Hakkı Suçin” in PostÖykü, Issue 43, November–December 2021. Translated into English for this site.