Posts featuring Ebru Ojen

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

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Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Inside the Mind That Falls Apart: Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu on Lojman

September 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

"Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax."

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.

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. 

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. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen

August 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Ojen writes along the pulse, and everything she describes is powered by the thrashing motions of something holding on to life.

Lojman is a book that shows its teeth. In powerful, unflinching prose of malevolence and confinement, Ebru Ojen depicts the family unit as a condition in which the most abject of cruelties and annihilations are imagined, resulting in an unparalleled portrait of madness and oblivion. By pushing her characters to mental precipices, the author points us toward the emotional peaks of human existence, drawing blood in an open display of intense, battered aliveness.

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. 

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu, City Lights, 2023

There’s something out there. Such are the familiar words that announce fear’s dramatic incarnations—a sudden violent churning along the horizon, a scream that shears the night-fabric, a figure separating itself from the darkness. The common portrait of horror is aiming its heavy steps towards us, drawing nearer with each quickened breath—a grasp, a suffocation, a descent inevitable as gravity, an opaque force and singular direction. We’ve all been stranded in this lingering vastness, certain of some unbearable thing that approaches, and yet this dreadful knowledge, of what may lie out there, is only an elementary stage in fear’s true theatre. Eventually, one finds a more intolerable, more defiling fact: something that does not pursue, does not invade—something that does not come scratching at our windows, but dwells already in the closest, most secret part of us, capable of everything and knowing nothing of order, nothing of control.

Ebru Ojen’s Lojman is a horror of intimacies. In brutal, visceral treads, it walks that demarcation separating the inside from the outside, revealing all that rages against walls both visible and invisible—the unspeakable violence of the precipice. And while the outside still holds the unknowable chill of our darkest suspicions, in Lojman, it is the inside where monsters are unleashed. The title, transliterated from the Turkish word for lodging, is the first indication of this novel’s form—as tightly fortified as architecture, and as taut and enigmatic as the human body. Through passages of incandescent maleficence and enthralled terror, we are led into the stifling, worldly containers that somehow manage to hold utterly uncontainable things—all that goes on in a house, all that goes on in a mind. We have been made so small in order to live, and that unbearable reality is given, here, for writing to bear. READ MORE…