I have read

Orhan Pamuk, Beyaz Kale / The White Castle (1985), Benim Adım Kırmızı / My Name is Red (1998), Kar / Snow (2002)

Vertical Divider

I have written

... nothing ...

Vertical Divider

Gazali'nin aynası

Her şeyini bildiğimiz Batı
​Hiçbir şeyimizi bilmezken

​
Temellük
in: Murathan Mungan, Dağ, Istanbul Metis Yayınları, 2007, p. 127

While the West, of which we know all,
​knows nothing of us


Appropriation
in: Aeolian Visions/Versions. Modern Classics and New Writing from Turkey, Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, Amy Spranger (eds.), London, Milet Publishing, 2014, p. 133; (trans. Arzu Eker Roditakis and Ruth Christie).
​

It is a beautiful, tender language that charms me, and that I once intended to learn (yes, also this one). Connected to the horizon of my speech through some threads of Arabic made invisible by deliberate reforms a few decades ago. 
I've read Orhan Pamuk just like everyone else. I have perhaps a dozen of Turkish novels in Polish and English versions in my Multilingual Library; some of them brought from Turkey as souvenirs. But what I've heard in Leiden is that Turkish novels are not half as good as Turkish poetry. I can easily believe this. No book, on the other hand, can render the sound of it, unless one day I learn how to read it aloud for myself.
Phonetically, the language makes impression of fluidity; it sounds natural and easy to speak. At the same time, it makes an impression of rich texture, with its inaudible ğ's and aspired T's; sounds tender with its ç's and c's. Makes a great choice of consonants, none of them alien or unpronounceable to me. 
And I'm really not sure if this verse applies to me:

For the roads of the East that are not oriental
there are no passages in the West, with its confusion
of parts: the History atlas, emblems
of the soul, inaccurate scales, broken compass, blind lighthouse, difference in mentality
points of view, chain of continuity, units of currency, kinds of measuring, wounded
consciousness, eclipse of reason, Plato's cave, Gazali's mirror,
an empire of signs and images

Even if I'm not really sure what a Gazali's mirror might be. Did he mean that little Fürstenspiegel that al-Ghazali wrote for some unknown Seljuq prince?


​
Turkish Literature Night, Universiteit Leiden, 30.04.2019 

Istanbul

Hagia Sophia

The cistern 

The search of Sinan and other pious peregrinations

Topkapı Palace

Konya

Alaeddin Keykubat mosque

Ephesus

Pamukkale

Hierapolis of Phrygia