Denis Ferhatović

on translating Anonymous

The folkloric and the avant-garde imaginations often resemble one another, as we know from the twentieth-century Eastern European poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasko Popa, and Mak Dizdar and the Americans in dialogue with Eurasian and other oral traditions such as Charles Simic and Jerome Rothenberg. The ancient can mirror the very current, even futuristic. Many riddles from anywhere in the world present the mundane as strange, causing the audience to experience delight at seeing objects, phenomena, and creatures in their midst in a new light. Crimean Tatar enigmas are no exception.

These delicate and sound-rich tiny poems present me with quite a challenge. How do I translate them without rendering them prosaic or sing-songy? They are not necessarily for children, although they possess some of the childlike wonder at the world, a quality not out of place in artistic expression generally. I could not manage to craft consistent rhymes to follow the original, but I do hope that some sonic play came through in the English by means of slant rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. It gives me some encouragement that the images – quite stunning in their compression and suggestiveness – seem to have survived the linguistic transfer.

My selection of seven enigmas constitutes a miniature Crimean Tatar feast. While Berbercan gives solutions in parenthesis after each enigma, I have decided to offer them in the note instead. (Perhaps you would want to play along. I hope you are hungry.) We have: 10.6 and 10.35 köbete (a savory phyllo pastry), 10.7 biber dolması (stuffed pepper), 10.18 baqlava, 10.19 laqşa (a lentil noodle dish), 10.26 sarma (stuffed grape leaves), and 10.27 çiberek (fried dough filled with meat). You may recognize many of these dishes from their counterparts in Eastern European, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian cuisines.