#6 / DO I REALLY WANT THAT REMOTE LIFE?

Welcome to issue six of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator, an artist and a curator of cultural programmes based in Amsterdam.

Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature. Each issue has a short essay, a nerdy look at translation, a page from one of my notebooks, a list of things to read, watch or listen to, and a highlight from my archives.

If you prefer an audio experience, you can listen to me reading the newsletter to you. You can also support my work via Patreon.

Thank you for your presence and attention!

THOUGHTS: DO I REALLY WANT THAT REMOTE LIFE?

This issue comes with thoughts rather than an essay. I am currently away from home to take care of a friend’s house and her two cats while they’re on a family trip. I’m in the Northern part of the Netherlands, in small town called Bergen. It’s not that far away yet it feels miles apart from everything I am used to. I didn’t know this place at all, but it is renown for being an artist and writer's town. Which I do understand as nature here is very inspiring: the forest is magestic, the bike ride to the sea is also mesmerizing (it’s a twenty-minute bycicle ride to my beloved North Sea! So imagine my happiness).

While I do enjoy the nature, I must admit I am no fan of the town. It is very posh, and with the summer season, it turns into this touristic fancy town with people passing through but no real feel of belonging or community. There is also a lot of wealth, with villas and mansions with huge water fountain sculptures behind giant gates. It doesn’t make me feel romantic or envious, I feel very out of place. But I do find happiness in the forest, which is just so precious, and the local art museum is also a gem. There’s also a cinema in the heart of the forest, and ruins of a church in the centre of the village. All these elements make me feel some affection for this place. The freedom of riding a bicycle all the way to the sea, discovering bunkers, a pine tree forest before the dunes and oak trees on the way, I am allowing all these fabulous colours to enchant my imagination.

Throughout the pandemic and the different lockdowns, like many of us, I kept wandering if I wanted to leave the city for a more remote life. Would I have more time to read, to write, to make art if I didn’t have to survive in a city that is getting more expensive and precarious to live in, day after day. And it is true, being surrounded by a forest and being so close to the sea is attractive. Although I’m sure life is not much cheaper in this particular town, it could be possible to find a place that is less posh and still is surrounded by nature more than people. But I realise that, maybe, for now, it isn’t enough to inspire me. I am after all a city person in my heart, and I do thrive in an environment with access to culture and stories on a daily basis. I will keep dreaming about remote living every time the harshness of a capitalist city will hit me, and it will. And maybe someday, I will surrender to a remote life, like writer and art critic John Berger did when he escaped a society in crisis to settle in a small village in the French Alps. Until then, I’ll remain in my Amsterdam.

ON TRANSLATION

Through keeping notebooks, sketchbooks and my photography, my work has seen the evolution of a perspective on translation which I call: “Definitions of Translation”. It all started with pictures I had printed as part of a project, taken in two different cities. When I saw them next to one another, I realised: this is translation! (You can the pictures in the notebook page I am sharing further below). From then on, I continued creating many “definitions of translation”.  

I came across an art work at the museum Kranenburgh here in Bergen: Guernica de la Ecología by artist and eco-activist Claudy Jongstra immediately made me think of an act of translation. It is described as follows on the museum’s website: “In this work, Jongstra directs her ire at a neglectful world that abuses the planet. She translates this condemnation into swirling, furious shades of black, white, and sepia-grey. The work’s title and precisely copied dimensions refer to Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting, Guernica, painted in 1937. However much their denunciations may differ, both artists omit colour to create comparably menacing atmospheres.”

You may say it’s an adaptation, a reinterpretation, an hommage… all these would also fit my vision of what translation is. My proposition is not to define everything as translation, but to explore the many layers of literary translation by looking at art, at what happens in the world, at small gestures and much more through creating your own definitions of translation.

LISTENING, WATCHING, READING

Read: Wavelength – Longitud de onda, by Cristina Lucas. I came across this book at the Kranenburgh museum shop, where Lucas’s exhibition The Environment is us, is on show. I must admid I haven’t read the book yet, but I browsed through and it’s very well designed, with photographs of the artists’ work. What interests me particularly are the different essays in it, which touch on capitalism, the environment and climate change, how Lucas is looking at the mechanisms of power, analysing fundamental structures in politics, economics, in society. So, this book is definitely on my radar.

Watch: Right now, I am obsessed with a Turkish soap called Kızılcık Şerbeti (which has been translated as Cranberry Sorbet but also as One Love), and I am definitely going to write about it in a future issue of this newsletter. It’s a kind of Romeo and Juliet story set in Istanbul, today, where the children of two families coming from totally opposite social backgrounds get married. The young woman is from a liberal, so-called “modern” family and the young man is from an ultra-conservative and mega rich family. They’re not enemies like the Montagues and the Capulets, but their views of the world clash a lot, which creates a lot of (melo)drama. It’s perfect as a soap but also gives an interesting perspective on today’s highly polarised societies (Turkey in this case, but we could definitely apply it to other places).

Listen: Whenever I feel a bit lost, especially in my creative practice, I turn to poet, musician, writer Patti Smith who reminds me that what matters is to keep doing the work. I love this conversation between Patti and Malcolm Gladwell in this episode of the podcast Broken Record. It’s from March 2022 but never gets old.

A PAGE FROM ONE OF MY NOTEBOOKS

FROM THE ARCHIVES

PODCAST

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a multilingual writer, artist, literary translator, performer, editor, podcaster and cultural programmes curator 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.

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