Click here for the Dutch translation of this essay.
This essay is the first in a series commissioned by SKUT about the politics of (literary) translation, inspired by the controversy surrounding the Dutch translation of Amanda Gorman’s ‘The Hill We Climb’. Canan Marasligil previously wrote about this topic in an essay titled ‘Uncaring’ (translated into Dutch as ‘Onverschillig’).
In Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald writes: “[…] I returned to Germany at the end of 1975, intending to settle permanently in my native country, to which I felt I had become a stranger after nine years of absence” (translation by Anthea Bell). Unlike what Sebald writes about Germany, Belgium is not my native country. But even if I wasn’t born there, it is where my parents migrated to from Turkey when I was one year old. Brussels is where I was before settling in Amsterdam in December 2007. Yet, if I ever decide to return, I remain uncertain where.
It reminds me of a graffiti, the image of which used to make the rounds on Dutch social media when I first settled here: ALLE TURKEN TERUG NAAR MAROKKO!, “All Turks return to Morocco!”
I choose to translate TERUG NAAR as ‘return’, instead of the more faithful ‘go back’ or simply ‘back’. I did so in order to reclaim it for my own purposes, in defiance of the violence of this racist and ignorant statement. It is also why I return to the sentence of Sebald’s, in which I especially feel the experience of my mother who left her native country when she was 24 years old. She spent most of her life in Belgium: learning a new language, going through two pregnancies, a divorce, a new job, an improvised career as a café owner… She had become a stranger to Turkey for so long. Yet, she keeps being perceived as a foreigner in Belgium. On paper also — unlike me, my mother never acquired EU citizenship. There is a Turkish saying: doğduğun yer değil doyduğun yer evin and it means: “home is not where you were born but where you eat” (“where you are not hungry”, to be precise). How strange that only one letter differentiates the two words doğmak (‘to be born’), and doymak (‘to not be hungry/to be sated’). My mother would often say sevdiklerinin olduğu yer evin, that home is where your loved ones are, closer to the English saying that “home is where the heart is”. Would this mean that we do not give our heart to a place but to those who inhabit a place? In the case of my mother where all her loved ones remained back in her native land, she had to build this love from scratch. And this process is ongoing.
Today I call Mokum home, a place I knew no one when I arrived.
For someone who finds themselves in movement (between languages, places, imaginations), it might be strange that I choose to call Mokum home today. And maybe it is because I am not really home anywhere but in writing and translation, in that constant movement, that it feels right to call Mokum home. Mokum in Yiddish means ‘place’ or ‘safe haven’, derived from the Hebrew makom. The names of certain towns in the Netherlands had been abbreviated in Yiddish; Mokum Alef for Amsterdam (‘city A’), Mokum Dollet for Delft (’city D‘), or Mokum Resh for Rotterdam (‘city R’). Today, the word Mokum is used without the Aleph to refer to Amsterdam. For fifteen years I have lived in this city and I have found a home in the former Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, which had been partly destroyed and was rebuilt following the Second World War, when many Jewish families did not return. When I look out my living room window, I can peek at the Nieuwe Herengracht canal and one of the oldest cafés in Amsterdam, De Druif, just around the corner of my street. It is said that the naval officer Piet Hein, a folkloric figure during the revolt of the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, came to drink his jenever in this bar. In those days, sailors also came there to sign on to work on VOC ships. Leaning out of my window, I contemplate my neighbourhood;
No one is the first to set foot on any soil
You’re always borne by souls who passed before
These first two lines of Karin Karakaşlı’s poem ‘History-Geography’ resonate in my mind.
An old man pushes a cart full of groceries from the supermarket, on the opposite side of the street. He advances slowly. The front wheels of his cart don’t always roll straight, but no matter, the old man straightens them and he moves on. To cross, he heads for the lower side of the sidewalk, passing between the carelessly parked bicycles. He pushes the cart further all the way to the larger sidewalk furnished with tables and chairs from the ancient café. He walks over to a chair, sets his cart aside, sits on the sunny terrace and orders a beer. De druif means ‘the grape’ in Dutch. The café started operation in 1631 as a distillery and the building still retains the inscription Likeur Stokerij De Druif on its façade. Almost five centuries of drinks and encounters around the corner, under the windows of my building which has only existed since 1869.
The abundant history that surrounds me is inspiring and frightening at the same time, especially the selectiveness of which narratives are allowed to be visible and which ones remain hidden. I turn to Karin’s poem again;
Time was, gods and goddesses
were alive just like you
Their strengths and weaknesses flow through you
into the earth
trodden underfoot by the procession
of the mortal dead
Amsterdam has been the centre of the Jewish community for almost four centuries; the first Marrano and Sephardic communities arriving in the late 15th to early 16th century. Ten percent of the city’s population was of Jewish descent. Eighty percent of this population was deported during the Second World War. One of them was Anne Frank. Every day, there is a line of tourists that runs along the house where she was hiding on the Prinsengracht. Today, the house is a museum, a place of research and memory. Annelies was born on June 12th 1929. Half a century and exactly one day separate our births.
The old man enjoys his beer. He must be around 90 years old. He may have met Anne Frank, or Etty Hillesum – another young deported Jewish woman who left letters and a diary as a legacy. Not as well known as her fellow Anne — less translated — but certainly not less important. There is a street in the neighbourhood named after Anne Frank. Two doors next to my home, there is a house of modest architecture, the façade decorated with an engraving of a pelican feeding its young with its blood. This building was a former Jewish hospital, active from 1804 until 1916, when the hospital moved a few blocks away. Memory and amnesia, both personal and collective, surround this place I inhabit. While I read and live in the history of Mokum, I also immerse myself constantly in that of my native country and all my host and chosen countries. Especially in the untold stories, the ones we deny or are denied access to.
They did not say a word
No one remembered those forgotten by God
During a trip to Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, I came across strange little objects at the flea market. “These are perfume boxes,” the merchant told me. I looked at him and smiled, “It’s pretty”. Then he added, “made by an Armenian perfumer from Marseille during the war”. I was intrigued. I tried to find out more, but that was all he could tell me, adding that “in times of war, people needed to earn a living, that’s why the perfumer created these little boxes for solid perfume,” it was more convenient to keep and to carry. I bought three of the small terracotta boxes, brought them back to Amsterdam, keeping one to gift Karin. I placed them on my library shelf. I see them every day and I can even smell their presence. I imagine their story. I hear the voice of the merchant — Which war was he talking about? When did this Armenian perfumer arrive in Marseille? I’ve searched online to no avail. I stayed with my imagination to reconstruct this story. Over 90 years old (that’s probably how old these boxes are), they still perpetuate a flowery fragrance. They are like the old man’s presence in my neighborhood. They make me reminisce of someone I have never known. I imagine that the perfumer or his family came to Marseille at the beginning of the 20th century, fleeing the massacres in the Ottoman Empire. Like many other survivors of the Armenian genocide, they settled in Marseille.
Granted some of you are my history
yet not my geography
Geography is the name of those who occupy the land
and it takes heart to stay
I watch the old man in front of his beer on the terrace of the De Druif café as I inhale the scent from one of the terracotta boxes. I imagine this same place nine decades ago. At this window from which I observe the street once stood a man, a father who lived here. I know who he is: his history is written, archived, can be researched and found. I know that in this apartment, which used to be bigger (a false wall separates me from my neighbours today), lived a family with six children. We are an eight-minute walk from the Hollandse Schouwburg, once a place of performance turned deportation centre, then a memorial, displaying over 6,700 names of Jewish families which were deported from the Netherlands or killed. I took Karin there once when she visited Amsterdam in 2018. The theatre is now closed as the names moved to the newly constructed Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names designed by Daniel Libeskind, not far away. In the neighbourhood there are also canal houses that had belonged to wealthy Jewish families for centuries; plantation owners in Suriname, businessmen, diamond dealers, doctors. A short walk further are two synagogues: one is now the museum of Jewish history, the other retains its status as a place of worship. On the square inbetween the two synagogues, on 25 and 26 February 1941, dockers launched a strike which had spread throughout the city, in protest of the arrests of Jews under Nazi occupation. 425 young Jews were arrested and deported to the Mauthausen camp — almost all of them were killed there. Every year on 25 February, Amsterdammers gather around the dock worker statue (by sculptor Mari Andriessen who hid Jews in his home during the war and whose studio served as a resistance arms depot) which was unveiled by Queen Juliana in 1952. So we would never forget. And yet, ALLE TURKEN TERUG NAAR MAROKKO!
Every morning I get up, every evening I go to bed in an apartment where a Jewish family lived. All were deported. Father, mother and six children. Barmhartigheid was this family’s name. Barmhartigheid means ‘mercy’ in Dutch. All the members of the Barmhartigheid family were deported and executed in Auschwitz in 1942 and 1943. The ‘mercy’ family, the ‘charitable’ family. In memory of the role played by the citizens of Amsterdam during the Second World War, in particular with the strike launched by the dockers, Queen Wilhelmina presented on 29 March 1947 the motto which has since become part of the city’s coat of arms (and can be translated as Valiant, Determined, Charitable/Merciful): Heldhaftig, Vastberaden, Barmhartig.
Photos, plans of the house, names and first names: everything is archived and accessible. This particular memory is saved. Even the inventory of confiscated family items can be found. Memories of the ghosts whose home I live in have joined my memories. This family became part of my life. It doesn’t matter who I am, where I come from, what minority I belong to. Their story, united with mine, has become part of this space. In this city I made my home, where I may return to if I ever leave. This memory rubs shoulders with the small boxes of the Armenian perfumer from Marseille that I can hold in my hand every day, their scent persisting despite everything.
I stayed in my geography with my dead
Yet you denied your very self
Turned official, emptied of truth
I stayed in my geography with my life
to write my own history
These objects placed in this context are a materialisation of how I view and practice translation. We translate with our biography. Objects — their history and the voices they embody — are part of a translator’s biography. They turn the act of translation into a sensual gesture. Their interaction, placement and arrangement create a space in which different histories and voices can be connected and seen on an equal level. When you don’t make those connections, you tend to treat the text an exotic object, and you can fail to create true empathy, which is essential if you want to translate with the heart and not just the mind. Literature isn’t only about how language is structured, it is about how language is felt, and these emotions all have their own context.
Every act of translation is an attempt at realizing this ideal of a common space for these voices. The problem with the industry is that literature and language are asked to be put in a certain box in order to be marketed in a way that will sell books. But we all know literature is more complex than that. Translation, to me, should go against all those restrictions created by the system in which literature operates. Systems of oppression know no borders. Though political, socio-economic and cultural contexts can differ so much from one place to the other — as in Turkey and in the Netherlands — as a translator it is an urgent matter for me to see the connections between them. Systems create a hierarchy, in which some voices are allowed to exist in public space, and others are erased. But some of those voices have found a space for expression in literature and poetry.
Translating History-Geography
It is in this context that I have translated the poem Tarih-Coğrafya, “History-Geography” by Karin Karakaşlı, an Istanbul poet of Armenian descent, which I have quoted throughout the first part of this essay. Karin Karakaşlı’s poetry has moved me since the very first time I read it. The lines are short and may seem simple, yet they carry the world on their shoulders. As a translator, I feel the responsibility to carry those words into the English language with the utmost care. I am faced not only with language but with the historical and political context of the geography this poem comes from. My native geography and language, which I share with the poet. However, I am not of Armenian descent. I have a multiplicity of ancestry in me, ranging from Kyrgyzstan to Albania, and as a family, we have ended up in different places across Western Europe: Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands. To follow the most cliche of images, it’s a luggage I carry, filled with its richness and paradoxes, and I use it to try to make connections in my imagination every time I translate.
We never just translate language, we also translate emotions: “No one is the first to set foot on any soil/You’re always borne by souls who passed before”. These opening two lines punch you right in the face to then immediately hold you in their palms. It is the effect Karakaşlı’s poetry has on me, so it is the one I aim to carry across when I translate. I had first translated and published this poem in French as part of an anthology of writers from Turkey I was working on. Later, I moved to English as part of the work I was doing with the Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) in London, where I was based in 2013 during my residency at the Free Word Centre. The methodology at the PTC is very engaging: in their workshops a translator presents a poet from a language most participants may not even know, offers a literal (word for word) translation and some context; then the group translates the poem together into English.
This collective approach to translation fits poetry perfectly, because as we know, there are a myriad of interpretations possible with poetry, which makes its translation impossible according to some people. Impossible is not a term I use when we speak about translation, because if emotions exist in one language, if they are moving and shaking one’s mind, heart or soul in that space, it is always possible to carry them into a different language. It may take another shape, and some of the language choices made by the original author may necessitate alterations in the new language. But that doesn’t make poetry translation impossible; it makes it real, very much set in the moment. In the same way I inhale the scent of perfume captured in terracotta boxes almost a century ago, observing the environment I inhabit now —as I am present, in the moment — and I connect the violence and pain behind all the elements around me. I don’t inhabit only a place, I inhabit its history and merge into it. Karakaşlı’s poem inhabits all of it, even though it starts in the Turkish language. When it gets translated, it moves across realities. Across imaginations. And in the end, it creates a common space for our emotions that only poetry, and eventually translation, can offer.
This is the reason why I always love to work with this poem in my translation workshops. Everyone is capable of the sensitivity needed for translation when given the space and the tools to express it. I have seen many ways ‘History-Geography’ embraced the different contexts and realities it was brought into: from multicultural Amsterdam to a former mining town in the North of France. Every participant made the poem theirs, keeping the emotions and bringing their own language into the expression of their own history. But this capacity for making connections also means that we cannot escape history. The sensitivity necessary to translate and communicate is related to being responsible to the voices present in those connections. Nothing is created in a vacuum: what surrounds us, how we live, with whom we live, what we learn —it all impacts how we we translate and who gets translate.
I don’t know if Mokum will always remain the place I call home, or if I will wander away to new languages and new contexts, where my imagination will be enriched, my biography moving and evolving, bringing with it new ways to translate. I know I will carry this poem everywhere I go. I will probably never settle back into my native country, because translation taught me to evolve beyond the idea of having one. It is one strange, sometimes lonely place to dwell in, but it opens a myriad of possibilities to experience, to feel, to express and to exist, paradoxically within and outside the lines of History and Geography.
Tarih-Coğrafya
Kimse ilk basmaz bir toprağa
Sırtlanırsın geçmiş ruhları
Tanrılar Tanrıçalar da bir
zaman sen gibi canlardı
İçinden geçer hepsinin gücü, zaafı
Aşağıda toprağın üzerinde
kafilelerce çoğaldı
ölü ölümlüler
Gıkları çıkmadı
Allah’ın unuttuğunu kimse anımsamadı
Tarihimsin bir miktar kabul
ama coğrafyam değil
Yer kaplayanların adıdır coğrafya
ve kalmak yürek ister
Ölülerimle kaldım coğrafyamda
Sen kendini inkâr ettin
resmî oldun, hakikatinden boşaldıkça
Hayatımla kaldım coğrafyamda
kendi tarihimi yazmaya
History-Geography
No one is the first to set foot on any soil
You’re always borne by souls who passed before
Time was, gods and goddesses
were alive just like you
Their strengths and weaknesses flow through you
into the earth
trodden underfoot by the procession
of the mortal dead
They did not say a word
No one remembered those forgotten by God
Granted some of you are my history
yet not my geography
Geography is the name of those who occupy the land
and it takes heart to stay
I stayed in my geography with my dead
Yet you denied your very self
Turned official, emptied of truth
I stayed in my geography with my life
to write my own history
Poem written by Karin Karakaşlı. Translated by Canan Marasligil and Sarah Howe.
Canan Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator, artist and curator of cultural programmes based in Amsterdam. Find out more at: www.cananmarasligil.net
Karin Karakaşlı (she/her) writes fiction, children’s books and poetry, and teaches Armenian language and culture and translation studies. Her poetry has been published in English by the Poetry Translation Centre in translations by Canan Marasligil and Sarah Howe.
The publication of this essay was made possible with a grant from the Thérèse Cornips Stipendium.