Hesketh Living in Language

International reflections for the practising poet
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7398948-9-4
Verlag: Poetry Translation Centre
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 188 Seiten

Living in Language brings together reflections on the craft and purpose of poetry, by 21 leading poets from around the world. The lyric essays, fragments, letters and new poems in this groundbreaking anthology shed light on topics as diverse and vital as writing the body, writing in exile, writing as witness, writing as a shamanic act, grappling with traditional forms, discovering your own voice, and even translation and self-translation. This is an essential resource for anyone looking to broaden their horizons and engage with the cutting edge of poetry as it is practised, around the world, in the 21st century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hesketh, Erica

Leseproben

Life’s Literary Stopping Places

Karin Karakasli

Translated from the Turkish by Ayça Türkoglu

For me, literature is a looping journey; I have passed each of its stops many times, never tiring of any of them. But if I must have a beginning, then it had better be language itself.

I grew up bilingual. Before writing or literature, there was language. Words and sound. A child’s home is the limit of their world at first, and the child believes that the language they speak at home is the language the whole world speaks. And so it was for me. One day, I heard different voices on the street. There were different voices coming out of the TV too, which in those days would broadcast very short, black-and-white programmes. I turned to my grandmother, who had taught me my own voice. ‘Yaya,’ I said. ‘What is this?’ ‘It’s Turkish,’ she said. My next question naturally followed: ‘Then what do we speak?’ ‘We speak Armenian, sweetheart,’ she said, smiling. The two languages were labelled like jam jars that day, and that was the day I split in two.

Then came school with its differently coloured book covers. My Armenian exercise book had a blue cover and my Turkish book had a red one. If that weren’t enough, letters had begun raining down on me from the sky. I had 38 Armenian letters, like hieroglyphs, and 29 Turkish letters from the Latin alphabet. I had two languages in my dreams at night, in my unending daydreams, and in the games I played out in the street. I was too much.

I will never forget the day I moved on from picture books to books filled with text. In the blink of an eye, I could see pictures in my imagination in the space between two sentences. I was no longer in that little living room with the grating over the window. I was floating in the air, free of time and space, just as I wanted. I was breathless in the face of the book’s magical power. And it was while I was reading that I first felt the enormity of writing. Literature became my freedom, first through reading, and then by writing the books I dreamed of reading myself.

Being bilingual is like being at the cinema and constantly being able to change the camera angle and focus. You become an inner eye and an outer eye at the same time. You’re able to look upon what’s closest to you from a distance, and look up close at things that are far away. Armenian has its own alphabet, harking back to ancient times. It has allowed me to share that world’s hidden stories. It has also nourished me in the literary language I established in Turkish, with its music, its rhythm, and its deep-rooted writing tradition.

But language is not merely a conduit, it is a subject that exerts its own will. A language can choose you. German, the first foreign language I learned, was freedom for me; it opened the door to a whole new region of culture, and I became so saturated in it that it became another language I can write in. I still take great pleasure in expanding the scope of my linguistic playground by learning new languages, and in my ability to take refuge in parallel universes when the world feels too small.

With language as its main ingredient, literature presents a different kind of challenge to other artforms. We use the same language to live our everyday lives, to fight, to swear, to command others to torture, or commit massacres. The power of words is great. Words can be a weapon that kills, but they can also heal. It’s the intention that matters. So, I fuss over the literary language I have built. I never skimp on giving it the care and the effort it deserves. I’m a steadfast worker, a patient collector, a compulsive observer. I’m not always tightly bound to life. Death is always close by. But I am in love with life itself, with its infinite existence that transcends the human span, with every fibre of my being.

It always seemed to me that literature and life meet at the thin line of horizon between the sky and the sea. Sometimes I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Sometimes the storm is at sea, and sometimes all hell breaks loose in the sky. They rise and fall like a seesaw, literature and life.

When I set out to write all this, and more, when I pour life into literature’s mould, I pause for a moment at the beginning. The truth is that everything has accumulated long before the pen touches the pages of your notebook, before your fingers move across the keys, and then it’s time for it to flow. And as it flows, you have to drift along with it. You look down and your words have begun writing you.

Whether it’s yourself you’re facing, or some imaginary being, writing always means searching for your interlocutor, extricating it from yourself, and sharing it. You will be the one who begins and the one who brings it to an end. You’re free of dimensions, free of shackles, as free as you can be. Yet in that freedom there’s a responsibility, too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that literature cannot compete with the fiction of life. Sometimes the reality of life is so absurd that if I tried to write it, people would say, ‘Well, she’s embellished that.’ But there’s another thing I know, deep in my bones: literature begins where life leaves off. While life is busy being lived, literature is the record-keeper of what it is and what it cannot be. It seems to me that when life forgets itself, it looks to literature to remember.

I think literature is inherently oppositional. Why would you stop living your own life and set about creating other worlds, unless you had some problem or some inescapable purpose? For my part, I’ve always been passionate about literature’s ability to record alternatives to official history and to liberate the human story. I’ve taken particular strength from seeking out the voices of those condemned to silence for different reasons. I find it meaningful to create different universes, to dream up dimensionless worlds, and to push the possibilities of language to their absolute limits. In doing this, I pursue a truth which either some power has deprived us of, or which we daren’t look in the eye. There is something tragic and telling about the fact that we are still drowning in lies even now that channels of communication are so numerous and varied. When everything and everyone is telling lies, literature will continue to express the truth of a person, a history, a geography, a future. I write this with real faith.

One of the most magical aspects of writing is that every genre is a school in itself.

Stories are my first love, a secret garden where I photograph life’s milestones, creating scenes like those in the films I love, and where I touch the soul in its barest state; stories are an alternative universe I slip into, before allowing the reader to join me. Novels are life itself, a contract for stability and permanence. They are an adventure I embark on, following my heroes, and the adventure doesn’t end until they say so. Essays and columns are the battlefield where I try to record day-to-day life, laying claim to the truth that is being taken from us and appropriated. They are a sanctuary with different doors, an ocean that takes me in and allows me to become one of its atoms when I’m spilling from life’s edges. The deeper I dive, the clearer it is, the further I go, the closer it is. With its authenticity in dialogue, its discipline which doesn’t permit even the slightest hole in plot development, its test of sincerity, and its realism, which doesn’t compromise on hope, children’s literature is the school I attend with utmost joy.

*

Poetry is my final stop.

I was brave enough to read poems early, but I was late in summoning the courage to write them. To me, poetry has always been an anomalous, singular universe within literature itself. It’s a force that shakes me, envelops me. When I feel incapable of doing anything, I reach instinctively for a poetry book. If I haven’t spoken to anyone all day, even if I’ve barely heard my own voice, I’ll mutter a poem to myself gently. Poetry brings me back to myself.

As a reader, I think I owe a lot to poetry in translation. As far as I’m concerned, nothing matches the nature of poetry the way translation does, because poetry has an inherent need to be on the move all the time. It must be spoken time and time again, echoed in other languages. Translation is its greatest companion on that journey.

You might say that poetry translation is a crossroads in the realm of interlingual relations; where one language goes, carried by poetry, another language rises to meet it. Poetry translation multiplies the creativity in all languages, infinitely expanding the possibilities. As the form closest to oral literature and music, poetry inhabits a special and permeable place in all of humanity’s languages. Poetry has a magic to it akin to the myths and archetypes we view as our common cultural heritage. I often try to translate poems in other languages that strike me into Turkish. When I do this, I first have to get some distance from the source text, because translation is a state of limbo. Cut adrift from two worlds, I find myself swaying in the void and wanting to become a bridge between the two.

At the very end of all these stops, I eventually found a description of the poem I wanted to write, in a poem by the 20th-century Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. He said:

I believe in poetry, in love, in death,

which is precisely why I believe in immortality. I write a...