Anas al-As‘ad
In 1993 Mehmet Hakkı Suçin (b. 1970), a native of the Turkish city of Iğdır, would graduate from Ankara University with a degree in Arabic — a university department whose students, given the academic and social climate prevailing in Türkiye at the time, were not expected to see their choices and ambitions in studying the literature of a neighbouring people, and then delving into the texts of its language, go so far as to draw an arc from the poets of the Muʿallaqat to the contemporary Arabic novel. How could such a thing be imagined, when the narrow, stereotyped view that the language of the ḍād has certain ideological functions it cannot transcend in the clamorous age of modernity had found its advocates even among its own native speakers and scholars — let alone in a Turkish academy that had not yet dared to open itself to its Arab neighbours?
Thirty years separate us from the date of that degree. Can we call this merely a “personal history”, especially now that its owner has accumulated more than fifty authored and translated books between Arabic and Turkish? Or should we say that it is a conscious ambition that met structural changes in the Turkish Republic — changes in which Arabic was no longer tied to religious duties, nor its use confined to meeting the needs of a limited segment of Turkish society? Yes, people’s ideas and orientations are usually studied according to the political determinants of their times; but here we take personal history as our basis, and pass through it to what is shared between the two languages and cultures.
Over the years and decades of these “thirty”, Suçin moved from one level of understanding to another in the lore of Arabic and in thinking “in” it, until, thanks to his purely intellectual achievement, these years were no longer his alone: readers and writers he translated on both shores shared them with him. “We have abandoned finite time” — a line by the Turkish poet Yunus Emre (1238–1328), with which Suçin opened one of his lectures for an Arab audience about a year ago. His choice may have been spontaneous, for introducing Turkish through Yunus Emre is like introducing Arabic through al-Mutanabbi or Ibn ʿArabi. And yet, is not the translator — having completed his work in Suçin’s way — very much like that call to abandon everything limited, everything resembling the finite time of which Yunus Emre spoke?
Let us return to personal history — having shown that it is not personal in any absolute sense, and before the current of language carries us away too — to follow Suçin’s academic journey. We find that the short story in Arabic literature was his first preoccupation after university: a genre that had not received full attention or critical study, while the novel, and poetry in its shadow, absorbed the literary concerns of critics, writers and readers. The stories of the Egyptian Yahya Haqqi (1905–1992) became the subject of the master’s thesis he completed in 1998 at Gazi University in Ankara, “Narrative Art in Yahya Haqqi”.
It was with The Lamp of Umm Hashim, published by the Egyptian novelist in 1940, that Suçin’s journey in translation began. Here the lines of the academic, opening onto the worlds of Arabic through Haqqi’s window, crossed with the young man in his twenties saying his first word as a translator, in a milieu whose calculations sometimes differed from academic frameworks. Translating a book, publishing it and its reception — all of this can be drowned in technical procedures before we even say anything about what hinders it intellectually and discursively.
In an earlier interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, Suçin recalled the first steps of a journey that would last thirty years: “During my studies I read all of [Haqqi’s] novels, stories and critical writings. In the meantime I translated The Lamp of Umm Hashim. I also began translating The Postman and Diary of a Country Prosecutor, but I could not finish them because of my working conditions at the time. The reception of this short novel was not what I had hoped, because the publisher did not have a good distribution network across Türkiye, so its reception was limited to Turkish university circles and a number of readers interested in Arabic literature.”
With the new millennium many doors opened between Turkish and Arabic, and the prevailing climate changed markedly. In this atmosphere Mehmet Hakkı Suçin continued his academic work, receiving his doctorate in 2004, again from Gazi University, for his thesis “Problems of Equivalence at the Level of Words and Fixed Expressions in Arabic–Turkish Translation”. The subject revealed the specialist’s field, and showed that the first ten years of his adventure with Arabic after graduation had begun to turn him towards the lexicographical study of both tongues.
In this context he signed many titles, among them his translation of Amin al-Khuli’s Innovative Approaches in Language, Grammar, Literature and Exegesis (2000), Translation into Arabic, Past and Present (2012) and Existing in the Other Language: Equivalence in Arabic–Turkish Translation (2013), alongside textbooks for Turkish learners of Arabic — all of which contributed to his heading the Arabic department from 2018 to the present day.
Translating poetry as poetry is a concern that has troubled those working in Arabic since the first age of recording, through the contributions of al-Jahiz, Abu Hilal al-ʿAskari and Hazim al-Qartajanni, to the early Nahda and Sulayman al-Bustani’s attempt at the Iliad, and on to our own time. Suçin can now be counted among those who think “in Arabic”, not merely translate from it and from outside it — especially since he signed the first poetic Turkish translation of al-Zawzani’s Commentary on the Seven Muʿallaqat, published by Kırmızı Kedi in 2020 in 176 pages.
Suçin travelled with the worlds of Imruʾ al-Qays, Tarafa, Labid and their companions — coming as he does from the background of a Turkish lexicon with its Sufi word for “abandoning” — without contenting himself with a passing or merely suggestive dialogue with the weight of the body as image and desire, in famous lines of the Muʿallaqat such as «فمِثلِكِ حُبْلى قد طَرَقْتُ ومُرْضعٍ»، «ببهكنةٍ تحت الطِّراف المُعمَّد»، «خنساءُ ضيّعتِ الفَريرَ فلم يَرِم».
From revelation to the body: a whole range. And from the lover of ʿUnayza to Yasawi, Gibran’s Prophet, Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove and Ibn al-Kalbi’s Book of Idols: a horizon of translation in which Suçin has translated works by Arab poets at the very heart of modernity, such as Nizar Qabbani, Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish, while at the same time not shying away from translating new Arabic poetic voices and giving them space with Turkish readers.
So much for the old diwan of the Arabs, poetry. As for the novel, which since the mid-twentieth century has become their “new diwan”, Suçin turned early to narrative with the works of Yahya Haqqi, as we have mentioned, before the Arabic novel became a fundamental part of his project as a whole — a project for which he received the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding in the Achievement category, in its eighth edition, whose results were announced in Doha last January.
It must also be noted that Palestinian narrative, in all the diversity of its styles and generational voices, has been a focus of work and reflection for the author of Existing in the Other Language — not only as a literary phenomenon, but by virtue of its human content and its cause of struggle against Zionist colonialism. This is shown by his Turkish translations of Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa and Men in the Sun, published this year, and of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail two years ago, which went through three printings in just five months after its publication in 2021 and won him the “Translation of the Year” award given by the Turkish magazine Dünya Kitap — the first time a work translated from Arabic literature has won the prize in the twenty-eight years it has been awarded. Like the Palestinian cause, that of the Syrians is also present in his translations: in 2019 he brought the Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah’s notable collection A Boat to Lesbos into the language of Nâzım Hikmet.
Truly, the whole atmosphere has changed between the last decade of the past century and where we are today. We do not, of course, wish to exaggerate and speak of a state of “recognition” that Arabic or Turkish has achieved in the embrace of the other, as though the two had been entirely strangers to each other; on the contrary, against the reality and conditions of history, the atmosphere of the nineties and the preceding decades of the twentieth century was no more than an “exception” within a broader presence. But what the author of the first poetic translation of the Seven Muʿallaqat into Turkish has achieved — and we shall see its tangible effects in the near future (we await a similar opening between Arabic and Persian too) — lies in the signs of a new, rising generation of translators who think “in Arabic/Turkish” at the same time. And if there is a founding reference to which this generation will be indebted, it is none other than Mehmet Hakkı Suçin.
Originally published in Arabic as “Muhammad Haqqi Suçin.. The New Era of Arabic and Turkish” in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 31 March 2023, p. 25. Translated into English for this site, with permission. Read the Arabic original ↗