Appearing Elsewhere

In the meantime, I also started re-reading Catch-22, probably one of my all time favorites. I made plenty of references to Catch-22 in connection with William Boyd’s An Ice Cream War and probably some other novels I read over the course of the last two years. Nevertheless, re-reading Catch-22 was a feast precisely because of all the literary horizons this modest novel created. Never a bestseller, Catch-22 became a cult classic and sold millions despite staying under the radar. Its influence on other writers is, I believe, huge. Aside from Yossarian being my obvious favorite for fearing that everyone, from his own commanders to the German anti-aircraft gunners, are conspiring to kill him, I mostly enjoy Milo Minderbinder’s stories. Milo is a good-hearted capitalist who contracts the Germans for the Syndicate he has formed, and no one can oppose him in that – or in bombing his own squadron for a hefty sum paid by the Germans – because everyone has a share in the Syndicate, and “what is good for M & M Enterprises [i.e. the Syndicate] is good for you.” Simply brilliant. The tragic story of Major Major Major Major, who became a Major in the squadron strictly due to an IBM deficiency and whose name – Major Major Major – ruined his life at every turn, is a major influence in my father’s efforts to name me savci (prosecutor) in Turkish. As some of you might remember, my father hoped that with such a name I could avoid any and all run-ins with the law by declaring my name, which in that case would go “I am Prosecutor Peker!” Luckily, my mother rejected the idea, but in essence that is Major Major Major Major’s story. Aarfy with his calm pipe smoking in the plane while flak explodes all around them, Orr with his mastery in crashing planes, Appleby with the flies in his eyes, Nately with his psychotic lover whore, General Peckem with his hate for General Dreedle, Dreedle’s hate towards his son-in-law, his son-in-law’s affection towards Dreedle’s nurse, Colonel Cathcart with his insecurities, Colonel Korn with his tendency to manipulate Colonel Cathcart, Sheisskopf with his love of marches, and many more. There are too many insider jokes and brilliant moments in Catch-22 to write a decent review of the novel. I just believe, like I only do with The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, that everyone should absolutely read this novel and cherish its wonderful moments of hilarity and sad reflections on humanity.By the time I finished Catch-22 I was already back in Turkey for the summer. I am now done with my paralegal job and await the beginning of school in the fall. Nevertheless, next I picked up Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey edited by Anastasia A. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen. I have been meaning to read this collection of essays by expatriate women in Turkey for a long time now. I remember coming to Turkey over a year ago and reading reviews of The Expat Harem in local papers and thinking that it could be very interesting. Right before coming back to Istanbul a month and a half ago I saw my Turkish roommate Uzay’s Minnesotan girlfriend Annastacia reading the book and assumed that she picked it out of my library. Wrong! She’d actually bought it and told me that she enjoyed it a lot. I’ve always viewed Annastacia as a potential candidate for the expat society of Turkey, so her reading the book egged me on and I picked it up. The collection is organized in nine parts, which are unique to Turkey and include various customs that foreign women find especially strange, unique, pleasant or repelling. I started reading the stories at random, there are twenty-nine of them, and realized that each one identifies a unique quality of life in Turkey. Seen through the eyes of an expat who chose to live in Turkey adds a different color to the customs and qualities that I already knew. To a Turkish person the stories are very revealing, flattering and intriguing. It is, after all, very refreshing to see commonalities in society through a different pair of eyes. I imagine that any foreign person reading The Expat Harem would find the stories equally revealing, informative and interesting. Each author employs a fresh style and tone, the stories are fluid and the collection is organized very neatly by Ashman and Gokmen, which creates an excellent journey through the quirky experiences of expats, all women in this case, in Turkey. If you are planning a visit to Turkey I urge you to pick up The Expat Harem to get a solid idea about the country’s culture. If not, I believe you would still enjoy the collection for its down to earth tone, accessibility and humane moments.See also: Part 1, 2

Two years ago, The Quarterly Conversation canvassed translators and publishers for great untranslated works and compiled their results in a volume called Translate This Book! In the same spirit, I offer to you Murathan Mungan, the much-loved, best-selling Turkish literary figure whose work, with the exception of some poems and an anthologized play and story, does not appear in English. Mungan is very prolific, and I am very slow; I’m sure he has many works worth translating. But I love the premise and the plots of Kadından Kentler (Cities of Women), a collection of 16 stories, each featuring a different woman in a different city in Turkey.

Mungan is a major figure in Turkey — his books become best-sellers when they appear, and just two weeks ago he received the Erdal Öz award for excellent writing (past Millions contributor Kaya Genç was a member of the selection committee). Mungan writes plays and poems and novels and music. He is openly gay and openly critical on matters political and social. He is an established member of the literary lights. (One columnist called him, somewhat pejoratively, Turkey’s answer to Truman Capote; see Nimet Seker’s biographical piece, in English, for a more substantial look at his accomplishments.)

Being a foreigner, my literary valuations are naturally suspect; sometimes I read things in Turkish and like them simply because I didn’t need a dictionary. This is not a good metric of excellence. But even while the process of reading Mungan is painful for me — my brows knit as I reach for the dictionary and try to find the verb in an artistic sentence — the strong spark of the work’s quality and interest transmits itself even to my lumbering brain.

The stories are about women’s inner lives, and their outer lives in their various cities, from Sinop to Ankara and Diyarbakir. Sometimes the happenings are small in the grand scheme of things — a newly-engaged girl strolls the Izmir pier for the first time alone. Other times, they are scandalous or macabre — a weakness for young men, a suicide by pesticide. We see the inside of people’s houses, the things in their handbags and their suitcases, their diseased family trees. The effect is voyeuristic and thrilling and sometimes grim, a literary gift to people who are prone to staring on buses and straining their ears in restaurants, trying to plumb the depths of their neighbors.

I know, thanks to Emily Williams, that there are myriad barriers to translating and publishing non-English language works in America. Still, other languages have a much better track record of translating Mungan — German, French, Italian, Greek, to name a few. If it’s a matter of money, the Turkish Ministry of Culture is here to help: TEDA, the Translation Subvention Program of Turkey, provides grants to publishing houses and universities for the translation or publication of works in Turkish. With assistance from this program, Cities of Women appeared in German in 2010, two years after its Turkish publication, and Chador was translated into German, Italian, and Greek. The deadline to be considered for this application period is, er, tomorrow, but applications are accepted throughout the year.

Furthermore, we Anglophones have a rare opportunity here for a bit of friendly cultural one-upmanship with the French: In a talk last summer, Mungan told the assembled that his French publishers rejected Cities of Women because they wanted to advertise him strictly as a novelist. The introduction of his stories and plays and poems to the market, they told him, would “confuse” the French people.

Certainly there’s an argument to be made against translating only the most famous people from a given place, but when the rates of translation into English are abysmal, we should be pragmatic. You need strong stuff to liberate the global Turkish literary market from the Pamuk monopoly, and Mungan has the credibility of critical and popular success, the seal of approval implicit in a long and august career. And most importantly, these stories are really great.