Cevat Çapan has been the spokesperson for world literature in Turkey without ever needing to get on a soapbox.  For Turkish fans of British writers like T.S. Eliot and John Berger, Greek poets like Yiannis Ritsos, C.P. Cavafy and George Seferis, Çapan's voice has been the one they have heard for fifty years.

Çapan, Writer of Honor at the 28th Istanbul Book Fair, is a graduate of Robert College and Cambridge University.  He began translating while still studying at Robert College. The work continued at Cambridge after he saw Marching Time, a play by the as yet uncelebrated John Whiting.  Moved by the performance, Çapan decided to translate the play into Turkish.  He continued translating even in his year working for the BBC and when he returned to Turkey, because of this experience and his doubts about his own writing.

“Translation was some sort of escape from doing,” Çapan says, “because at that time, there were some very good Turkish poets who I thought I could not compete with.  This must have been an unconscious fear.  So I translated, I started translating English poems, Greek poems, and later, I realized I was translating all the poems I liked from all over the world:  Italian, Spanish, Chinese.”

Though Çapan's translations of world poetry have been criticized because he only uses English “bench translations” for his work, he believes that this practice is not unscrupulous, particularly with Greek poetry.  When he translates from Greek to Turkish, he listens to the original poem before pinning the exact meaning from the available English translations.  The feeling of the poetry, Çapan says, is more important to him than the exact words.  Even though Çapan does not know Greek for instance, he has a feeling of the language from listening to his mother, an immigrant from Crete, and her friends, talking and singing in the language, when he was a child. 

“We live in the same world,” he says.  “It's like when you meet Greek people, in spite of this artificial antagonism, there's a great friendship and sharing things, shared experience.  For instance, we had an interesting actor, Mehmet Ulusoy who used to work in Paris.  There was a time when he couldn't come to Turkey; he hadn't done his military service, so he stayed in Paris, and then he missed Turkey so much he went to Crete for one of his vacations with his French girlfriend.  He went fishing and brought it to the motel he was staying at and said, 'Prepare a feast for tonight, we'll eat and drink,' and, there was a huge feast, a nice table on the threshing floor, and then they started playing the music and started dancing.  And all of a sudden, they started playing a Turkish dance tune.  He said, 'they understood I was Turkish!  From the way I danced, they started playing tsifteteli Tourkika.'  This happens many times.”

Yet Çapan, translator and poet, never feels confined to the Mediterranean even in his own poetry, which he began publishing in 1985.  This work, according to his friend and colleague A.S. Byatt, in the English translation of some of his work, ‘Where are you, Susie Petschek?’ knows its place amongst world literature without forgetting that it is Turkish.

“I think I try to be, I feel very much at home in world literature because I am interested in what I read of literature,” Çapan says.  “I feel very much at home.  Whenever I had the opportunity to meet people in multinational meetings, I never felt that I was in the minority.  So I think that my poetry is not typically Turkish, but it is Turkish.  I've written about Lichtenstein, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, but I've also written about Cretan immigrants or east Anatolian workers, people who work in coffee shops and things like that.  So writing poetry about my age, about the world, about everything I experience, I think makes me a world citizen.”

Çapan's challenge in translating world literature into Turkish is thus not from his own unfamiliarity with non-Turkish works, but from the difficulties of interpreting.  English literature, Çapan says, represents a “more industrialized society” which has “a different sensibility” that must be explained in his word choices.

“I try to find the lowest common denominator.  I mean, what do we share with that sort of people?  How can we express that sort of experience in Turkish?  For instance, I translated T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland,' which is a very difficult poem and very different from the Turkish society.  So it is not a completely successful translation.  It is not a perfect translation.  This was also true for Spanish when someone says, I have to wait for so many years to translate 'The Wasteland,' because Spanish was not developed enough to translate 'The Wasteland.'   'The Wasteland' is a poem which represents an industrialized civilization- and Spanish wasn't developed enough to reflect that social civilization.  This is true for Turkish.”

But Turkish literature, according to Çapan, particularly in the work of Yaşar Kemal, can be translated into English or other Western languages because of the similarities in the tradition of writing stories.  Kemal, for instance, represents the final vestige of the oral literary tradition in Turkey.  When a reader from the Western tradition reads Kemal's work, the source of storytelling is reincarnated in the reader.  According to Çapan, Kemal has a novelty and that is what carries his name and the sense of Turkish literature to the rest of the world.  That novelty, of which Çapan resurrects each time he enables someone to read a non-Turkish writer in Turkish, may remind the attendants at the book fair of where their literatures began and may, if listened to carefully enough, be heard in their original tongues without needing a translation.

The Fair in Brief

The 28th Istanbul Book Fair will run from October 31st to November 8th.  The theme, “Translation in Intercultural Dialogue,” brings eight international writers to the Tüyap Fair and Congress Center and will feature discussion lectures and readings.  Over 550 publishers will be represented at the Fair; just to get an idea for the importance of the fair, it’s worth mentioning that they are expecting 300.000 attendees! Topics for the main program include “Che Guevara's Inheritance and the Effects of Latin America's Guerilla Movement on the Continent's Current Politics,” “Modern Romanian Literature and Translation” and “The Berlin Wall after 20 Years.”  Children's programs and plays will also run during the Fair's normal hours.  Shuttle and bus service to the Center in Büyükçekmece is available to fair attendants. For more information visit: http://www.tuyap.com.tr/webpages/kitap09eng/index.php.