Keyla Çavdar
on translating Nâzım Hikmet
Nâzım Hikmet has a special place in my heart that I hadn’t realized before. I was reintroduced to his poetry last spring through a translation class. I had never considered how strange it is to translate from your mother tongue, how cautious and intimate the experience is. There are definitely things that I find untranslatable, especially between Turkish and English, and Hikmet has a peculiar language of his own that I have not quite figured out how to define. It’s hard to let go of words that, to me, mean so much, and having to find those words in English can feel impossible from time to time. In “I Would Like to Die Before You,” I wanted to get through the sensation of a daydream; how images can seem so real in your head yet they also feel so unattainable. It’s tough to stay loyal to the original as you can say things in Turkish with so little words sometimes, but in English things multiply. I love the part about the translucent pot on the stove, and I hope I was able to bring that image a little closer. In the end everything still seems untranslatable, but I think the in-between created through translation has a life of its own, and is constantly moving and changing.
about the author
Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) was a Turkish poet, playwright, and revolutionary figure. His political views and support for communism often landed him in jail, where he wrote much of his poetry. His poetry was looked to by much of Turkey’s youth as the poetry of the revolution. He is considered Turkey’s first modern poet and was influenced by the Russian Futurist movement. After being released from jail after starting a hunger strike, Hikmet moved to the Soviet Union.
about the translator
Keyla Çavdar is a student at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and fine arts. She was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and moved to Philadelphia in 2014. She was reintroduced to revolutionary Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet in Taije Silverman’s translation class in the spring of 2016; Hikmet’s poetry made it possible for her to understand not only the current political climate in Turkey, but also the implications of losing one’s country and language. Translation enabled her to dwell in the space between her mother tongue, Turkish, and her second language, English. Exploring the space between these languages brought about a consciousness of distance, which she writes about in Notes on the Afterlives.
