By Karolina Dejnicka
“So it’s like a soul, then?”
“No, not a soul.” My friend paused, thinking of the right words to express his thought in his second language. “It’s more like the life inside you,” he explained, pressing his hand to his chest in emphasis.
“Well,” I replied, “If there’s a word for that in English, I don’t know it.”
Can, like many Turkish loanwords, is Persian in origin. Turkey officially adopted the Latin alphabet in 1929, but the pronunciation of the letter c makes what an English speaker would describe as a “j” sound — not to be confused with the “zh” pronunciation of the Turkish j, a relic of European influence that is pronounced like the g in the French (and subsequently English) word gendarmerie, which in turn gives us the Turkish word jandarma.
This pronunciation of c reflects the previous life of the written Turkish language in the form of Ottoman Turkish, which used the Perso-Arabic abjad where — as the word abjad itself suggests — the “j” sound comes third in the alphabet. When I first went to Turkey, I kept thinking I was meeting people named John. As it turns out, Can is a fairly common name.
When we think about transferring concepts like can into another language, we encounter a common problem faced by translators everywhere. There is no single-word equivalent, and the options left to us are either an imperfect translation or a description bordering on the overly explanatory. If the accurate meaning of can was not as important as the fact that it was a short word in a long sentence about something entirely different, “soul” might be a perfectly suitable substitute (although my friend would insist that the correct word for that would be ruh).
But how could we succinctly say “the snap on the flap of the pocket on his coat” in a shorter way that retained all that information because the next sentence needed those details to make sense? Sometimes we need to add something not in the original text or skip something that’s there in order to get the point across in a well-written way. When we translate poetry, this issue becomes even more important.
I’ve been trying to expose myself to more Turkish poetry, and find that I sometimes want to retranslate poems I’ve read in English for no other reason than because the quality of the translation wasn’t very good. I keep thinking to myself, “This poem deserves better!” Sometimes, it seems as if the translator thought, “Well, since poetry is impossible to translate exactly anyway, I just won’t even try.”
Too often, the translated version retains only a vague echo of the original, disregarding the poet’s style, meter, word choice, and even meaning… just about everything that made the poem stand out in the first place. And while this can be very difficult to get right in translation – for example, I struggled for hours on one Orhan Veli poem with a remarkable ABAB rhyming pattern that I was determined to at least translate into an ABCB pattern, only to get stuck on the last two lines – I still think that even if you know you won’t be able to replicate the exact style, you should at least get the substance, along with a good rhythm that evokes the original. I am constantly bewildered by translations that express a new idea completely absent from the original, or that abandon style entirely in favour of explaining each line until it no longer reads like a poem at all.
A few years ago, the collective sat together and tried to come up with a translation of Gülten Akın’s “Çile” – a title that translates both to “a skein of yarn” and “suffering.” This poem is short, asking only one question over two lines — “If the end of a skein is lost, how can it be rolled back together?” — while simultaneously asking the same about the unraveling of suffering in one’s life when there is no end in sight. We finally agreed that in order to convey the double meaning, we would need ask the question twice – once regarding yarn, and again regarding suffering.
After all, it’s not really about yarn, is it?
translation attached 