Interview by Sabri Gürses

Poetry translation is perhaps one of the most important fields of translation connecting humanity. Do you remember the first translated poem you read?

Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, in Aytunç Altındal’s translation. The book consisted of prose texts, and I read it without knowing it was poetry. I learned only much later, after I had become familiar with the source text, that it was prose poetry. My reading of translated poetry increased after I began reading theoretical books on literary theory and poetry criticism. After that I started reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud and T. S. Eliot.

Without leading you: can there be poetry without translation? Does poetry need to be nourished by translation?

If we classify translation as Roman Jakobson did — intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic — we broaden the semantic value we attach to the act of translation. If we consider that poets create and develop their own voices by reading other poets and writers, then poetry that is not a translation can in fact also be considered translation in the broad sense. In that case, when we carry a poem that is already a “translation” into another language, the text we produce is a translation of a translation. On the other hand, poetry that is not nourished by interlingual translation may after a while begin to repeat itself. It does not step outside the limits it knows; if it lacks the opportunity to encounter different poetic voices, forms and themes, it cannot get the chance to surpass either itself or what is given. This leads to poetic stumbling, to marking time. If we look at the phases of Turkish literature, we see behind all of them an interaction with the poetry of the “other”. Had it not been nourished by Persian and Arabic poetry — and at times by the Sufi vein of both — we could not speak of Ottoman divan literature as it has come down to us. Alongside the “neoclassical” openings of Yahya Kemal and Ahmet Haşim, is it possible to say that the explorations of the Garip movement and the Second New did not develop under the influence of Western poetry? That is why translation has the power to form, shape and develop the canon of a language’s poetry. Without translation, a literature cannot be expected to widen its boundaries, let alone go beyond them.

You also write poetry, don’t you? If not, there is a poet in the family, Elçin Sevgi Suçin. Does — or did — her poetic language influence your translations?

I am not the child of a family steeped in literature, so, apart from what we read in the curriculum, I came across poetry books late. Interestingly, though, in my high school years I had a notebook of poems into which I poured my heart. I remember writing poems on love, humanity and justice. Thinking of those texts now, I realise that, like many young people of that age, I was expressing my sensibilities. During my years studying Arabic Language and Literature I translated poetry from time to time. In my third year as an undergraduate I attempted to render into Turkish Imru’ al-Qays from the pre-Islamic poets and Adonis from the contemporary ones; I still keep those attempts. But I really began to read poetry when my wife, Elçin Sevgi, began writing it, because I was the first reader and critic of every text she wrote. At that stage I also witnessed a poet’s writing process, and this developed my way of reading poetry in a positive sense. Elçin Sevgi, in turn, became the first reader of my translations. The corrections she made with a poet’s sensitivity and eye helped me develop in language and feeling, especially in my poetry translations.

One of your most recent works is the poetry of the tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi. Is this the first time al-Mutanabbi has been translated into Turkish? Was he translated in the Ottoman period, and did he influence our poets and our poetry?

Al-Mutanabbi is a “literary event” in the history of Arabic literature, and his influence on Arabic poetry continues to this day. His influence on Persian poets, Saadi above all, is well known, and the impact of his poems extends even to the poets of al-Andalus who wrote in Hebrew. It is not hard to detect his influence on our own poets Nef’i and Baki either. Last year my German colleague Stefan Weidner and I were invited to Saudi Arabia to speak about al-Mutanabbi’s influence on poetry beyond the Arab world. As I read there a few poems by Nef’i that I had translated into Arabic, some in the audience called out, “Yes, this is al-Mutanabbi!”

As for why he was not translated: in the Ottoman period many poets were trilingual, knowing Turkish, Persian and Arabic, and some even have divans in all three. Translation was therefore probably not felt to be necessary. There are two odes translated from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish in that period, but it is very hard to call them translations: couplets of two lines were rendered as paragraph-long texts, more commentary than translation. So my translation is the first in the sense of being a translated text proper.

In the book’s promotional text, al-Mutanabbi says in your translation: “Burası cinlerin oyun sahası / Ama tercümansız dolaşmaz Süleyman bile” [This is the playground of the jinn, / yet even Solomon would not walk here without an interpreter.] This quotation, implying that even the Prophet Solomon needed translation, beautifully stresses the necessity of translation. When I read it, I imagined the jinn as translation machines. What do you think: in the age of artificial intelligence, which we might call a playground of the jinn, can machines translate poetry too? Can such a translation replace a real translator?

Before going into the context of the poem, I can say in answer to your question that if even Solomon, who knew the language of the birds, could not walk the “playground of the jinn” without an interpreter, this points to how indispensable translation and the translator are. Artificial intelligence can translate on the basis of the material data of language in a way that makes a text intelligible to a certain degree. We will know more about how far it succeeds from the results of the project you are conducting with Professor Mehmet Şahin. Still, I expect these translations will contain deviations. But it cannot be expected to perceive and reflect the subtle details that make a poem a poem — its context, its feeling, the translation of the poet’s selfhood as it is received along with the poem. As for the use of the word “interpreter” in the poem, it relates to the period when the poet, after his bad experience at the Egyptian court, was invited to Persia. In the ode in which he describes the valley of Shi‘b Bawwan, the poet skilfully estranges the Persian setting through an Arab–Persian opposition. The poem goes:

Bevvan Vadisi’nin konakları ki en güzeli konakların
Bahar neyse onlar da öyle mevsimler içinde

Vadide bir Arap genci olsa da
Yabancıdır teniyle eliyle diliyle onlar

Burası cinlerin oyun sahası
Ama tercümansız dolaşmaz Süleyman bile

[The dwellings of the Valley of Bawwan, the fairest of dwellings, / are, among the seasons, what spring is. // Yet a young Arab in that valley / is a stranger to them in face, in hand, in tongue. // This is the playground of the jinn, / yet even Solomon would not walk here without an interpreter.]
(al-Mutanabbi, İnsanın Şarkısı, p. 181)

Foregrounding the otherness of the Persians and their language in a setting where the poet was expected to write a panegyric is a rather bold stance. In al-Mutanabbi’s Diwan, the “interpreter” also appears in the ode recounting the battle of al-Hadath al-Hamra’, which played a strategic role in the Arab–Byzantine wars; the site is thought to be near Pazarcık in today’s Kahramanmaraş. There the interpreter appears like this:

Çelik zırhlarını sürüyerek geldiler sana
Atları üstünde geceleyin ayakları olmayan

Yeryüzünün her yönüne ilerleyen bir ordu
Naraları ikizler burcunun kulaklarında yankılanan

İçinde her dilden her milletten askerler vardı
Kimse diğerini anlamıyordu tercümanlar olmadan

[They came at you trailing their coats of steel mail, / riding by night on horses that seemed to have no feet; // an army advancing toward every quarter of the earth, / its war cries echoing in the ears of Gemini; // in it were soldiers of every tongue and every nation; / no one understood the other without interpreters.]
(al-Mutanabbi, İnsanın Şarkısı, p. 147)

The catastrophe in Palestine is plain to see. So we dedicate this poetry day to poets killed in the Israeli bombardment, whose deaths we learned of online — Refaat Alareer, Salim al-Nafar, Hiba Kamal Abu Nada. We have always learned of this resilient people’s unending pain through poetry and poetry translations. You often say that they are strong in literary fields beyond poetry too, but could poetry be the true language of a people uprooted and destroyed?

Poetry seems to me the first literary form in which human beings expressed themselves, because it rests on an oral tradition. This allows poetry to be passed down from generation to generation and preserved. Prose is not like that; to be preserved, it needs writing. That is why the literary heritage of many nations rests on poetry. The Arabs have a common saying: al-shi‘r diwan al-‘Arab, “Poetry is the diwan of the Arabs.” Here diwan also carries meanings such as record, archive, canon, encyclopedia, accumulated knowledge and cultural platform. This is why, although ancient Greek philosophy was translated into Arabic, poetry was not. It is therefore of course possible to regard a genre so central as the first means of expression.

What would you advise a young poetry translator, and what would you recommend to readers of translated poetry?

My suggestions for young translators:

• Try to understand, through examples, the poetic traditions of the source and target languages and the phases they have gone through.
• Don’t rush into translating poetry books. First have your translations read by people with a developed taste for poetry, take their views, and only then send them to magazines.
• Let the poem in the source language be readable as a poem in the target language too. Find the poet’s voice in that poem and try to carry “that voice”, “that style”, into the target language.
• Realise that you can set your own creativity in motion within the frame of the source poet’s creativity.
• Poetry translation is a constant management of gain and loss. Excessive gain and excessive loss both lead to failure; the translator’s skill lies in striking a good balance between the two.

My suggestions for readers of poetry:

• When reading poetry in translation, don’t expect texts that look as if they were “written in Turkish”. Can you understand Ece Ayhan or Edip Cansever without effort? If not, then going to meet a “foreign” text on its own ground is also a requirement of hospitality.
• If you are a reader who wants to write poetry, you cannot understand what good poetry — or even poetry itself — is by reading the poems of a single culture, and you will naturally struggle to find your own voice. Reading poems from different cultures and geographies can open the door to entirely different creations. Open your doors and windows wide to the “other”, but don’t become like it.
• Bad translations can spoil your taste for poetry, so take note of translators whose skill you trust.

On this occasion I celebrate UNESCO World Poetry Day, and I wish that the world’s poetry may always have the dynamism to surpass itself.

We thank Mehmet Hakkı Suçin for his contributions to the world of poetry and translation and to our blog.

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Originally published in Turkish as “Mehmet Hakkı Suçin ile Şiir ve Çeviri Üzerine” on the website of the Turkish Translators’ Association (Çeviri Derneği), 21 March 2024. Translated into English for this site.