Place: Turkey

Judging the Author, Not the Book: Exploring the Discourse of the Shafak Plagiarism Case

February 12, 2026  |  in Essays  |  by Neriman Kuyucu Norman

The most radical act of resistance remains to be a truly critical reader.

Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most globally renowned writers, having been translated into over fifty languages, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and named a Chevalier of l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. As such, when she was accused and then indicted of plagiarism in 2021, it sent deep reverberations throughout the Turkish literary scene. In this following essay, Neriman Kuyucu Norman examines the details of the case against Shafak—and why it is always important to look beyond the surface representation of such matters.

On October 19, 2021, Turkish author and columnist Mine Kırıkkanat filed a plagiarism lawsuit against the internationally acclaimed British-Turkish author Elif Shafak and her Turkish publisher Doğan Kitap. Kırıkkanat claimed that Şafak’s 2002 bestseller The Flea Palace (Bit Palas) was a structural copy of Kırıkkanat’s 1990 novel The Flies’ Palace (Sinek Sarayı). Last November, the 16th Civil Chamber of the Istanbul Regional Court of Justice issued a ruling concluding that the similarities found in Shafak’s novel went beyond mere inspiration.

The court’s ruling was based on a 35-page expert report that confirms the absence of any direct plagiarism of sentences or dialogue. Instead, the report identifies what it describes as a structural and thematic overlap, accounting for nearly 5% of the book. Based on this finding, the court ordered substantial penalties, including financial damages, a total market recall, and a ban on future printing. Doğan Kitap has formally contested these measures, claiming that both the publisher and Shafak will seek a reversal of the decision through the Supreme Court of Appeals.

Having recently read R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), which tackles the blurred boundaries between creative inspiration and intellectual theft, I found the court’s decision particularly compelling. The case against Shafak brings the core dilemma of Kuang’s narrative to the forefront: What constitutes plagiarism within the realm of creative writing? Can a concept or a literary idea ever truly be owned by a single person? How does public reaction recalibrate the parameters of intellectual theft? READ MORE…

Winter 2026: Highlights from the Team

February 9, 2026  |  in News  |  by Arla Hoxha, Julia Maria, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, Olivia Wohlgemuth, and Sabrina Fountain

Still not sure where to start with the new issue? Let our team members be your guide!

Reading Minna Canth’s Children of Misfortune (translated from the Finnish by Minna Jeffery) felt like a jolt of moral clarity. In a year when I stopped apologizing, the play reminded me why anger, when shared and articulated, can still feel invigorating. Canth refuses the lie that oppression is inevitable, insisting instead that the world we inhabit was made and can be remade. There is something bracing, almost ecstatic, about watching oppressed people unite in fury, turning their rage against the lifeless property their masters prize so dearly.

That same refusal of appeasement runs through Hélène Laurain’s On Fire (tr. Catherine Leung from the French), whose blunt, abrasive narrator feels almost instructive in a moment when calls for meek compromise echo as loudly as calls for violence. Laurain offers no heroes, no romanticism, only a clear-eyed account of what resistance actually costs: police brutality, surveillance, isolation, depression. And yet resistance remains necessary, as does art.

If Canth and Laurain speak to the anger of the present, Zekine Türkeri’s A Jihadist Dried Up a Sea (tr. Keko Menéndez Türkeri from the Turkish) does justice to its grief. Few endings have struck me as forcefully as Türkeri’s explanation of the title. Stripped of sentimentality, the piece insists that meaning is not born from grief but constructed against it, and that only by recognizing our shared pain can we find the strength to go on.

That recognition undergirds Anatoly Loginov’s The Narrow Neck of Being (translated from the Russian by the author himself), a staggering survey of attention in Russian literature. For all its scholarly precision, the essay is bound to the issue’s most politically outspoken works by its insistence that attention and suffering are inseparable. To be aware is to be fragile, mortal, and therefore attuned to the vulnerability of others. Loginov’s call to spend attention lavishly, even on another’s suffering, feels like an ethical compass for an age of ceaseless crises.

I ended my reading in a quieter register with Rokhl Korn’s Four Poems (tr. Pearl Abraham from the Yiddish). Their exactness captures the shared longing of romantic love, but what stayed with me most was Korn’s use of the future tense in “My Wait” and “My Dreams.” Desire, she seems to accept, will never be fulfilled. And still, she grants it beauty.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Reading Zekine Türkeri’s A Jihadist Dried Up a Sea (tr. Keko Menéndez Türkeri from the Turkish) alongside Sidsel Ana Welden Gajardo’s As a Child of a Refugee, I Have Learned That War Lives on Across Generations (translated from the Danish by the author) was devastating. Even knowing, intellectually, that war and displacement scar across generations, both pieces force a confrontation with that truth. Türkeri reminds us that every person in a refugee camp carries a story worthy of more than a report, while Gajardo’s letter to her father wrestles with how trauma persists long after exile, living on in loneliness and the mind. If time heals, these pieces ask, what does healing even look like? Can war ever truly end?

I was struck, too, by A Poetic Psychology of Attention, the interview with Kristin Dykstra, particularly her observation that interruption itself can signify. In a world saturated with stimuli, dissonance becomes not a flaw but a necessity. Estranging ourselves from the familiar may be the only way to recognize what realities truly matter. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2026

February 2, 2026  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Blog editors weigh in on our latest issue!

We are not only celebrating the release of our newest issue, the fifty-eighth under our belt, but also fifteen years of working to promote global literature! This is a jam-packed issue, with two special themes and giants in the world of translation interspersed with up-and-coming voices. There is so much to discover, and our blog editors are here to help you navigate the rich offerings on hand!

In a heartwrenching ending to a long poem, Franz Wright wondered:

. . . but
why?
Why
was I filled with such love,
when it was the law
that I be alone?

And therein lies the bind of desire, which is solitude incarnate, which demands that the object of our affections remain distant and suspended, love being most absolute when it resides in wish and conjecture. We are most in love when we hibernate within our singular conception of it, alone. The pain of the unrequited condition consoles, then, by providing us with the most vivid chimeras, pursuing the indefinite with abandon, setting up its own precipitous stakes and utmost heights, the heartening glimpses at pleasure. Such speculations lead easily into self-indulgent ecstasies, but Dino Buzzati is fluent in dreams, and as such he knows that they are only interesting if relayed by someone who sees their truths.

In the earnest and lovely “Unnecessary Invitations”, one perceives the writer who had once said that he believed “fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism”—who understands that a head in the clouds remains connected to the two feet on the ground. The story, addressed to an unnamed lover, sets up several scenarios of the wonderful things the narrator would like to do with his beloved: “to walk . . . with the sky brushed grey and last year’s old leaves still being dragged by the wind around the suburban streets”; “to cross the wide streets of the city under a November sunset”. The scenes are rose-coloured, ripe with affection—but Buzzati follows up each with a cold splash of recognition, in a brilliant switching of registers captured by translator Seán McDonagh:

Neither can you, then, love those Sundays that I mentioned, nor does your soul know how to talk to mine in silence, nor do you recognise, in exactly the right moment, the city’s spell, or the hopes that descend from the North.

READ MORE…

The Radicality of the Fracture: A Review of What Remains by Leylâ Erbil

January 8, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

Erbil is a chronicler of the cracks, of what disrupts a sense of wholeness and cohesion but also evades hegemonic structures of conformity.

What Remains by Leylâ Erbil, translated by Alev Ersan, Mark David Wyers, and Amy Marie Spangler, Deep Vellum, 2025

In 2022, the publication of A Strange Woman (Tuhaf Bir Kadın) introduced the renowned Turkish writer and activist Leylâ Erbil to the Anglophone literary world, a step made possible by the efforts of translators Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler. What Remains (Kalan) now gives us a new side of Erbil—her first novel, characteristic with her uncompromising commitment to exploring the taboo. In a delightful moment of parallelism, Maureen Freeley’s translation of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, one of Erbil’s most beloved friends and regular correspondents, came out in April, making 2025 a watershed year for Turkish women writers in translation.

Ayten Tartıcı’s insightful introduction to What Remains sets the stage beautifully, giving the reader enough context to get a sense of Erbil and her work while preserving room for mystery and surprise. Born in 1931, Erbil grew up in Istanbul and was an autodidact who did not believe in shutting herself inside the ivory tower of academia. She read widely, immersed in the work of her Turkish contemporaries but also global thinkers and writers like Kafka, Proust, Freud, Faulkner, and Marx. Undeniably a brilliant and prolific writer (as the first Turkish woman to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature), she was passionate, opinionated, and politically engaged in both her texts and her life, advocating for freedom of expression in Turkey and beyond. READ MORE…

Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable Translator: Nicholas Glastonbury on Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories

December 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

. . . if we can unmake or destabilize the novel, we might similarly destabilize the nation, which warrants or conscripts the novel.

The Competition of Unfinished Stories is one of those texts that would be classified as “untranslatable” by the more cynical amongst us. Aside from addressing the intricate language politics of Turkey—namely the oppression and marginalization of Kurdish—Sener Ozmen’s text is full of jokes, narrative tangles, loose ends, shapeshifting characters, and suspicious translators. As such, the English edition of the novel is a triumph, not only in Nicholas Glastonbury’s fluid and adventurous prose, but also in his own interjections that celebrate the original’s chaos and multiplicity. In this interview, he speaks on the challenges of translating the book, authorial authority, and language’s resistance to containment.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Hilary Ilkay (HI): This is a challenging and strange book! How did you find out about it? Did you pitch it to a publisher, or was it pitched to you?

Nicholas Glastonbury (NG): I met Sener maybe six years ago. I was in Diyarbakır doing research for my PhD, and there was an organization trying to build an online platform for Kurdish literature, given all of the obstacles that it has in accessing foreign language audiences, and I did some work for them. I was aware of Sener’s work a little bit, but when I met him, I became really interested in it. He’s also a visual artist, so I became really interested in how he saw the world. He’s also written quite a few books; The Competition of Unfinished Stories is his second novel, and the title is what drew me in. After I read it, I thought, what is going on here? This is a crazy book. Then I began pitching it around, and it landed with Sandorf Passage, which I’m very happy about.

HI: I was delighted to discover Sener’s prolific artistic practice when I was reviewing the book. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you see his practice as a visual artist influencing his writing. Do you see an interplay between his art and the way that he constructs stories and narratives?

NG: I think he’s really interested in the absurd. For example, there’s one photograph of his that comes to mind; it’s a group of men hoisting a flag up a flagpole, and they’re all wearing neck braces, and they’re unable to look up at the flag. There’s a tension between violence and nation, and the obligation to nation is very much an aspect of this novel.

He has another piece, a sequence of photographs of himself dressed as Superman. He takes off his cape and uses it as a prayer rug, and the title of the work is “Supermuslim.” He’s got a real sense of humor about things that are so heavy and serious.

There was another piece he did called “Road to Tate Modern,” which is him and another artist trying to make their way to London, to the museum. They do a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza act, riding a horse and a donkey, asking shepherds around the Kurdish countryside where the Tate Modern is. And the shepherds say things like, oh, it’s just over the hill. . . So there’s a sense of the distance that Kurdish cultural production has to surmount in order to reach international audiences—of course conditioned by the violences of the nation-state—that comes through in both his writing and his visual work. I think the way that his approach to writing is shaped by his visual work is how he captures images. For example, in The Competition of Unfinished Stories, the image of Neil Armstrong on the prayer mat dying stands out to me, or all the scenes of Sertac masturbating. There’s a real sense of creating these absurd tableaus, and I think that’s probably influenced by how he sees and visualizes the world through his art.

HI: You have such an impressive and interesting portfolio of translations under your belt and I’m curious, given the scope of your work, what made Ozmen’s writing unique, or what stood out about the way that he wrote? And related to that, what was the biggest challenge in trying to render this unwieldy text into English? READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen

November 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

From a Turkish perspective, there is no Kurdistan . . . . Ozmen’s novel meditates on what this effacement does to someone’s subjectivity.

Dizzying, furious, scathing, and absurdist—artist and writer Sener Ozemen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories is a testament to an identity, region, and language under siege. The novel, with its many layered narratives, confronts the Turkish state’s enduring violence against its Kurdish minority, illustrating the psychic and physical fractures of oppression with intellectual complexity and emotional clarity. In attempting to disentangle the knot of selfhood from a merciless assimilating power and a growingly fragmentary everyday existence, Ozmen builds the architecture of fiction to its most veering heights, capturing all the threads of reality’s illusions, and thus resulting in one of contemporary fiction’s most vivid portraits of psychological dissolution—that which still never turns away from the need to express its truths.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen, translated from the Kurdish by Nicholas Glastonbury, Sandorf Passage, 2025

In her book Immemorial, Lauren Markham notes that “the feeling of grieving something that isn’t yet gone, and whose disappearance isn’t fully certain . . . is an eerie, off-putting one.” This liminality and its disquieting effect are what animates Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories, deftly translated by Nicholas Glastonbury. This is not only the author’s debut in the Anglosphere, but one of the first works written in Kurdish’s northern Kurmancî dialect to receive an English translation.

Ozmen is a prolific Kurdish writer and multimedia visual artist, the author of numerous books of poetry, novels and short stories, criticism, and artist books. Across his written oeuvre and artistic practice, he has drawn attention to both the urgency and difficulty of speaking from a position of marginalization; The Competition of Unfinished Stories, originally published in Kurmancî as Pêşbaziya Çîrokên Neqediyayî in 2010 and translated into Turkish as Kifayetsiz Hikâyeler Müsabakası in 2015, follows in this spirit. The novel dramatizes—in a challenging and disorienting way—that the stories one tells are always co-authored and situated, demonstrating the interrelatedness and imbrication of the self. As Judith Butler observes in Giving an Account of Oneself, “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.”  READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2025

October 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Sophie Benbelaid, and Xiao Yue Shan

Thoughts and inspirations from our latest issue!

Our latest—and fifty-seventh—issue draws together work from thirty-one countries and twenty-one languages, from antiquity to the boldly contemporary, the comedic to the compassionate, the historic to the experimental. To help you navigate this compendium, our blog editors offer up their favourites.

In one of the many street art pieces embroidering the surfaces of Athens, a black sign reads: ‘A memory of a memory that we are all left with.’ Greece’s capital is bound in all directions: to the bodies that live within its confines, the oblique and omnipresent archive, the dynamism of recollection, the strategies of function, the desperation of loss, the translucency of power, reality’s elasticity and its collapse. To be within it, then, is to acknowledge that no space is neutral—that the collective illusion of fixed borders, fixed pasts, and fixed stratagems of everyday life are gossamer comforts. There is nothing stable in the city. The condition of its existence is nothing less than a mass hypnosis.

‘When my parents told me we lived in Athens, I believed them.’ Amanda Michalopoulou writes in ‘Desert‘, translated with great emotional heft by Joanna Eleftheriou and Natalie Bakopoulos. Through a combination of confession and elucidation, the piece seeks to delineate the living morphology of present-day Athens from its manipulated dreams of cohesion and glory, earmarking the ‘transcendent’ objectives of the ancient city as a catalyst for its current fragility, the very definition of transcendence gesturing at an inoperable unreality, a beyond that persists only in attempts and potentialities. ‘A city that would invent cities and governments, language and liberty,’ so Athens grew with immovable conjectures of goodness and intelligence, until: ‘Step by step, they created a society that matched their insatiable vision of absolute power and control.’ The converge of experience and concept is chaotic, and space does not hesitate to dislocate itself from our comprehension. Thus, as Michalopoulou describes her ‘investigations,’ the city can perhaps be only understood via the fragmented origins of our most ancient texts, in those long-gone years where our present certainties had been amended, invented, reconstituted, and dismembered ceaselessly. The instability of today’s Athens resents the wonders and heights of its own birth, yet this shakiness is also evidence of another strength, for it is as David Graeber said: ‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur. READ MORE…

Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

August 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

READ MORE…

Bringing Contemporary Turkish Poetry into English: A Conversation with Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher

August 14, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Even when poetry is read silently, we tend to subvocalize. Rhythm—and even a kind of melody shaped by stress patterns—still resonates.

Curated and translated by Buğra Giritlioğlu, with the collaboration of Daniel Scher, The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish: Poems from the New Millennium (Syracuse University Press, 2025) seeks to dismantle the “Orient of the anthologies,” as Laurent Mignon calls it in his incisive foreword, offering instead a mosaic of voices that refuses reduction to cliché or cultural shorthand. The volume spans 172 poems by 61 poets, weaving canonical figures alongside bold experimenters who push the boundaries of form and language. Familiar names, such as Lâle Müldür and Murathan Mungan, converse with emerging poets whose works might otherwise remain inaccessible to English-language readers. The effect is an anthology that is not merely representative but dialogic.

Turkish, with its null-subject syntax and layered ambiguities, resists a one-to-one mapping into English. Rather than smoothing these difficulties, the translators lean into them. “If any of the translations seem obscure,” Giritlioğlu writes, “the reader can rest assured the originals are equally so.” This refusal to domesticate feels radical in an era of over-sanitized translations. Scher’s role balances this fidelity with readability, bringing a native ear attuned to English idiom

In this interview, I speak with Buğra Giritlioğlu, whose background straddles materials science, ethnomusicology, and literary translation, and Daniel Scher, whose editorial eye and native English fluency helped shape the anthology’s final voice. We discuss the puzzles and pleasures of translating experimental Turkish poetry, the ethics of collaboration, and the aesthetic fault lines that define this vibrant literary moment. From negotiating null-subject ambiguities to preserving sonic textures across languages, their reflections offer a rare glimpse into the labor behind making a national literature audible in another tongue.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): Buğra, given your background in materials science and ethnomusicology, how do these fields inform your work as a translator of poetry?

Buğra Giritlioğlu (BG): Both materials science and ethnomusicology have shaped how I think, in ways that carry over into translation. All three require an inquisitive, analytical mindset. Translation often involves a kind of optimization, much like materials science: you’re constantly weighing trade-offs, making fine-tuned adjustments, and aiming for the best possible version under specific constraints.

READ MORE…

Life Adorned with a Little Death: A Review of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü

June 23, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

This is a novel of simultaneous journeys outward and inward, through space and time, and also through memory and literature. . .

Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Transit Books, 2025

The Turkish writer Tezer Özlü lacks widespread recognition in the Anglosphere, but the tide of her English reception is turning thanks to the efforts of Maureen Freely, the translator of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In her lifetime of 1943-86, Özlü was part of a moment in modern Turkish literary history in which secular women writers proliferated. Though many of them too remain in relative obscurity among English audiences, one can only hope that the publication of Özlü’s novels will set off a domino effect.

In 2022, Deep Vellum released an updated translation (thanks to a joint but asynchronous effort between Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler) of Tuhaf Bir Kadın / A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil—the only Turkish women to be nominated for the Nobel as well as Özlü’s friend, source of influence, and dedicated epistolary correspondent. Originally published in 1971, Tuhaf Bir Kadın is a pioneering force in the genre of Turkish women’s writing, but proved to be a controversial text for its frank exploration of a woman’s sexuality, representation of domestic abuse, and explicit engagement with the political left. Still, it set the stage for a new generation of authors, and its legacy extends into the twenty-first century with novelists like Elif Shafak, who is committed to exposing the deep-rooted misogynistic violence of Turkish patriarchal society. For instance, her 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World narrates the story of a murdered prostitute in Istanbul; the dead woman’s brain continues to function for the length of time in the title, a dirge for the disposability and precarity of women’s lives in the Turkish metropolis. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.

In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.

Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.

In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.

With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Fındık” by Sait Faik Abasıyanık

January 7, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Will Washburn

Something else was going on with the dog; deep down, he was catching on to something.

Fındık, the titular character of Sait Faik Abasıyanık‘s short story, is the kind of dog you can find anywhere: one of those common strays who are nonetheless elevated by virtue of their sheer adorableness, endearing themselves to the local residents. He’s also a perfect litmus test for human character, exposing those who would scold a dog for merely approaching them. Despite such treatment, Fındık remains trusting and friendly. That is, until he encounters the Poison Man, a self-important garbage collector who is charged with culling the village’s canine population. Translated from the Turkish by Will Washburn, “Fındık” examines themes of moral responsibility, human-animal bonds, and the rationalizations people use to justify cruelty toward the downtrodden—but also, what spurs them to defy those rationalizations.

Fındık is pals with everyone in our village, young and old, who doesn’t have too high an opinion of themselves. Colored like a tabby cat, Fındık (his name means “hazelnut”) is the bastard offspring of a wolf-dog and a hunting dog. As a love-child, he ought to be beautiful, but in fact he isn’t. If you don’t give him a pat on the head when he approaches you, wagging his big thick tail and blinking his brown eyes, then you’re a strange one indeed. To reject an animal that approaches you with such a need for affection, you’d have to have never been in love in your life, never cared about anything, never known what it means to have a soft heart. You might hold that such people don’t exist. And yet how many times, with my own eyes, have I seen Fındık approach people—not just for a piece of bread, but in need of a simple pat—and be shooed off. So I’m unable to change my opinion of humanity.

It’s a well-known fact that, with the onset of summer, dogs catch a nasty microbial illness from each other. Around that time, the city busies itself with killing off every dog in sight. People hide all the dogs in their area. The municipality pays one-and-a-half lira per dog, and a bunch of dog-killers set off on their rounds.

In our village, we call this person the “Poison Man.” You should see this Poison Man: he’s an odd one. To be sure, not everyone who does that job is abnormal. But becoming a killer, an Angel of Death, inevitably alters a person’s condition, their character, their gaze, their walk. Or maybe it doesn’t alter them; maybe we only think it does. You know that play, So It Is (If You Think So)? Well, if we think the Poison Man is abnormal—then so he is. He might as well be the Düsseldorf Monster. That’s the fellow who used to carry a gleaming metal chain with a knife attached to one end, which he’d use to ensnare little children, take them behind the bushes, and kill them.

READ MORE…