#19 / AND A LOT OF TENDERNESS

Welcome to issue nineteen of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist based in Amsterdam. Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.

This week I have shared the following thoughts on social media:

my first post of the year 2024 🧡
wearing my grandfather’s tie and my grandmother’s leather boots. two souls gone, my roots arrachées de la terre (found myself crying earlier because i missed living more in the French language. then i listened to a song in Turkish and cried some more).
i stopped looking for a home. i want beauty, care, justice, dreams and a lot tenderness.

And so, instead of my usual longer reflections or an essay, this issue of the newsletter is filled with tenderness, including pages from earlier sketchbooks and notebooks, as well as poetry.

TRANSLATION AS A GESTURE OF LOVE (OR REMEMBRANCE)

“Listening to music is the gesture that defeats the skin by transforming it from a boundary into a connection.” —Vilém Flusser, in Gestures (translated from German by Nancy Ann Roth).

i want to translate

all the love songs of my geographies

to you

sezen aksu and jacques brel

the newer ones too

i want to translate

the yearning to go back

places, spaces, faces

a feeling you are alien to

your life

spent in this one city

from birth on

i was defined by movement

i want to translate

the recipes my grandmother brings to life

so that you can taste

what it is like

to be loved

beyond borders

something we know too well

we, who grew up with the nostalgia

of a country we never lived in

(isn’t it how we never get lost

in translation)

i want to translate

my imagination

so it can merge into yours

so we can turn our present

into a past

that will not fade into a blur

on a forgotten photograph

LISTENING, WATCHING, READING

Read
I have been reading Teju Cole for years, all his non-fiction. But I had never taken the time to dive into his fiction. This January, I treated myself to all three of his novels (one of them is said to be a novella but I don’t care for such definitions). Everyday is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2011) and Tremor (2023). It was an intense and beautiful experience to read all those books one after the other. Cole brings so many emotions out of me and most importantly, he creates that urgent space where beauty meets reflection, where imagination is always part of how we must look at the world. Cole does it so beautifully well through music, art, photography (including his own).

Watch
I have finally seen The Red Shoes, a 1948 film written, directed, and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It’s been on my list forever, but I wanted to see it in a cinema and not on a small screen. So when I saw it was playing in my local beloved cinema Kriterion, I didn’t miss the chance. The story is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story of red ballet shoes that refuse to stop dancing. It follows aspiring ballerina Victoria Page (played by a mesmerizing Moira Shearer), who joins the world-renowned Ballet Lermontov, owned and operated by Boris Lermontov (played by Anton Walbrook), who will test her dedication to the ballet by making her choose between her career and love. Heartbreaking, very dramatic, a visual treat (especially for its time). It is also one of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.

Listen
Ava Duvernay has directed a new film, titled Origin, based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and both the film and the book are on my watch/read list. While waiting for the film to arrive to the Netherlands, I am listening to interviews with Duvernay, like this one on Radio Hour, where she tells about the process of filming, from funding to making, the urgency of the theme and why it needed to come out now and not later. A truly inspiring artist and visionary.

NOTEBOOK PAGES

FROM THE ARCHIVES

PODCAST

🎙️ an audio version of the attention span newsletter is available on your favourite podcast app: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast…or to listen on the attention span website.

ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. She established The Attention Span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

You can support my work via patreon 🧡

Thank you so much for reading! Feel free to share this newsletter with your friends, on your social media and more. Here’s the link to subscribe: https://theattentionspan.com/subscribe

When quoting or sharing content, make sure to attribute it to the author. Unless otherwise stated, all content (writing, photography, design) created and published in this newsletter is authored by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil.