After Flavia Teoc took us to ancient Constantionople last week, I’m thrilled to present two microfictions by Turkish writer Muzzafer Kale. Deceptive in their outward simplicity, these perfectly poised stories hinge on the unsaid and work beautifully in English thanks to translator Ralph Hubbell’s precise language.
—Lee Yew Leong, Translation Tuesdays editor
Incident
I wasn’t from that mountain village.
What brought me there was work, and by work I mean looking at carpets and kilims. There were plenty of people from the village that I knew.
So we were sitting in the July heat, trying to cool ourselves off in the shade of a walnut tree—me, Ibrahim and Lazy-Eyed Salih.
That Salih, he was a cheerful one. He had a different way of looking at things. Leaping from one topic to the next, he talked of this, that and the other thing while we all laughed it up. These two friends of mine were good shots too. They were wagering who could hit a half-lira piece with a thirty-two caliber from forty meters away…
And then she appeared, with her donkeys, coming off the mountainside path. She’d loaded the animals piecemeal with some sagging goods, which swung all over the place.
It wasn’t the donkeys that were afraid of us, though; it was her. We’d given her a fright, and she made it clear. Maybe our faces looked unnaturally long to her right then, our noses huge…
I was sure she was going to say, “What are you looking at like that, or have the men here never seen a woman before?” but she didn’t speak to us.
If she had, I’d have just hemmed and hawed.
Ibrahim would have kept his mouth shut.
Salih would have been at it again with that other angle of his.
But I wasn’t from around there.
None of that happened.
She continued with her donkeys, straight towards the first houses below. The goods that hung from the donkeys swayed steadily now, back and forth, side to side.
And we stood there staring after her, with our unnaturally long faces and our huge noses.
Under the Sun
They wilted with exhaustion.
They had to cling to one another to stay on their feet.
They practically dragged their heels, stirring silently under the baking sun in their long, colorful clothes, which had gone heavy with sweat and dust. There were about fifty of them—children, the aged, and a handful of youths. The youths were unarmed. That was how it had to be. It was the first thing one needed to know. It was knowing certain things that kept them alive a little while longer.
None of them turned to look in the direction from which they’d come; they didn’t look ahead either. It was as if they weren’t looking anywhere at all. Their eyes were open, but they weren’t looking.
One of the unarmed youths wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and addressed the gendarmes, which had surrounded them in a circle.
“What’s this one saying?” the lieutenant said.
A gendarme answered: “He says he only wants some water, sir.”
And what on earth could that mean, to only want some water?
Translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell
Muzaffer Kale was born in 1957 and grew up in the rural countryside outside of Bodrum, Turkey. He graduated from Dicle University in Diyarbakır and taught literature and writing at a variety of schools over the years. Kale has published twelve books of poetry and, most recently, two books of short fiction, Güneş Sepeti and Sabahın Bir Devamı Vardı through Can Publishing. He is the recipient of several poetry prizes, as well as the 2015 Sait Faik Abasıyanık Short Story Award, one of Turkey’s longest-standing and most prestigious. He is married with one child and lives in İzmir.
Ralph Hubbell‘s essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House‘s Open Bar, The Hopkins Review, The Bosphorus Review of Books, K1N and Today’s Zaman. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and teaches writing to ELL students at the Maryland Institute College of Art. After living in Istanbul from 2007 to 2015, he now calls Baltimore home.
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Read more from Turkey on the Asymptote blog:
- Translation Tuesday: “Constantinople” by Flavia Teoc
- In Conversation with Fuat Sevimay, Turkish translator of Finnegans Wake
- Translation Tuesday: “Spring’s Doings” by Orhan Veli Kanık