About the Muser

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.