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Dirty August

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Edip Cansever

December 2009

Larry O. Dean

It’s an understatement to say that Edip Cansever isn’t very well known in poetry circles (whatever those are), nor any more so in the specialized area of Turkish literature. Reading the introduction to Dirty August will give you some helpful background on the latter, but to appreciate Cansever’s poetry one has only to peruse Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin and Richard Tillinghast’s translations. While I can’t vouch for their fealty to the native language – that would be an issue for a different kind of review, couched in quibbling over semantics – I can say that what Tillinghast fille et père have kindly bequeathed English language readers, through these eminently readable translations, is a beguiling peek into the work of a “Second New” wave poet (who died in 1986), one espousing a secular vision more philosophically aligned with European existentialism than with Ottoman empiricism. The Tillinghasts are long-time aficionados as well as scholars of Turkish idiom and culture, and their love for Cansever’s writing is readily apparent in this slim, yet potent volume.

It’s an understatement to say that Edip Cansever isn’t very well known in poetry circles (whatever those are), nor any more so in the specialized area of Turkish literature. Reading the introduction to Dirty August will give you some helpful background on the latter, but to appreciate Cansever’s poetry one has only to peruse Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin and Richard Tillinghast’s translations. While I can’t vouch for their fealty to the native language – that would be an issue for a different kind of review, couched in quibbling over semantics – I can say that what Tillinghast fille et père have kindly bequeathed English language readers, through these eminently readable translations, is a beguiling peek into the work of a “Second New” wave poet (who died in 1986), one espousing a secular vision more philosophically aligned with European existentialism than with Ottoman empiricism. The Tillinghasts are long-time aficionados as well as scholars of Turkish idiom and culture, and their love for Cansever’s writing is readily apparent in this slim, yet potent volume.

I first encountered Cansever serendipitously, reading perhaps his best known poem, “Table,” which begins:

A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.

The imagery here is simple and direct enough – the keys, flowers, eggs and milk on the table, staples of anyone’s everyday existence – yet more than that, we know that this man is “filled with the gladness of living.” We ask ourselves, does his gladness precede his arrival home, or do the simple pleasures of his life beget that elation? Before we can venture a guess, Cansever swerves away from kitchen sink drama and into a different realm entirely:

He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sound of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.

What makes this singular poem so astonishing, and so captivating, is the deftness with which Cansever draws us into its deceptively ordinary milieu. The titular furniture isn’t just a plateau for activities of daily living; it’s also a place where the main character – and by extension, the reader – lays out the miraculous intangibles that sometimes defy description. What is especially stunning is how plainspoken the poem is, yet how much vested interest we have in those abstract things, and ideas: light from a window, sound of a bicycle’s spinning wheel, the softness of both bread and weather, the machinations of a mind.

Cansever deliberately refrains from specificity, from pornographic ornamentation; it’s not that “Table” is chaste, immaculate, an ode to minimalism – if anything, it infers a maximalism that is rather staggering. So when it reaches its final stanza, not too many lines further on, it’s no surprise to find the satisfyingly subjective exclamation, “Now that’s what I call a table!”, made, not by the glad man within the poem – unless the speaker was that person to begin with, or has become him – but by a not-so-neutral observer, whose attention shifts from the items stacked there to the table itself:

It didn’t complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.

Cansever personifies the table, which tacitly accepts the man’s actions: they are in cahoots with one another. He will keep piling; it will remain standing. So it goes. To draw comparisons to Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus here, in both spirit as well as general tenor, is not exactly accurate, since with Cansever there is additionally an abiding melancholy, as well as an oft surreal prescience in his poetry that further distances him from the French intelligentsia. (Come to think of it, the Camus comparison may be apter than I originally thought, since Camus was Algerian.) Still, as evinced by “Table,” as well as the other poems here, with their fleeting references to Bedouins, camel-drivers, and desert sands, native Istanbulian Cansever seems like a happy stranger in his own city, in that his inspiration seem less parochially dictated than drawn from pan-European observations. However it is achieved, the effect is mesmerizing.

Being exposed to a poet’s work through such a magnificent poem as “Table” invites disappointment. Thankfully, however, that is not the case here. These forty selections are uniformly engrossing, and if nothing else were to ultimately have the depth charge-like effect of “Table,” that doesn’t mean that other poems here aren’t worthy of scrutiny on their own merits. I’m telling you that they are, and if anything, they instigate enthusiasm for a much deeper appraisal of this poet’s oeuvre. Dirty August is comprised of work from four earlier volumes, and makes no claims at being a collected edition; as I said, it is, relatively speaking, a slim volume. In addition to the introduction, which delves briefly into Turkish history, modern Turkish poetry, Cansever’s life and that of his contemporaries, it includes an autobiographical sketch by the author, as well as a few (helpful) pages of notes, and finally notes on the translation itself. The Tillinghasts have provided an absorbing introduction, then, not just to a poet but to a whole under-explored school of poetry.

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