Orthodoxies, Ece Ayhan

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language: Turkish (English tr. Murat Nemet-Nejat)
country: Turkey
year: 1968
form: poetry
dates read: 26.5.24

I don’t think I liked Ece Ayhan’s Orthodoxies quite as much as A Blind Cat Black, his earlier collection it’s paired with in this edition (translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat, who also provided endnotes and a short essay postscript).

the poems are as dark, a bit grimy but not enough for me to tag it that way, but also playfully irreverent — thus the “lighthearted” mood. like A Blind Cat Black, this is about exposing the underbelly of Turkish society, centered on the double meaning of ortodoks as both “Orthodox (Christian)” and, per Nemet-Nejat, “whore, homosexual, pederast, betrayer, etc.”. the poems — prose poems like A Blind Cat Black — are a series of enigmatic reflections on this double meaning, evoking characters from Turkish theater, Armenian and Greek Orthodox history (though the names are so idiosyncratic as to be unfindable; I think something has gone wrong either in the poetry or in Nemet-Nejat’s interpretation), and Ottoman and Middle Eastern history.

the result is something that is difficult to fully grasp, and I suspect they probably land better a) in Turkish and/or b) for Turkish readers. as it was, reading them in English, the imagery just felt a bit less cohesive than A Blind Cat Black.

nonetheless, I would definitely read more of his poetry if it were available in English.

moods: dark, lighthearted, horny, mysterious


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