#9 / Once a Flaneur, Always a Flaneuse

Welcome to issue nine 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 and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature. Each issue has a short essay or some thoughts, 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!

THE ESSAY: ONCE A FLANEUR, ALWAYS A FLANEUSE

Arzu was a high-spirited child, and Sevgi was crazy about her. Mother and daughter would walk all around Brussels together, discovering every single street, looking at shop windows, and wandering the Royal Galleries Saint-Hubert. They would admire the handmade gloves, antique toys, chocolate fountains, and Brussels lace adorning the windows. They would step on the cobble stones leading to the Grand-Place, marveling at the grandiosity of the square and caressing Everard t’Serclaes for good fortune. They would check if Manneken Pis had a new costume on and then move uptown via the Sablon, where they would stroll some more as they made their way towards the Ixelles neighbourhood, where they lived nearby the University. Sevgi had always dreamed that her daughter would study, unlike herself. She would always regret not having finished her undergraduate degree, which she started at the University of Istanbul in 1978.  

Walking aimlessy was her escape. They would walk all along the Avenue Louise and its luxurious shop windows. They would take detours behind and stop in front of the typical Brussels mansions with their mind-blowing outside ornaments of twisted ironwork and stained glass depicting spectacular botanicals. There was nothing minimalistic about these streets and their architecture. It was a feast for their eyes. Sevgi takes pride in knowing the city better than any taxi driver today. She always finds her way through the narrowest backstreets.

 

When they would be too tired to walk or if the weather was too cold, Sevgi and Arzu would take the tram. The squealing noise it made as it turned and rode the tracks, and the bell that would reverberate at every crossing, added to the soundtrack of their mother-daughter ballads.

This short fragment about mother and daughter Sevgi and Arzu is from my novel in progress. The passages are a blend of memory and imagination. Childhood wrapped in fiction. They reveal to me that I was always a flaneur. A stroller, a lounger, a loafer… that 19th century poet who walks the streets and observes its happenings. Reflects. Walks some more. It is an art. Charles Baudelaire was a flaneur. Walter Benjamin too. In French, flaneur is a masculine noun. Flaneuse is a feminine equivalent, although according to Wikipedia, “The historical feminine rough equivalent of the flâneur [is] the passante (French for 'walker', 'passer-by').” I’m a flaneuse as much as a flaneur. If I go back into my memories and look at the fragment I shared of my fictional self with my fictional mother, we were never just passing by. The city was foreign to her, yet she was tracing her existence in it, one step at a time. Forty years later, I have archived those steps into fiction and made her a flaneuse, not just a passer-by. My mother still lives in Brussels today and knows all the backstreets better than a taxi driver.

Throughout the years, as part of my flaneusing in many cities across the world, I developed an artistic practice which became City in Translation and materialized in workshops, residencies, talks, and a chapter in a Routledge publication. Exploring languages in urban spaces was only a natural way for me to look at the world. Thanks to my family history, my reality has been rooted in motion: between places, languages, emotions.

In French, the word ‘ou’ changes its definition with only one accent: ‘ou’ without an accent means ‘or’, whereas ‘où’ with an accent means ‘where’. I see this as a movement, too: getting rid of the accent to transform place—‘where’, into a choice—‘or’. Fifteen years ago, I made the choice of moving from Brussels to Amsterdam.

I was not always aware of my yearning for movement until I was constantly reminded that I was never really ‘home’ in Brussels and that my language was alien in this city where I grew up since my earliest memory. What they insisted on calling my ‘mother tongue’ came to me through body and gestures. I have been looking for my language in so many ways because I was enjoined to reject her. That language I was born into has been made invisible for decades in these new lands where my family and I were considered as passers-by.

Now, in Amsterdam, I am living in a language I feel less connected to emotionally, and yet accomplish so much connection with. The curiosity and amazement I have learned to nurture through flaneusing has brought me here. I am constantly trying to reclaim all my languages. I had no choice but to learn and speak my hosts’ languages. With time, I made them mine as well. Through this process and understanding, Turkish has become the mother of all my tongues, and transformed me into the translator, writer and artist I am today. I have turned my roots upwards; I have created the possibility of being from nowhere so that I could belong everywhere. I owe this freedom to my mother, the initial flaneuse of my life.

ON TRANSLATION

I am currently working on a wonderful book project with the Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) in London. Together with poet Sarah Howe, author of the magnificent collection Loop of Jade (2015), we are translating Karin Karakaşlı’s poetry from Turkish to English. Karin is not only a poet, writer and intellectual I admire deeply, she has also become a friend. I had first met Karin through her work and my initial steps to become a published literary translator almost two decades ago.

The way we are working for the PTC publication is a journey in itself: I propose an initial “literal” translation (I put it in quotation marks because nothing is ever literal, you always start interpreting the moment you imagine what a word, a line, a sentence, a poem… means to you) and add lots of notes regarding language, what I think the poet meant, how I felt it etc., so that Sarah can take over with her own vision and passion for language and poetry. We had done a first collaboration like this one back in 2017. I am looking forward to sharing more with you all once the book comes out in Spring 2024!

For now, let me share two lines from Karin’s latest poetry I’ve been working on recently. See this as having access to my brain (and heart, after all we translate with our whole body!) in the very first moments I approach a text and start translating. There’s no editing work yet, this is just raw:  

Ülken peşin sıra sürüklediğin
Your country which you drag behind
bir kahır bavulu
is a suitcase filled with pain/ an aching suitcase/ a suitcase in agony

(the full sentence would be: Your country is an aching suitcase you’re dragging behind)

I just love this image of an aching suitcase. I bet we all have at least one we keep dragging behind us. Translating poetry is one way to make my suitcases lighter.

And stay tuned for the final translation Sarah and I will create.

LISTENING, WATCHING, READING

Listen: I started listening to Living Archives, an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through testimonies shared by UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form what Stuart Hall calls a “living archive of the diaspora”, which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain. It is hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor who invites practitioners to reflect on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other.

Read: “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, like illusion; but we can never give them up.” These are notes from 1962 by painter Gerhard Richter, published in The Daily Practice of Painting, which assembles writing and interviews between 1962 and 1993, edited and introduced by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and translated from the German by David Britt. It’s one of the many books I have been gathering from the library (I go to university libraries and the local ones and have always a dozen of borrowed books around the house). I love reading several books in parallel. The context in which I read (whether it is external or internal) always influences how I will feel a text. I admire Richter as a painter and reading his thoughts, his process and vision is just fascinating.

Watch: I waited for weeks to find the right time to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at the cinema. I would need to have had eaten before, bring water and snacks, make sure I am rested so I can make it for more than three hours seated in a cinema. But these all went out the window last week when, following a conversation which made me reflect on questions regarding integrity, moral and ethical responsibility in the positions I hold within culture, I decided to go for a walk and my steps made me cross the IJ river to the EYE Cinema where they show Oppenheimer in 70mm. I didn’t check the time once, I was deeply engaged in the complicated story, the magnitude of Nolan’s visual language, the mesmerizing music, the superb acting and flawless cinematography. Of course, there are many angles to read this film from, and I understand the different critical point of views. But in that moment, I needed that intense cinematic and human experience. I have loved many of Nolan’s films and was disappointed in a few others. This one will be added to my beloved ones.

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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