#29/ SO REAL

Welcome to issue twenty-nine 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.

In this issue, I am sharing the introduction I wrote to the poetry collection of Karin Karakaşlı, titled ‘Real’ which we have launched in London on 18 June, at the Theatreship. This is a gift, an invitation to further explore the work of this extraordinary poet.

INTRODUCTION TO REAL/ASLI

Late in September 2023, I paid the poet Karin Karakaşlı a visit in Istanbul. We sat on her balcony overlooking a courtyard filled with immense trees, a bubble of oxygen in a city overwhelmed with buildings and endless urban renewal. We were looking at the cats relaxing on the emergency stairs. ‘I keep observing them, there’s a whole life happening in there,’ Karin said, lighting a cigarette. I recognized this curiosity and constant marvelling at the world, including the smallest details most people would ignore, from her poetry. I noticed how every smoke exhale was followed by silence. A silence in which she might be writing her next line of poetry. For me, her translator, to witness that instant was so real, as Karin’s beloved Jeff Buckley once sang. 

Karin Karakaşlı is an Armenian-Turkish poet who writes in Turkish. She pens columns and opinion pieces regularly for independent media platforms, and writes fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature as well as poetry. Before I ever met her, I learned to know her through her poems, which have their deepest roots in the pain and scars left by the Turkish state’s negationist discourse on the Armenian genocide of 1915. The government’s persistent denial of collective memory not only affects people of Armenian descent but all communities, especially minorities such as the Greeks and the Kurds but also women and LGBTQI+ communities. It is an example of how those in power in Turkey have erased the history, and rights, of large parts of their population.

From her earliest work, Karin has sought to exist as an artist in the context of these ongoing violations of freedom of expression, dignity and human rights. But her poetry has evolved and gained many layers of emotion over her 15-year career, and so too has its interpretation, and therefore its translation. Her latest poetry collection, from which we have chosen several poems for this book, offers a more personal contemplation of this context in which she is still based.

My journey as Karin’s translator began over a decade ago. I first translated one of her poems into French, another of my languages. Following the first translation workshop I gave at the Poetry Translation Centre in London in March 2013, where I introduced Karin’s poetry to the PTC’s founder, Sarah Maguire, I decided to focus on translating her work into English. I remember that day clearly: walking through Regent’s Park, starting in the sun and ending up in the middle of a storm, arriving at the workshop space wet to the bone. All the layers of me becoming one with the rain may sound like a cheesy metaphor for translation, but I will still make the connection. Since then, I can say Karin’s poetic language has become ingrained in me. Sharing it with another poet, Sarah Howe, my fellow translator in this project, has added new layers and a depth to the process of translation that it is not possible to experience working alone. Translation is a slow process, and it teaches you to never lose hope in the realisation of things.

For this World Poet Series book we have selected poems from across Karin’s poetic oeuvre, namely: Benim Gönlüm Gümüş / This Heart of Mine is Silver (2009), Her Kimsen Sana / Whoever You Are, (This Is) For You (2012), İrtifa Kaybı / Loss of Altitude (2015) and most recently Yek Parça / Single Piece(DATE). The first time I read this last collection, my heart – the heart of a poetry lover – started stuttering. I read the line 

Çünkü tutkunla varsın, isminden bile önce

and felt it deeply in my whole body. But straight away my mind asked, how am I going to translate it? In my notes to Sarah, I conveyed the line in its rawest, most literal form:

Because you exist with your passion, even before your name

along with the side-note, ‘I love this line! It’s a beautiful way to say we exist with our passion, our emotions, before we’re ever defined by a name, or any identity.’ I also recorded myself reading the poem aloud so that Sarah could hear the Turkish language, thereby adding musicality to the emotion. The line we created together in English is:

Since passion makes us exist, even before we are named

I read it now and it makes me shiver in the same way the Turkish original does. That is the magic of translation: a text comes alive when someone else’s imagination enters the realm of the original.

We worked in this same way for each poem. I wrote down rough notes on what each line may mean, recorded myself geeking out about language, telling stories related to my own experience of the Turkish language, explaining what I thought the poet might mean, linking it to the context in which the poems were written but also read. Translation happens not in one moment in time but many.

Karin has told us, with her customary open-heartedness which you will hopefully also feel in her poems, how in awe she is of Sarah’s commitment to her poetry; ‘It is like going for a walk in another body,’ she tells us on a Zoom call, adding that it is a gesture of immense generosity for a poet to lend their voice to another person’s poetry. Sarah has freed not only Karin’s poetry but my own practice as a translator of this collection. She has shapeshifted in her own poetry, trusting me and Karin in the process. Translation is always an act of generosity, and it necessitates not only the mind but the heart and, I believe, the body too. What you will find in these pages are the poetic languages of two poets, woven together through the act of translation.

The gesture of translating can be defined by the moments in which you translate, especially with poetry. When I first started working on this book, I visited a retrospective exhibition in Paris by the American painter Joan Mitchell. Throughout my visit I took pictures of Mitchell’s abstract paintings which were heavy in purple colours: lilac, violet, lavender, purple… mixed with yellow, sometimes red, creating gigantic yet magnificent bruises on immense canvases. I sent them to Karin with the note: ‘They’re like your poems.’ Karin kindly accepted my interpretation, which I believe is a sign of how rich her poetry is. It permits many meanings. Every reader will draw their own associations, read beyond the specific context the poet is based in, because Karin captures our imaginations by sharing her inner fears, excitement and hope in the most vulnerable way. Her bruises turn into poetry (and maybe this is how healing is possible?).

There is a lot of tenderness in every contemplation she offers, and even when she is critical of the world she never judges. Every line is an invitation to us to explore the possibilities of language, to allow it to blend with our own reality. The poems in this collection, we hope, pull us towards our truest selves, to hold space for authenticity, for good, and for beauty. To live in such a way to be able to say, oh... that was so real.

Amsterdam, December 2023

READING I invite you to dive into Karin Karakaşlı’s poetry collection Real, which I have co-translated with Sarah Howe. Real has been selected as a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice for Summer 2024 and acclaimed by fellow poet Kit Fan as ‘astonishing’, with Fiona Sampson praising Karakașlı as ‘an important contemporary poet of witness’. It took me more than ten years to carry this urgent work of poetry in translation and I am very proud of it.

WATCHING I also invite you to watch the launch of Karin Karakaşlı’s poetry book REAL, which was live-streamed on 18 June 2024. It was a moving gathering; we have read poems from the collection in both English and Turkish, and we have discussed the process of translation, including the power of the collective and the importance of generosity.

LISTENING Jeff Buckley’s album Grace, especially the songs: “So Real” (which I refer to in this introduction) and “Lilac Wine” (which Karin refers to in one of her poems). I still remember how we cried with my friends in high school, the day we learned that Jeff drowned in the Mississippi river. So at the book launch, I read the poem “Lilac” and that’s how we carried Jeff with us.

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. They 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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