We spoke to Mehmet Hakkı Suçin — known to us as a writer, translator and academic — about many things, starting from words: the books that touched his life, poetry, and what translation means to him. Suçin: “During the lockdown I translated the Seven Suspended Odes, the Muʿallaqat. Recreating in Turkish these texts, which even Arabs find hard to understand today, was a different kind of experience for me.”
I have been working with words for as long as I can remember. I discovered in primary school that I loved playing with words. I was a cheerful, playful child, and most of my jokes were built on wordplay. Sometimes my puns were so indirect that I had to explain them — and then, of course, the joke was lost. But words are not just play for me. The word is a necessity of being human; it belongs to the human being. The Gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the Word.” In Arabic this is rendered as “In the beginning was the kalima.” In the Qur’an, kalima is used in many senses: the word of God, the Qur’an, God’s promise, wisdom, religion, good tidings, proof, judgement, revelation. In other words, the word is a mystery that can be unfolded endlessly — a multidimensional secret, if you like.
I went to primary school in a remote village back home. Much of the school year often passed without a teacher, so I never really encountered books in those years; my acquaintance with books was limited to a few textbooks. Then I went to the city to attend an İmam Hatip school, and that is when I first came across books other than textbooks. I remember reading Ömer Seyfettin’s stories in the school library — and Aziz Nesin’s Fil Hamdi, which I loved so much that I read it two or three times. But my literary reading in middle school didn’t last long. In our day, fiction was looked down on as a waste of time. We read Sayyid Qutb, Mawdudi, Muhammad Qutb and, at a later stage, Ali Shariati. Nor did we stop there: we read not very profound books of “thought” comparing Islam, socialism and capitalism. My reading of Hassan Hanafi and al-Jabiri, limited though it was, came at a later period.
Looking back now, I realise that my interest in literature stayed alive throughout my reading of those books of “thought”. In high school I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms several times. Every time I read The Grapes of Wrath, my eyes filled with tears.
I have no obsession with any author or book. It seems to me that there is no flawless writer, just as there is no flawless book. So I think of myself as a reader who is free in thought and free in reading. But I do sometimes read a text I love many times over. I think this has to do with how the meaning we create together with the text, as readers, multiplies. As we multiply the meaning we recreate the text, and we can read a text we have already read as if it were new — or discover new meanings in the same text. I think we experience this especially when reading a good poem.
Before I start translating a work, I try to form a bond with it. Once that bond has formed, I cannot stop the translation monster inside me; I am impatient to start translating as soon as possible. Still, I hold myself back and try to anticipate the likely difficulties in the text, making notes on it. If I don’t know the author of the text I am translating, I always browse their other books too and look through what has been written about them. Then comes the translation stage, which, depending on the book, sometimes moves fast and sometimes slowly. When the translation is finished, I read it once or twice myself, checking whether I have carried the text correctly into the language I translated it into. I feel like an envoy between the source language and the target language: if the message is not conveyed correctly, I panic, as if the envoy’s head were about to roll. Then, if possible, I try to have it read by someone who understands literature. I am lucky in this respect: there is a poet at home, Elçin Sevgi Suçin. My wife and I are each other’s first readers, which is why we usually send “clean” texts to publishers.
Working with Arabic is a difficult business in itself. You can’t please anyone. Some sneer, “As if Arabs had a literature!”, while others always expect you to translate morally centred, “sterile” texts. In other words, while some keep Arabic literature at a distance with elitist attitudes, others are prejudiced on grounds such as “this part is erotic” or “our community won’t accept that.” In my view, however, no approach that puts limits on the mind — whether from the right or the left — does literature any good. Literature cannot develop in such an environment. Despite all these prejudices, I am glad to see that in recent years publishers of every leaning have shown interest in Arabic literature. Successful translations from Arabic have undoubtedly played a large part in this change.
Contrary to what one might expect, there are more translation problems between Turkish and Arabic than with Western languages. Some problems stem from the structure of Arabic, others from the differences between Turkish and Arabic. To elaborate: orthographically, vowels — the harakat — are not used in Arabic writing other than religious texts. For someone learning Arabic as a foreign language, this brings significant reading difficulties, and you cannot correctly understand a text you cannot read correctly. The second issue is that Arabic is a “diglossic” language: Standard Arabic and many Arabic dialects live intertwined, side by side. Many people learning Arabic in Türkiye either deny or ignore this sociolinguistic feature. In institutions that teach Arabic, dialect teaching is either not integrated into the curriculum or is weak, which delays the prospective translator’s grasp of the local and cultural elements of the language they are learning.
I see Arabic literature, my field of academic work, as a whole — classical and modern alike. A good text does not age. New or old, every reader receives a text in proportion to their intellectual and aesthetic background and sensibility. Moreover, the new and the old are in close interaction. Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove and Muhammad Bennis’s The Book of Love, for example, are closely related; someone who has read Ibn Hazm can penetrate Bennis’s text more deeply. Likewise, without a knowledge of classical Arabic poetry you cannot properly penetrate the texts of Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish or Nizar Qabbani. When I catch these ebbs and flows between texts, I take pleasure and feel excitement, above all as a reader.
According to Octavio Paz, there is no original text. Every text is carried over from other texts. So everything we write and read is translation, and what we call translation is the translation of another translation, which was itself already a translation. This approach raises the literary translator from the position of a copier to that of an author. In this sense the translator is perhaps a “ghost writer”. Not only an author, the translator is also a critical reader and, before any real editor, the editor of their own text. The translator’s creativity accompanies the original author through all these stages — but it is bounded by the author’s creativity, and this is where the translator parts ways with the original author.
When writing and translating, I prefer to listen to the sounds of nature — waterfalls, birdsong, the waves of the sea. They help me concentrate more on the writing. I love authentic music from every corner of the world. Years ago we went to Erbil on behalf of the Presidency for Turks Abroad to select scholarship students, and there I discovered a group called Li Dinê. I have always loved music like theirs, which synthesizes the local and the universal. I also love and listen to music with local elements, such as the Raï music common in the Maghreb countries or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali. Genres such as New Age, country and jazz interest me too. But I am not rigid about other kinds of music either: I listen to whatever sounds good to my ear.
If I were to sum up my life in lines I love, they would be these:
Sen ey şiir sevmeyen,
Güzel olmayacak ölümün.
[You who do not love poetry, / your death will not be beautiful.]
(Adonis, “Belli Belirsiz Şeyler Anısına” [In Memory of Vague Things], tr. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin)
During the lockdown I translated the Seven Suspended Odes, the Muʿallaqat. Recreating in Turkish these texts, which even Arabs find hard to understand today, was a different kind of experience for me. It also made me realise how unexplored and virgin a territory pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is. Meanwhile, I am preparing a very rich anthology of Syrian short stories. And many of my own works and translations awaiting completion are asking for my special attention.
Originally published in Turkish as “Yazdığımız ve Okuduğumuz Her Şey Çeviridir” in Sabitfikir, Issue 115, September 2020. Translated into English for this site.