A Mind at Peace

8vo, br. 436pp. Orhan Pamur speaks of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar as an essential part of his sense of Istambul. Based on his descriptions of Tanpinar in his book Istambul, I was excited to read this translation of Tanpinar's masterpiece. The physical book is extremely attractive, even sensual. With an old photo on the cover of several rowboats on the Bosphorus you are being introduced to the world within the book's covers. Elegant endpapers, thick off-white paper, and an unusually square shape to the book all present a pleasant, inviting physical object. Archipelago Books, I publisher I'd not encountered before, did an excellent job (though their editor missed a few too many errors). On opening the book the first thing you notice is the lack of any notes, introduction, or even an index to the various Parts of the book. This is puzzling, and unfortunate. The dust jacket provides a few sentences on the author and this work (in addition to a few sentence plot summary). And even those sentences tell us little. What does it mean to say that this book is "a Turkish Ulysses"? The book deserves a wide readership, beyond the niche of people already familiar with this author. And that readership needs at least some minimal sign-posts to help navigate this dense examination of Istambul's intellectual, philosophical and moral dilemmas at the start of World War II. One method would be an introduction explaining the dynamics of Turkey at that time, and explaining Tanpinar's place in that debate. Another would be to provide a few footnotes, or end notes, explaining certain words or concepts unlikely to be understood by the average English speaking reader. For example, the debate over whether a character is mevlevi or bektashi was completely lost on me. How about you? The novel starts "(City of Two Continents, August 1939)". And that could also be the one sentence summary of the novel. Turkey and its citizens are about to be plunged into WWII, a Western war that is very on the periphery of its interests, history and consciousness. But what is consuming the characters in this novel is the doppelganger of living in the past and the present, in the East and in the West, in two continents, two realities. The novel is told using both the first and third person views of the main character, Mumtaz. And even the third person observations are claustrophobic, told from a ground level prospective never far from the immediate observations of Mumtaz, a young writer and intellectual who "does" essentially nothing during the 1939 focus of the book. He thinks, observes, feels. His love for Nuran, his hatred of yet attraction to Suad, the filial love and respect for Ihsan.these are drawn out in long, complex worlds of emotion that slowly built and deepen as the novel progresses. But the central character in this novel is Turkey, Turkish, Istambul and the Borphorus. What do these things mean to a well educated, not-poor (I'm not sure what "class" these intellectuals belong to.but few have a conventional job) group of largely male intellectuals? The answer is a deep ambivalence. They live in a city of past architectural glory, the capitol of a vast empire. And while they are part of that heritage, they are also drawn to the present, to the Western. This is most often described in descriptions of music. Some of the most lyrical parts of the book describe Turkish classical music, the sound of the ney while a singer intones verses composed for various sultans. And while this is being lyrically described Mumtaz will realize that he is actually thinking of a Beethoven sonata. Quoting a Farsi couplet the discussion will veer to French symbolist poets. But oh the longing, the sorrow, of those couplets: The days foreshortened, aged men in Kanlica Conjure memories of past autumns one by one. By the end of the novel you are left with a deep understanding of the longing felt by Mumtaz, to be his own person, not dragged down by the weight of his history and culture, yet aware that without those things he would be empty. "The vast fallout of two centuries of disintegration and collapse, of being the remnants of an empire and still unable to establish our own norms and idioms." So why only 4 starts (and actually I would give it a 3.5)? Because of the lamentable translation. My definition of a good translation is one I don't notice. And this fails my test miserably. There is little plot in this novel. It is a closely observed study, and by necessity that means a book that is slowly, closely, read and observed. The lyrical content simply must be accompanied by similar prose or the image is shattered. On every page the reader encounters a variety of translation ticks: the hackneyed phrase, the unnecessarily complex words, the odd spelling, the anti-lyrical and the weird. Hackneyed: hither and yond, oft times, by and by, by and large, truth be told, kith and kin, hale and hearty, sing a ditty, let the cat out of the bag, a slave of his baser desires. Big words: in one paragraph we encounter quiddities, haecceities and ideational. Odd spelling: phantasy and magick [each used many, many times]. Anti-lyrical: "Ihsan's personality was more agreeable than those personae of his preconceptions might have indicated" "exercise her volition to live apart" "the verdure assaulted one's casing of skin." Weird: "at whiles." Synonym for periodically or at times. And used way too often! So maybe Tanipar is addicted to archaic spellings, has a huge vocabulary that he throws around, is addicted to hackneyed phrases and the translator is merely following the original. Maybe, but adding all of these quirks together, if the translator has merely followed the original, this book would not be "the greatest novel ever written about Istambul," quoting Orhan Pamur.