Y U N U S EMRE: The Wandering Fool/Sufi Poems of a Thirteenth-century Turkish Dervish
Translated from Turkish by Edouard Roditi
BY V IR G IN IA TAYLOR-SAÇLIOLU
If the title of this slender volume brings to mind “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by W.B. Yeats, reading the verses makes one wish that Edouard Roditi had tried to emulate a style closer to that of Yeats.
Yunus Emre, who died in 1320/21, was a medieval Turkish poet and Sufi (Islamic mystic). His verses are not only remote in time, but are also alien to the outlook of most people in the Western world today. Nonetheless, with a certain “suspension of disbelief’ and a sympathetic translation, they are as accessible as those of his European counterparts.
Roditi has undertaken to produce what he calls “as exact a translation of Yunus Emre as possible though in a form that might still suggest spontaneous utterance”. Roditi prefaces his intention with a disclaimer of any attempt to reproduce verse-schemes or rhymes.
When so few pieces of Turkish literature have been translated into English, one hesitates to be too critical when a new one appears. But Roditi’s claim to exactness invites us at least to check the accuracy of his translations. For example, rendering “bağrı başlı” (literally “his breast wounded”) as “head lowered” is hardly exact.
The word “baş”, which means “head”, also meant “wound” in the 13th century. But this translation of a single word aside, one wonders how Roditi construed the grammar since “bağrı" is a possessive noun and “baş" has the “It” suffix for “with” attached to it.
But more than accuracy, what one misses in Roditi’s translations are the rhythm and pace in natural English diction.
The translations are awkward and
unnatural and do not strike a responsive chord in the reader. Neither do they convey the immediacy of Emre’s straightforward language and unexpected images.
Sometimes the choice of words, while not completely wrong, creates a peculiar impression. For example, in Turkish one is “yanayana", or, literally, burning, bum inğ’ with love. But does one actually become “red hot” as Roditi says time after time?
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{A simple comparison of Roditi’s translation of one of Emre’s best known verses with a translation by Talat Halman is a good example of this. The poem begins:
Is there anywhere here a stranger like my poor self, head lowered and eyes in tears, a stranger like my poor self?
Compare this with Halman’s more flowing rendition:
I wonder, is anyone here A stranger so forlorn as I?
His heart wounded, his eyes tearful — A stranger so forlorn as I?
The word “forlorn” seems perfect for evoking the intended image, whereas “my poor self’ seems inappropriately self- pitying. Furthermore, it is in the third line of this particular poem that the mistranslation referred to above occurs.
The “wandering fool” (of the title and poem five) is Roditi’s translation of the Arabic Medjnun, meaning “madman” or “fool”. Medjnun, explained in the lengthy essay at the back of the book, is a character from the 12th-century narrative poem, Ley la and Medjnun, about a pair of lovers who are separated which results in Medjnun’s going “mad” and wandering in the wilderness. In mystic parlance, the name subsequently became a metaphor for someone “mad” with love of Allah.
Considering that Emre’s Divan, or collected poems, includes about 350 poems (a fact not mentioned by Roditi), it would have been nice to have had some explanation of Roditi’s choice. Did he find these 20 especially relevant to our times?
Also, one would like to know what text (presumably he did not work from original manuscripts) Roditi used. Despite the book’s subtitle, I am left with the impression that he made his translations
from the French translations of Giizin Dino, whose biographical note about the poet, translated from the French, provides the foreword.
The foreword and the concluding essay, “Western or Eastern Themes in the Poetry of Yunus Emre”, are the more substantial parts of the book. Both try to put Emre into the broader context of his time and place and the general world of mystic belief, both Western and Eastern. The foreword, for example, describes political turmoil in 14th- century Anatolia and the myriad heterodox sects which sprang up in the resulting climate of insecurity.
Roditi is more ambitious in the essay and points out the need for a study of medieval Eastern literature comparable to E.R. Curtius’s exhaustive schorlarly work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. A comparatist himself, Roditi draws on his extensive acquaintance with many literatures — from Byzantine Greek poetry and the “graveyard” school of late 18th- to early 19th-century England, to Jewish mysticism, Shakespeare and Donne — to familiarise the reader with Emre’s outlook. What he fails to do in the translations, he does much more successfully here.
Readers who wish to delve more deeply into Turkish mystic and other poetry are referred to The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, edited by Nermin Menemencioglu with the collaboration of Fahir Iz, published in 1978. Although this anthology contains only eight poems by Emre, they have been translated by three different translators which gives the reader a taste of other ways of rendering the poet into English. The verses of other mystical poets, such as Pir Sultan Abdal, are also included.
Another book on Emre, now available only in libraries, is The Humanist Poetry of
Yunus Emre (Publications of the RCD Cultural Institute No. 39), by Talat Halman. It contains translations of 40 poems, prefaced by an insightful essay, “Yunus Emre’s Humanism”.
Nowadays, when it is mainly the more fanatic Muslims who are getting coverage in the West owing to the Salman Rushdie affair, Halman’s essay is especially instructive for showing that there is a basic religious tolerance in Islam. □
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