Our August Book Club selection, Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, is a vivid and absorbing novel that traces the depths and illusions of psychic agony, pulled along by a singular, poetic style. Within these flowing, absorbing pages of emotional surges, however, is a representation of how imposed orders and hierarchies can rob the individual of humanity. In this following interview, translators Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu speak to us on the process of working with this language its rawness and its darkness, the narrative’s subtle political symbols, how it moves on from the Turkey’s social realist movement and its sociolinguistic history.
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Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Lojman is a book that unleashes its narrative and its characters on us. There are so many uncontrollable elements in it, but what reigns it in is the prose, which is so precise and lyrical. I’m wondering what it was like reading this book in the original Turkish—if there was that similar effect, and if there were stylistic elements you were seeking specifically to preserve in translation.
Selin Gökçesu (SG): Lojman is very immersive, beautiful, and lyrical and Turkish too. I don’t keep up with contemporary Turkish literature as much as I would like to, but within what I’ve seen come out, this book is very in its lyricism—but also its topic and voice. Part of the unruliness of the narrative can perhaps be attributed to the Turkish editing style, which is definitely more open than in the American publishing industry; different voices will enter and come out barely edited—which has its drawbacks. The final translation, after Aron put the final touches on it, is a lot more polished in English then it’s in Turkish, but it still has the spirit of the original.
But I will say that Lojman’s forcefulness and gushing and uncontrolled quality, the very untamed writing—some of that is a product of how open the Turkish publication system is. They’ll allow people in, and they’ll publish things with very little editing or external control. So you get these really raw, powerful stories in different voices. Turkish contemporary literature is maybe less middle-class than American literature, so the class boundaries of allowing different voices in is a little bit more flexible, resulting in such unique products. I’m so glad we came together and caught Lojman amidst so many books being published in Turkey. It’s really serendipitous that this landed where it did.
Aron Aji (AA): I agree with everything Selin said about Ebru’s voice and writing style. To add to that, I was in Istanbul with Ebru this summer—she just finished her new novel. It’s being edited, and hopefully will be coming out in the next couple of months. It’s an entirely different novel. The form is entirely different, the language is incredibly elevated, but there was something very, very similar to the way she built the main character. I asked her to tell me what she was trying to do, and she mentioned how people always talk about the author as the witness of a character’s life and an author as the witness of her time. Then she said, “I want to put the reader in a position of witness, and the way I can do that is by pushing the reader as far into the mindset of the main character as possible.”
As you know, the characters in Lojman are very damaged, to say the least; your review also shows how that damage becomes pervasive. Ebru really is a writer that doesn’t want to stand in the way of the reader, so she writes with this incredible euphoria. There is another Turkish author, Aslı Erdoğan (also published by City Lights), who writes with euphoria, but it’s a lot more controlled, oddly enough. What we have in Ebru is really the rawest possible witnessing of a mind falling apart.
So by choosing to do this as a co-translation, we actually mixed two voices and two consciousnesses into the process—the splitting of voices. I should also say that Elaine of City Lights was incredible in her later editing. And the more voices and consciousnesses we incorporated, the more we were able to crystallize the language, but also retain its rawness.
XYS: Could you maybe speak more on the process, or that division of labour, if you will?
SG: Well, I think our division of labor was more aligned with our experience than anything else, because Aron has been through this process many times and I’m just getting started, so I think it just made more sense for me to do the first round. I wasn’t really trying to capture the voice as much, and was instead more in the weeds of language—which I actually do enjoy—and thinking about Turkish as an opposing force to English. I felt like I was walking in a swamp, but enjoying it.
I tried to approach the sentences as literally as I could, and not miss any part of the meaning. For certain passages, I would put include an entire range of words within brackets, which could work to convey that meaning. And even when the original Turkish sentence was awkward, I left it alone. I tried to capture that awkwardness. So I feel like the voice emerged after Aron went over it and made some calls that were a little more editorial. Translation is not just about trying to make approximations or tone and language in English, but there’s also an element of editing the original—especially when it comes from a Turkish source, where the copyediting is very hands-off.
When you’re translating from the Turkish tradition, I feel like you’re both the translator and, on some level, the editor. There are lots of sentences that slip in which make one question if the author really wanted it that way. So I would say that what I did was more to do with the mechanics of language and grammar, and I feel like the voice emerged after the second round, where Aron did his magic.
AA: Well, I think you are really being very modest, Selin. I’ve known Selin for a while, because I was the outside reader when she did her thesis at Columbia, and ever since then I have been trying to tease her into translating. So this was an incredible opportunity for me to go to Selin, and put something before her that I was really hoping she would not refuse. But there are other reasons why I think Selin’s role was incredibly important.
Even though Ebru described this reader as a witness this summer, when I read this book, I felt at once very estranged from it and very absorbed in it. It’s an interesting position to be in because, as translators, we try to go into the book as closely as possible, but we must also come back to look at it from the outside, so that we can calibrate it for the actual reader. Then, through the draft I received from Selin, I was put in the position of the reader. It already had an emerging voice of the characters, and many instances where the language wants the reader to wrestle with it. The sentences that sometimes didn’t make sense had much to do with the fact that the person speaking them could not make sense—because of their psychic reality. So Selin’s manuscript allowed me to enter a text that was already emerging, rather than a text that I was trying to gestate and bring out.
I will tell you this honestly, Selin. The idea was to always stay close to what you saw first. While we, of course, worked on the language and editing, there was something in your translation that was so important to retain, which had to come out almost without my intervention—and it did. So it was just really a beautiful process for me.
XYS: That really reflects in the book—this artifact of such gorgeous language wrapped up with all this madness, it’s really a testament to how much everybody in the process respected one another’s craft. And translating such a phantasmagoric, imaginative language, where everything inside the mind is pushing at the precipice and taking very realistic physical form, it can be very much an act of translating not only the words, but emotion itself. Selin, in the first draft, is this something that you felt?
SG: There’s something about Ebru’s writing that evokes the emotions automatically. It’s easy to enter that very dark space. I did think about whether being a woman made it easier for me to enter it, as one of the things that really intrigued me was that Ebru is not a mother, but she captures the dark side of motherhood so compellingly. The outside narrative of motherhood really misses a lot, and then once you enter that space of being a mom, you see the uglier side, which doesn’t sort of seep as much into the social narrative. It was interesting to see that revealed so intimately by someone who hadn’t gone through that. Of course, we’re all children, so we do have a window into that relationship, but there’s definitely a darker side that opens up when you actually have a child—about your identity, about the rage you can feel against your children. It’s extreme in Selma’s case, but it’s also very believable. As a mom, I didn’t find it unrealistic, so it was very immersive for me.
AA: “What a bad mother,” is something we can’t even say. You can’t dismiss this psychology.
SG: Exactly. The characters are very convincing. I really empathize both with Selma and Görkem quite a bit, which is also intriguing because my upbringing in Turkey was so different from anything that’s going on in Lojman. That novel really has a sort of dark fairyland quality, and Van is a place I’d never really thought about. Still, I felt very close to the characters.
But I didn’t really try to capture that, as it just seemed like too big of a challenge for the first draft. But I do think that some of it organically emerged, because it is a very enveloping book. It’s not quiet or only intellectual.
AA: Yes, it’s not a book that you can intellectually read; it’s one where you have to allow yourself to be carried away. It’s very powerful in that regard—emotionally charged and charging. Reading some of those sections, I often felt arrested by it. I was speechless. I’d not seen this kind of writing before—with this kind of clarity, this psychic violence.
XYS: In that clarity and conflux of passions and violence, it reminded me a little bit of Clarice Lispector—that same unspeakable center in the middle of the prose. Every reader will have their own ideas about this, but for you two, what is the unspeakable center in Lojman?
AA: It’s the lojman. In fact, when Ebru Ojen is invited for interviews, she really cringes when someone wants to read this as a feminist writing. The central character is a woman and a mother, and the second central character is also a female, but she was really writing about the triad of the state, the house, and the self. And how the state—the taboos, cultures, traditions, religions, customs—infuses us firstly through the spaces we live in. The lojman is this alien force—an alienating space where this narrative unfolds.
So there was absolutely no question in our mind that the title of this book had to remain in Turkish—though the word itself is a very alienating word in Turkish as well. I was in a boarding public school, and whenever some of my friends would say that they were a “lojman child,” it immediately meant, “My parents are civil servants, and we live in a loaned house.” Loaned houses are characteristically characterless, but by the same token, their design is such that you can’t really do much with them to imbue them with personality. What it does is it rob you of your personality, so that you can endure life in it. So whenever someone would say, “I’m a child of lojman,” they would feel a certain sense of shame.
SG: I think part of the unspeakable or the unspoken in the book is also the Kurdish experience in Turkey—which is not pronounced in the book or in the way the book is received in Turkey. On the one hand, being a Kurdish woman obviously shouldn’t mean that you have to address the Kurdish experience and its politics in every formal art that you create, and maybe that wasn’t necessarily Ebru’s aim in this book, but it is a part of Lojman that is unspoken. Being Kurdish in Turkey can still have ramifications, and that is a very quiet aspect of not just the book, but also the whole universe it exists in.
AA: And anyone who reads this book in Turkey will know why this character, Yasin, insists on drawing and lowering the flag on the flagpole everyday. It’s a sign of obedience to the state—how peace is secured in in the environment where people are made to feel they are living in borrowed spaces. So the symbols here are subtle—though very little is subtle about this book. Ebru silences them; she doesn’t turn them into polemic. These details permeate. For example, the book opens with migratory birds—an image of perpetual exile. And what happens to the poor little mallard in the book happens because someone insists on giving them a home! The book is full of these inside jabs that make it very powerful.
XYS: I was actually reading an essay by Jale Parla, who said that the Turkish novel is traditionally seen as a vehicle for social reform. There are all of these underlying politics within the narrative, but do you think there’s a push for social reform there?
SG: Social realism in the Turkish novel is a very different voice and genre than what Ebru is giving us. Such books are often more intellectual, and the position of the narrator is not quite inside the experience—they’re usually a very sympathetic outsider, a close third in a social sense, giving a very different glimpse into whatever world they’re writing about. The social message is then less subtle in those narratives; the politics are a lot louder, and there’s also some idealistic underlying solution coming from the writer. Going back to the suggestion of the witness, Ebru is more of a witness than someone presenting a problem and a solution. It’s more about how the state politics really affect, firsthand, the individual experience. So she stands out from that tradition.
AA: I agree with everything Selin says, and I would just add that such novels of social reform are very didactic. They either gesture towards an ideal, or they just come out and tell you how things should be. But if you think about it, there’s enormous skepticism amongst writers today about the capacity of ideologies to offer solutions, because really, the problems that humans experience in society are due to people trying to solve our problems, more than letting us live. So Lojman is an acutely diagnostic novel, but it’s almost like a camera in a surgery room; you’re seeing everything, but you’re not sure the patient will live at the end. It’s really an affront to the tradition of social realism, which has really turned everything into types, rather than seeing the social, political, and cultural discord in the raw experience. There is no solution in Lojman; the solution is to start the whole thing over.
When I teach literature, I always ask my students if such novels are actually an expression of hope. I still think they are, because they create an aesthetic experience that opens up what is ugly, and it doesn’t sugarcoat.
XYS: Even if not hope, there’s a lot of beauty in the book, and I think so much of that beauty comes from the poetry, which plays a role with Selma specifically, representing a kind of liberation—the only liberation available to her. There are actual poems included in the text; I wonder if they have something to do with the vitality of poetry as a craft, which present a kind of liberation from language?
AA: It’s a very multifaceted question, and I’ll approach it in terms of the text itself. When I was reading these poetic excerpts from the book, I was always wondering why they were there. One just reads them, and they are not necessarily illuminating something that precedes or that follows. They are just as unhoused in the book as Selma is. You’re right; Selma, in another reality, would’ve been a beautiful human living a happy life, writing and immersing herself entirely in poetry. But these precious few interjections of poetic lines, which she is trying to keep in her life—her otherwise utterly unpoetic life—they are, as you said, hinting at where things could have been. But it’s ultimately contributes that feeling of unsettledness, of unbelonging.
SG: Actually, I met the poet! He’s a good friend of Ebru’s and she put us in touch. I was intrigued by the poetic lines, but I was a little lost as to why Ebru selected them or what they added to the text—so I experienced what Aron is described.
But separately from that, the book itself, and Ebru’s style, is very poetic. I don’t know if it’s intended as an affront to social realism—I don’t think she cares. It’s just unique. Turkish literature has a lot of humour and it is socially powerful, but in my limited experience with contemporary literature, I haven’t read anything as emotional or immersive as Ebru’s.
AA: Those strangely out of place lines of poetry or some couplets here and there are, in fact, incredibly in place. When we don’t understand why those lines are there, in the flow of the narrative, it displays to us how far and deep within her own world Selma is. They put the reader in their place, and remind us that Selma’s mind remains inaccessible, that some part of her mind remains in those realms of pure poetry.
XYS: I wonder if such use of language has something to do with the sociopolitical context of language in Turkey, with the reform and many writers in the twentieth century innovating language in the aftermath—could Ojen’s poeticism and innovation could’ve come out of that?
SG: Well, I think that, generationally, current Turks have been really disconnected for many years from the earlier literature, which preceded the Republic. After this reform happened, they cleaned out all the Arabic and Farsi words from Turkish, and when I tried to read some writers that I’m interested in translating, who wrote in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I don’t understand them. It’s created such a disconnect that I don’t think it affects contemporary writers much. There’s a trend in the more conservative end, in which people are trying to reabsorb these words that have been taken out of Turkish—to go back to the Ottoman roots—but it’s very small and contained.
To me, the bigger mystery is Kurdish. As a mainstream Turk, there’s so much we don’t know about Turkish. It’s such a repressed and suppressed language. I can’t even speculate as to what it’s like for Ebru to write in Turkish, the language of the oppressor, or to whether there are any echoes of Kurdish in the Turkish she uses. For years, we’ve been fed a narrative that Kurdish isn’t a uniform language, it doesn’t have a written tradition, it’s spoken in such specific pockets that most Kurdish people don’t understand each other—that’s what I grew up in. While I don’t have insight into it, I am really curious about how Ebru writes so beautifully in the language of the oppressor, and whether her language to some extent echoes Kurdish. To me, that’s the more interesting tension.
AA: It really is. It’s fair to say that Ebru’s own idiosyncratic language is more apparent in her syntax and grammar than in her vocabulary. We tend to zoom in too quickly on vocabulary, and in fact, the movement for the purification of Turkish has been undertaken in the name of vocabulary—though there is a grammar that the new Turkish has also evolved in.
The syntax is where vocabulary shines or becomes opaque. Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax. One of the things that helped me in deciphering Ebru’s syntax was having worked before on Bilge Karasu, who is the architect of modern Turkish syntax, if you will. One of the admirable things about Karasu is that he’s introduced words into modern Turkish language, but does so by manipulating the syntactic elasticity—like in the suffixes, which can be utilized to alter meaning. But he does that by telling this extremely compelling story. In Ebru’s case, whenever we encountered a sentence that didn’t make sense, we were especially careful not to impose our sense of it, and instead we really wrestled with it. That’s where her language emerges.
As for contextualizing it within our language politics of today, there are three camps: one of progress intellectuals who utilize a very pure Turkish vocabulary—such as in academic discourse; then we have a very strong and, as of now, not very sufficiently acknowledged community who are going back to Ottoman roots, and whose vocabulary is thus inflected with Ottoman words and syntax; and then there is a space in the middle between these two extreme positions, where there is incredible freedom. In Ebru’s writing, there are Turkish words that are particularly close to Kurdish speakers—and the title of the book, Lojman, is a Turkified version of the French logement. So this book is unabashedly a product of its own time—of Selma’s own time.
Aron Aji, a native of Turkey, has translated works by several Turkish authors in addition to Bilge Karasu including Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, Nedim Gursel, and Latife Tekin. He is the recipient of the 2004 National Translation Award for his translation of Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in support of the translation of A Long Day’s Evening. Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019, and is the Director of Translation Programs at the University of Iowa.
Selin Gökcesu is a Brooklyn-based writer and Turkish translator. She has a PhD in psychology and an MFA in writing from Columbia University.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, translator, and editor. Author of Then Telling Be the Antidote (Tupelo Press, 2023) and How Often I Have Chosen Love (Frontier Poetry, 2019). shellyshan.com
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Announcing Out August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen
- Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About
- Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma