Nicolette Tan

on translating Nurullah Genç

The first thing to know about Turkish poetry is that is meant to be spoken. That is important because of the many things not visible in print due to line breaks or punctuation, like emotion and emphases. The emotions of this poem, with the complement of music and tempo, set the base for my interpretation of this poem. With my rudimentary Turkish I am thankful for knowing Turkish pronunciation and basic sentence structure, which is essential to being sensitive to the internal rhymes and rhythm. I also translated this poem into my mother tongue, Mandarin, to see if I could gain more insight as well. For example, “biraz şehir hülyası” translated into 小镇遐想, which literally translates to “small town reverie,” I chose to translate as “some city daydream” instead for the repetition of “some,” as intended in Turkish. Verbs end very similarly in Turkish, resulting in a lot more opportunity for rhyme and gravitas in the original, which I tried to replicate by playing with word length. In this poem, there are also literary choices, like the dual meaning of “remains” in the aftermath of an earthquake, that are my own but are inserted in place of my failure to retain the double meanings in other stanzas. Special thanks to Deniz Uğur Kemahlı for his advice.