Interview by Eray Sarıçam
We had a pleasant conversation with the translator, writer and scholar of Oriental studies Prof. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin about being on the road, intercultural interaction and the nature of translation.
A lot has changed, both in Türkiye and in the world, since the years you produced your first translations — from our political life to technological developments. What was expected from translation and translators when you started, compared with today, in terms of the translator’s sense of responsibility and purpose?
I started translating non-literary texts in the 2000s. There were computer-assisted translation tools back then, but only a very small group of translators used them. Translators would build a memory in these tools, and when similar texts came along again, the memory would bring them back to the translator, so they did not have to translate what they had already translated. This was a very important convenience, but now the situation is very different. The field of translation studies has developed theoretically, and the conditions and environments of translation have diversified in practice. Developments in artificial intelligence in particular have greatly affected the field of translation and continue to do so — so much so that people have begun to ask whether the traditional role of the translator is changing. In fact, technology and globalisation have expanded the translator’s roles. Translation is no longer limited to a text; it now spans a wide range, from audiovisual materials to digital platforms. It is worth stressing, however, that today the translator is not only a transmitter but also a creator, especially in literature.
Not only in our literature but in world literature as a whole, being on the road and travelling come up again and again. Why are we so drawn to thinking about “the road”? What do we expect from it? What kind of story do we want to come out of the road?
The Arab poet Abu Tammam, who lived in the ninth century, says in one of his lines: “Gurbete çık ki yenile kendini.” [Travel abroad, and renew yourself.] The metaphor of the road is not only about movement or covering a physical distance. The road is a powerful symbol of the human being’s existential quest, of the effort to discover oneself, of the desire to transcend one’s limits, and of the bond one forms with the universe. Both in our literature and in world literature, the road appears as a process in which the individual undergoes inner and outer transformation and comes to terms with themselves, their surroundings and existence. Thinking about the road can therefore be seen as an attempt to search for meaning — perhaps one of our most basic human needs.
When I look at “the road” as an image and a concept in the poets I have translated — for example in the couplets of al-Mutanabbi, who lived in the tenth century — it appears both as movement in the outer world and as an arena of inner struggle. In al-Mutanabbi the road is like a battlefield. His mounts are like spears, and obstacles are challenges that test his courage and determination. The poet’s line “Ben ki havada uçan bir okum / Tutunacak dal bulamazsam geri dönerim tekrar” [I am an arrow flying through the air; / if I find no branch to hold on to, I return again] shows that the journey is not only a forward movement but also a cycle that allows the individual to stop and begin again. In al-Mutanabbi the road is a destiny shaped by the individual’s determination while passing through difficulty and uncertainty. Patience and perseverance wear down the seemingly insurmountable stretches of the road and draw the individual into a process of transformation. The journey becomes less about reaching a destination than a process in which a person builds themselves through their own will.
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, on the other hand, approaches the road as a search for belonging and identity. Moving back and forth between past and future on the road, he works through a sense of belonging shaped by longing and uncertainty. In a poem from his book Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, in a dialogue that begins with the question “Do you know the way, my son?”, the road symbolises not only a return to a place but also the individual’s return to their own identity and roots. Darwish’s journeys, however, usually remain incomplete; they neither truly begin nor truly end.
From all this we understand that reflecting on the road is really reflecting on our own existence. The road offers us a life experience full of uncertainties. As Âşık Veysel sings in his folk song: “I am on a long, thin road, travelling day and night.” As Veysel says, the road is in fact uncertainty, and the story we hope to find on the road is usually our own story. Our own fears, hopes, mistakes and successes take shape on the road. In this sense, the road is perhaps the goal itself.
Alain de Botton describes travel as an art. Eugenio Borgna stresses the importance of travel for creativity, saying, “The danger of boredom lurks in every closed institution.” What is travel for you? Where do travel, academia and creativity meet, and where do they arrive together? Do you have a routine of walking, travelling and writing?
To be honest, I don’t think of travel and translation as separate things. Just as travel is a journey between places, translation is a journey between languages and cultures. Both are experiences that expand one’s boundaries, open doors to new worlds and allow us to rediscover what we already know. Both take us to the other. On our journeys to the other, what we actually discover is ourselves. Even when one travels towards one’s own essence, the companion on that journey is still the other, the one who is different.
Seen from this angle, translation is a kind of mental travel between different cultures and worlds by way of languages. While trying to understand the rhythm, sensibility and aesthetics of a different language, we also construct a new existence in our own. As in travel, translation has a destination, but that destination is neither definite nor fixed; it matters as much as the journey itself. When you translate a text, you are not only building a bridge between words; you are carrying a world, a culture, even a universe of emotions. In this process you act like a traveller: you draw the map of a new geography, get to know its people, and try to understand its past and its spirit. Every text is a journey and every translation is a discovery. Sometimes a line, a word or a rhythm stops you and makes you think, just like a beautiful or strange landscape encountered on a journey. The translator recreates what they have seen, felt and discovered on this journey and erects a monument in their own language.
Just as travel brings about a personal transformation, so does translation. When I bring the verses of al-Mutanabbi or Mahmoud Darwish into Turkish, I merge their world with my own. In this process the texts transform me, and I in turn reshape them with the aesthetics of my own language and culture. This transformation in translation is the same as the personal and cultural transformation of travel. Travel and translation carry both people and texts from one border to another, and in doing so make them richer, deeper and more meaningful. That is why, for me, travel and translation are like two different but intertwined chapters of the same great story. Both take a person from one place to a point they could not have imagined at the outset. And this journey never ends.
Can Yücel translates Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” as “Oy Reis, Koca Reis,” while Memet Fuat renders it as “Ey Kaptan, canım Kaptanım.” Considering the author’s aesthetic concerns and style, how far should a translator intervene in the text? Is there a limit?
In this context the word “intervention” reminds me of Antoine Berman’s approach to the “deforming tendencies” of translation. According to this approach, every “intervention” in a text in a sense distorts it and does violence to it. What we do, however, is less intervention than a process of rewriting and creation. Managing this process resembles crisis management. First of all, one needs to determine the communicative values of texts according to parameters such as time, place and convention — a kind of road map for the translation.
It is important to look at the content and form of a text as a whole. Form must be preserved, or compensated for in some way, without compromising the content. In the context of poetry translation, what has to be created in the target text is “poeticity”. But poeticity is not achieved through metre and rhyme alone. One could put it in a meta-poem: “How many rhyming poems I have seen that had no poetry in them, / how many poems I have seen that had no rhyme.” Poeticity means conveying “that” poetic feeling as one translates. In doing so the translator decides: Will I take the reader to the text, or the text to the reader? In the Walt Whitman example you mention, one decision gives you Can Yücel’s translation, the other Memet Fuat’s.
You translate into Turkish everyone from the poets of the pre-Islamic Jahiliyya to contemporary Arab poets, and you also bring figures such as Yunus Emre and Ahmad Yasawi into Arabic — across changing periods of language and changing centuries of politics. What do you pay attention to when carrying the spirit of languages, periods, texts and, of course, their authors into the present?
Defining literature as old/classical and new/modern is no more than a chronological label. For me, literature is a whole, with its classics and its moderns. “Good” literature is beyond the ages and does not grow old. Moreover, the new and the old in literature are constantly in close interaction and communication. Many works we call “old” today were treated as “avant-garde” in their own time because they went beyond the canon. Poets such as Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam, al-Mutanabbi and al-Ma‘arri, who were considered “avant-garde” in their day, are now regarded as “classical” poets. In many of the poems in the selection from al-Mutanabbi that I translated into Turkish a few months ago under the title İnsanın Şarkısı (The Song of Man), we feel as if we are reading a “modern” poet. The lyrical, epic and at times even pastoral voice of his poems is accompanied by a magnificent harmony. And do the poems of Yunus Emre — who in his own time could not even make it into the poetry anthologies known as tezkires — not still keep their freshness today?
Which city or cities have influenced you, and how? I am from Gebze, for example. It is a place caught in between, like Türkiye; that is why my mind always feels fragmented…
I don’t have a city like Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul or Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, because I became a city dweller later in life. I spent my childhood in a small village deprived of every kind of technology, and my adolescence in Kars, a small city. Since my youth I have lived in Ankara. So my sense of belonging to places is far from single-centred; it is complex and multidimensional. Still, I can say that the city that shaped my personality is Ankara, because for me Ankara is home, my sphere of existence and the starting point of my intellectual journey.
The places where literary works circulate are not what they were ten or twenty years ago. We now have platforms such as Spotify and SoundCloud, social media and podcasts. Where do you place such channels and tools in reaching readers — in terms of their benefits and harms, and in shaping the reading habits of the future?
I think what the reader needs is to reach the work, and the author, too, wants the work to find its readers. I don’t think it matters which medium or tool makes this happen. Each reader can decide on which platform to reach a work according to their temperament, habits and means. I think that in the future traditional and digital tools will live side by side, or intertwined.
Finally, which city are you late for?
I have been to the major cities of Europe, the Middle East, the Gulf and North Africa. I am curious about Central Asia and China, and I would like to visit Isfahan and Samarkand at the first opportunity. Of all of them, I think I am latest for Hangzhou. It is a distant city, and, like some of Calvino’s invisible cities, it creates the image of an imaginary city in my mind.
Originally published in Turkish and English as “Mehmet Hakkı Suçin: Yol Bize Belirsizliklerle Dolu Bir Hayat Deneyimi Sunar / The Road Offers Us a Life Experience Full of Uncertainties” in Sky Road, Issue 109, January 2025, pp. 68–75. The English text is based on the magazine’s own translation, lightly edited for this site. View the original pages →