Customer Reviews

A Mind at Peace

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

A Mind at Peace is a movingly haunting symphony. Set to a backdrop of age-old Ottoman music and verse, it is the story of a country's struggle to hold onto meaning and philosophic insight gained from centuries of traditions and customs while careening toward the comfort of wealth through acceptance of modern Western economic culture. In just three generations, Turkish peasants were expected to complete this process of acculturation.

Mümtaz, the main character, when orphaned as a child, is sent to live within the family of his paternal cousin, Îhsan, an intellectual, a teacher and a philosopher. Îhsan would become like a brother to Mümtaz, and also his mentor. Îhsan's students, Mümtaz among them, challenge his beliefs with the idealism of youth, but Îhsan is up to the challenge of leading them forward with the knowledge that the intellectuals will point the way toward Turkey's destiny.

Mümtaz is tortured by the tragedies of his childhood, but also by memories of Nuran. We learn early on that their love affair has ended, but then throughout the second movement of Tanpinar's beautiful symphony we are led on their journey through the Bosphorus strait. The Bosphorus itself seems a metaphor for the struggles pitting the Black Sea and the Orient to the east against the Mediterranean's modern cultures to the west. As Mümtaz and Nuran travel back and forth by ferry and rowboat, standing in the way of a life together is the constant conflict of the two ways of life. Other than by Îhsan and his family, their match is not seen as perfect. Nuran is older than Mümtaz, is divorced and has a daughter seven years of age.

As it was in many other works throughout his life, for Tanpinar, the concept of time and its effect on humanity is a prominent theme. Life, death and the passage between are an abstraction only evident to humans.

"Only for mankind does time, monolithic and absolute, divide in two; and because time, this dim lantern, this sooty radiance, struggles to burn within us, because it introduces a complex calculus into the simplest things, because we measure its passing by our shadows on the ground, it divides life and death, and like a clock's pendulum, our consciousness swings between the two polarities of our own creation. Humanity, this prisoner of time, is but desperate, trying to escape to the outside. Instead of losing itself in time, instead of flowing along with all else in a broad and continental river-run, humanity tries to perceive time externally. Thus time becomes a mechanism of torment. One lunge and we're at the pole of death, everything's over. Since we've split the unity of whole numbers, since we've consented to being fractions, we should resign ourselves to fragmentation. Momentum, however, sweeps us to the other pole; we're in the midst of life, we're full of vitality, we're once again the plaything of our hurtling inertia; but yet again, by its very nature, the balance tips irrefutably toward death, and torments increase exponentially."

Tanpinar gently melds the two lovers to the seasons. The relationship is born of the spring, flourishes during the summer, begins to wain in the autumn and is snuffed in winter. Time passes, yet does it exist?

Mümtaz claims not to fear death; he claims to seek satisfaction rather than greatness. Yet he also feels humans are creatures of anxiety and fear. At moments of bliss, he finds himself "lanced by dread." He fears the balance could suddenly tip. Nuran's family's deep roots to the past and Ottoman music is attractive to Mümtaz, yet Nuran is tiring of it and would like to move forward.
The final movement of Tanpinar's symphony finds Mümtaz without Nuran and searching for inner peace and a consciousness of continuity.

Struggles abound in A Mind at Peace. Yet it seems that every page causes one to stop and think as insights into human nature are thrust forward.

Regarding Ottoman music: "Whether we like it or not, we belong to it. We admire our traditional music and for better or worse it speaks to us. For better or worse we hold this key that unlocks the past for us . . . The past relinquishes its epochs to us one after another and dresses us in its labels." The translation from the Turkish is by award winning translator Erda' Göknar and is, for the most part, lyrically gorgeous

This is a novel more in the spirit of a wm Faulkner novel than a Robert Graves piece. Why did I expect more war than personal, romantic intimacy? Frankly, I wonder if the translator has ever been in Turkey for any period of time. Imagery is good, but for me the translation is 'too high brow' maybe I should have tried to read the original Turkish, before turning to the English version because much of the English seems too 'unTurkish.' So much of what is translated seems more an invention of the translator than the intent of the author. I am soldering on reading the book because of the unique subject and unique period it encompasses.
Hope I am not offending anyone, but it's my review

Required reading for anyone going to Istanbul. Amazingly poetic prose. Every page is a gift.