Layla Erbil's What Remains (#EuropeanReadingChallenge)

i've no idea why i'm telling you all this my dear readers

i can't know

i feel like i should know everything

before putting my other foot in the grave [208]

Laylâ Erbil's verse novel of 2011 was published by Deep Vellum last year in English translation. 

Lahzen is our narrator; she's an elderly woman of the secular, political left living in Istanbul. She's remembering the events of her life and of Istanbul, her home. She doesn't tell us her story in chronological order, but reflecting backwards on it. There are several recurring themes.

The first is her childhood. She grew up in Fener, also known as Phanar, the once Greek neighborhood on the Golden Horn, the European side of Istanbul. In her childhood, she had Greek, Jewish, Armenian friends. Rosa, the Jew, broke her pencil in half one day when Lahzen had forgotten hers; an act, she tells us, promising forty years of friendship. But in September of 1955, state-sponsored riots against homes and businesses drove out the non-Turks. Rosa's family goes to Israel. Lahzen remembers Greek songs, and songs in mixed Turkish and Greek. Her sister, her aunt go to Orthodox churches to perform magic with candles for good luck. The multicultural Istanbul of her youth is gone, and she misses it. A copy of Marilyn Monroe's skirt from the famous photo over the steam grate remains in a shop window in an arcade:

all that remained

was marilyn's pleated white skirt

in hristo usta's shop window

its white now blotched with purplish rot

the keys to the shop window

remained with hristo usta who fled to athens

do you think he'll come back

one day

you never know

they miss it here [210]

A second thread involves the deaths and disappearances during the years of the military dictatorship in Turkey. As she herself was a leftist, some are people she knew; some are just news items. Her second husband Sabit was in jail, but was eventually released. (There was an earlier husband who was good-looking and had a motorcycle, but oh, well, maybe not such great husband material.)

What it means to be a good person in such a world is a recurring thought for her; she often turns to Kierkegaard, and in particular Kierkegaard's retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac (in Fear and Trembling):  

...yes we can defend søren as someone who was trying to make the best of the world's fear of raging hellfires in those times; in a sense his love was harmless. he said "how does one become a good christian, that's always been my priority." in his day and age that was what it meant to be a good person. [159] 

In the present her relationship with Sabit is difficult. While he was in jail, she had an affair with his best friend Zeyyat, and maybe she's still a bit in love with Zeyyat. Is Sabit holding that one time infidelity over her head? A bit.

What remains at the end of a life in such a place? History and stones.

The book is billed as a verse novel. I can't comment on the verse, and largely didn't feel it. Probably my limitations, but who knows? Traduttore, traditore. Though it feels like the three ranslators (Ersan, Spangler, Wyers) knew what they were doing. I know nothing about modern Turkish poetry. Mostly I read it as oddly punctuated and capitalized prose, but even as that I quite enjoyed it.

what could the content of the text

be

other than

the writer in her own way

struggling to capture the truth

knowing that it cannot be captured [27]

 I first came across the book here.

 

Fakhraddin Gorgani's Vis and Ramin (tr. by Dick Davis)

And may there be no love at all unless

It's like this love, and brings such happiness.

How fortunate the lover whose sweet fate

It is to live in such a favoured state--

Truly, this is the way that love should be,

Good fortune, followed by simplicity!

How many days I've loved and never seen

A joy like that of Vis and her Ramin... 

Vis and Ramin is a poetic romance written by Fakhraddin Gorgani in Persian around 1050 CE, commissioned by the commander of Isfahan. It's the earliest surviving version of a story that takes place at some point in Persia under the Parthian empire (247 BCE - 220 CE).

King Mobad is the ruler of all Persia; he meets Shahru, wife of Qaren, a minor king and mother of two sons. She's beautiful and he woos her, but she says, my lord, I'm married with two boys, this is inappropriate. But if ever I were to have a daughter, I promise her to you.

Vis was that daughter. 

Years later and Vis is now of marriageable age and at least as beautiful as her mother. Shahru ignores her promise (or maybe thinks it doesn't matter anymore) and Vis is married off to her brother Viru. 

The introduction assures us that sibling marriage was fairly common among Parthian royal families (as it was in Pharaonic Egypt for that matter). At any rate, the story doesn't treat it as icky as it is for us, or would be to the Muslim Gorgani for that matter.

But King Mobad hasn't forgotten that promise. Before the marriage with Viru is even consummated, he's launched a war against Qaren. Qaren is killed. Vis was happy enough to be pledged to Viru, but she has no interest in that 'old man' and writes to him:

And if Viru weren't mine, this doesn't mean

I'd love you or consent to be your queen.

You killed my father, he's in heaven now;

My self, my being, are from him so how

Could you become my husband or my friend? 

Vis tells her mother off for promising her away even before she was born. Viru manages a successful counterattack for a while, but it can't last: in the end she's married to Mobad. She's sent off to Marv, Mobad's capital.

She brings her nurse. Who happens to know a magic spell or two. And when Vis is no more impressed with Mobad upon seeing him, the nurse whips up a spell that makes Mobad impotent, and Vis' second marriage is also never consummated. 

Though well-done the nurse is a fairly stock figure in this sort of romance--Davis in his introduction mentions the nurse from Romeo and Juliet--and she's out to get Vis interested in and involved with somebody:

You've never truly slept with any man.

You've had no joy of men, you've never known

A man whom you could really call your own...

What use is beauty if it doesn't bless

Your life with pleasure and love's happiness?

You're innocent, you're in the dark about it,

You don't know how forlorn life is without it.

You'll have to decide just what it is.

 

Who's available? Turns out Mobad has a very much younger (and very much better-looking) brother named Ramin and he happens to have fallen in love with Vis as soon as he's seen her:

Half of my body burns, half of it freezes.

Has God created, and can heaven show,

An angel made like me from fire and snow?

Fire does not melt my snow, and who has seen

Snow coexist with fire, as in Ramin?

Ramin approaches the nurse to see what can be done and pretty soon Vis and Ramin are finding ways to meet in private.

 

Mobad is a king; he has responsibilities and has to leave town occasionally. Mobad goes hunting and Ramin falls ill; Mobad goes to war against the Romans, and Ramin, a prominent member of court and an important warrior in his own right, falls ill. Eventually Mobad catches on--a bit after everyone else in the kingdom--and leaves Vis behind in a locked castle on a mountain top with a guard outside the door. He comes back to discover that the well-guarded Vis has been enjoying herself with Ramin. Mobad is aghast. All these restraints and guards are like a belt:

A pretty belt's of no significance

Unless it's holding up some kind of pants!

Buckle your belt as tight as you can make it,

But with no pants to wear you're still stark naked!

The story quite often proceeds by speeches and similes; though it has a different tone and subject matter, think of something like the Iliad. Where the Iliad might compare its warriors to lions or boars, Vis and Ramin compares the lovers to cypresses or moonlight. The art is generally in the details of the comparison. About two thirds through Ramin and Vis break up, both half deciding this is the wiser course, each convinced by an adviser of dubious value--the nurse for Vis, a 'philosopher' for Ramin--but that doesn't last long, and pretty soon they're working their way back together. But it takes a hundred pages first of letters, then in-person speeches, full of recriminations and lament, self-justification and imprecations, and not much event. But it reads well in place, with lots of fun rhetorical flourishes.

But I am still the lover whom you knew

Whose like has never yet been seen by you;

My brightness has not dimmed, my musky hair

Has not turned camphor white yet with despair,

My clustering curls are still as black and tight,

My shining pearl-like teeth as strong and white,

My silver breasts as firm and opulent,

My cypress stature has not yet been bent.

My face was once the moon, it's now the sun

Admired throughout the world, by everyone!...

I never saw a man who didn't prize me,

So why should you reject me and despise me? 

Actually, in typing that out, it rather reminds me of The Song of Solomon.

 

The translation, by Dick Davis, is done in heroic couplets. He writes in the introduction that the original Persian is in couplets, and that the line length is close to that of iambic pentameter. The rhymes are mostly quite tame, and so don't draw attention to themselves, but he is capable of more extravagant rhymes, as in the comic outburst of Mobad quoted above. (significance/some kind of pants!) I'd earlier read Davis' translation Faces of Love, of three Shirazi poets, and quite liked it. This is different, and by design less showy at times, but still a lot of fun.

 

Given all that buildup I was prepared for a tragic ending. The story is compared to Tristan and Yseult, and is sometimes considered a source for it, and I thought it could very well end with them dying in each other's arms in some foreign country. But it doesn't. Vis and Ramin live long and happy lives and produce two sons. (Though it does end less well for some of the other characters.)  How they get to their happiness, I'll leave as an exercise for readers...😉But it does mean it's a suitably seasonable book for a post, except I hadn't quite finished it yesterday.

This is a post about Ramin and Vis,

The ancient Persian epic, blogged by Reese,

A romance written in ten thousand lines,

With love and danger for your Valentine's.

A book off my Classics Club list. 

 

 

 

Maggie Millner's Couplets

 

1.1

All my life I've shown up late.

  But when I do, I compensate

for my delay--I laugh and preen and carry on

  as if I had been present all along.

I stayed in utero, for instance, two

  weeks after I was due,

then came out so decisively and fast

  I couldn't breathe. I spent my first

night on earth alone inside a tent

  flushed full of oxygen, the event

from which (my dad believes)

  have sprung like fires all my weird anxieties.

Mostly I can't see myself at all

  until I sense in someone else a parallel,

like how I only realize what

  I want at the moment I attain it,

my mind the final part of me to know.

  I've hurt people I love by being so

late to my desires. Last year, I met someone I thought

  I couldn't live without, and in the process lost

another, without whom I thought I'd

  die. If I had only realized

sooner, etc., etc. But I handled things ineptly

  and he left. I didn't die. Instead, I went to therapy

and saw the stegosaur uptown, stayed with friends

  and drank a lot of tea. Even then,

riding the bus to visit my new lover,

  I was breathless always, early almost never.

-Maggie Millner

That's the opening (after an introductory proem) of Maggie Millner's verse novel, Couplets: A Love Story, which came out earlier this year. The (female) narrator had a serious boyfriend for years--they'd talked about marriage and kids, but hadn't decided for sure on either--when she falls in love with an older woman and dumps her longstanding boyfriend. Does it work out? That's our drama.

I'm a sucker for verse novels--Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, Douglas Dunn's The Donkey's Ears, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Iliad--especially if they at least nod to formal poetics. 

This one consists of fifty sections, of about the length of the one quoted, divided into four books, making up 102 pages. (So actually a novella?) Most of the poems are like this, in couplets that allow slant rhyme and of varied line length, but some consist of a prose poem ending with a short rhyming line. The writing suggests autobiographicality, in much the way In Search of Lost Time suggests it, with its narrator named Marcel, but I don't know how autobiographical the story actually is. One of the blurbs calls it steamy, but it mostly makes me, living in the provinces, think NYC sex lives are way too complicated... 😉

Still, it's a pretty fun read, moving along well, and you feel like you know the narrator by the end. (Though less so the ex-boyfriend, or the new lover.) I liked the verse, which offers the occasional suggestive line. ("I was breathless always, early almost never.")

Poem For A Thursday: Clough

Amours de Voyage, Canto I, Introduction

Over the great windy waters, and over the clear crested summits,
  Unto the sun and the sky, and unto the perfecter earth,
Come, let us go,--to a land wherein gods of the old time wandered,
  Where every breath even now changes to ether divine,
Come, let us go; though withal a voice whisper, "The world

that we live in,

  Whithersoever we turn, still is the same narrow crib;
'Tis but to prove limitation, and measure a cord, that we travel;
  Let who would 'scape and be free go to his chamber and think;
'Tis but to change idle fancies for memories wilfully falser;
  'Tis but to go and have been."--Come, little bark! let us go.

-Arthur Hugh Clough

Umm. The selection of this is feeling a little over-determined for me at the moment. (1.) I recently learned that Amours de Voyage was reissued by Persephone--I don't see Persephone volumes here very often. But I would have reread it for the recent Persephone reading month. (2.) I'm currently reading Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil in the English translation of Jean Starr Untermeyer, and he apparently wanted the Vergil quotes in the translation to be in dactylic hexameter. It's clear to me Untermeyer went off and studied Clough for how to write dactylic hexameter in English. A very good choice, I'd say. And (3.) we're thinking about our own trip to Italy in the late fall, which is where Clough's voyaging lovers go. (From England to Italy, over the great windy waters and the clear crested summits, while poetic, is also literal. It doesn't work quite as well from here: more water, less mountain. Though given the likelihood of changing planes in Frankfurt...)

Arthur Hugh Clough was a British poet who died in 1861. Amours de Voyage is a story poem in five cantos about a group of young English people who travel to Italy in 1849, the time of Garibaldi's defense of the Roman republic. It's about 40 pages in my edition. Except for the proem to each canto, written in elegiacs, it consists of a series of letters in dactylic hexameter written by the young people in Italy to their friends back home in England; various of them fall in love, with decisions to be made about that. I really find it very good.

There's a great John Masefield poem at Holds Upon Happiness this week. More great windy waters!