YILDIZ MORAN
Photographer

Deniz Türker

Yıldız Moran: Kindness of the Shadow

Exhibition Catalogue

Galeri Nev

12 November 2022

 

Yıldız Moran and the Archive of Rejection 

 

This text is the skeleton of a Moran biography in the works.(I) In the most straightforward of ways, it is an attempt to write out the on-going sentimentality attached to her historiography by contextualizing episodes in the artist’s photographic practice through the provisions of her own archives. No matter how personal therefore presumed to be most revealing about her personhood these archives are—and indeed they were retained by Moran and later meticulously and faithfully maintained by her son, Olgun Arun—they, too, are incomplete: vintage prints occasionally do not find their corresponding negative imprints, or provocative letters from friends and acquaintances naturally only imply Moran’s responses and solicitations. Regardless of missing negatives and various now-lost photo-centric projects that the artist undertook, the photographic archive, the wondrous products of her active looking, is rich and bewildering. The taxonomic tone of the extant textual archive—that of letters, newspaper clippings on her exhibitions during her lifetime, postcards, and published photographs—is one of a defiant preservation of artistic will. After all, Moran selected items she wanted to keep over others; she curated her own archival representation. It is easy to read in them a collated set of rejections (from global exhibitions, for instance) or reviews badly misrepresenting her work (unsurprisingly here from male critics); the extant scholarship has built on this imagined and compounded sob-story, and has invented a sentimental narrative of commercial failure and giving up.

What is defiant in Moran’s habit of keeping an archive of rejections and misinterpretations is her trust in her own artistry, the support she garnered from those that understood and encouraged her talent, her contestations with her technique (what was a universal subject, she often pondered) as well as her photographic equipment and materials (always very expensive and hard to obtain in postwar Turkey).

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Lamenting what she could have done had she not put away her camera is not a position that I intend to prolong here, but rather highlight from within the archive what she was constantly negotiating as an artist. The extant scholarship also presents her as a woman artist striving and failing alone. On the contrary, Moran’s personal and professional worlds were crowded. She sought company, but most reflective of her character, she was profoundly sought after as a friend, mentor, confidante, and mother; the epistolary segment of her archive is triumphant in exposing especially that.

 

I           A version of this catalogue text was presented as gallery talk on the closing date, December 12, 2022, of the first Galeri Nev exhibition on

            Yıldız Moran’s photographs, entitled Kindness of the Shadow (Gölgenin Nezaketi).

 

 

FAMILY

 

One of the family photographs in the archive is singularly telling about Moran’s formation. A little girl -probably her older sister İnci- with an oversized bow on her head and a toy black cat on her lap sits on a divan below a large commemorative, impressionist portrait of Yusuf Akçura (d. 1935), the early-Republic’s erstwhile pan-Turkist ideologue, who happened to be the brother-in-law of her mother, Nemide. Nemide would marry Ahmet Vahid Moran, a seasoned bureaucrat with an Ottoman military school background, best known as the first Turkish-English lexicographer of the Turkish Republic. The exactitude with which Yıldız would later write in English, update her father’s widely used dictionary, and make ends meet as a professional translator all have to do with her father’s more than amateur interest in the world of words and structures of languages.

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This affluent family of intellectuals could easily make for a close study of Turkish Republic’s poster families. Nemide’s older sister Müfide (later Müfide Ferit Tek), was a French-trained physician and early- nationalist feminist, who was among the first to advocate the rights of Turkish womanhood. She also authored Turanist novels such as Aydemir (1918) in consultation with Yusuf Akçura, which was based on the strife of Turks living under Tsarist Russia—in many ways it was a fictionalized biography of Akçura himself. Müfide’s daughter and Yıldız’s cousin Emel Esin would become a renowned art historian, who left behind pioneering studies of pre-as well as post-Islamized Turkic art across Anatolia and Central Asia. While a pan-Turkish, pan-Turanist model constituted a large part of the table conversations of this illustrious extended family, a hermeneutic, universalized approach to art and its history was introduced to Yıldız by her uncle Mazhar Şevket İpşiroğlu, the philosopher of aesthetics and professor of art history at the Istanbul University. It was İpşiroğlu who “discovered” his teenage niece’s artistic inclinations (akin to his discovery story of his student and artist Yüksel Arslan), gifted her the first Rolleiflex camera, and took her along his quest to unearth Anatolian civilizations with a crew from the university. This crew also included Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, a multi-dimensional scholar, translator, film producer, and folklorist, who would also bring in Azra Erhat, Cevat Şakir, Yavuz Abadan and others into Moran’s world.

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To fully understand Yıldız’s particular photographic sensibilities, especially when she cast her glance at Anatolian subjects, one needs to weave in the Turanists, Turkish nationalists, and Hegelian (and Heidegerrian) aesthetes that surrounded her, aided and guided her eye.

 

 

WOMEN

 

Moran family ephemera contains statuesque wedding photographs of Nemide and Ahmet Vahid, both together and separate, which were taken by Carl Vandyk, the German society photographer of interwar England. Like a modern Caryatid, Nemide is in profile view donning the 20s trademark bob, against a dark backdrop. (Vahid, entering his second marriage and much older than his bride, wears the low astrakhan hat associated with Kemalist intellectuals.) There is another, stranger photograph of Nemide from 1928, seated in her home in Izmir, where she is looking at the camera, no smiles, while holding a female doll.

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Photographs had an important place in the Moran household because they commemorated important occasions. With experience throughout her life as a photographic subject, in her later years, Nemide wanted to support her daughter’s chosen profession by offering her reflections on Yıldız’s photographic trials in family portraiture. In a letter to her daughter in London, Nemide offers her critique on a batch of photographs of the two older Moran siblings, İnci and Tosun. Nemide reads through these photographs her uncensored view on why her children turned out the way they did. The letter is both loving and cruel, one that wavers between encouragement of her daughter’s art and disappointment over its early results. Nemide is particularly irked by İnci’s indiscrete poses (“The complete bust with her head extremely high”), chides Yıldız for being easily manipulated by her older sister— the sitter’s disconcerting badinage would cause the photographer to lose control over her subject, which John Vickers, Yıldız’s one-time mentor and preeminent photographer of the Old Vic in London, also deeply abhorred.(II) When Yıldız’s internship in Vickers’s studio ended, Nemide needed proof from Vickers that her daughter was ready to start off on her own in Istanbul. The archive retains that letter from Vickers to Nemide written in Summer 1952 assuring her that “[Yıldız] could undertake this ambition which I understand would make her a pioneer in fine portraiture at home.” He added that if she “were to take as a place to live, a flat or premises with one room large enough to be treated as a studio, she could invite friends and acquittances to be photographed and thereby learn for herself those aspects of the work which must be personal and cannot be ‘taught’ in the ordinary way.”(III)

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Yıldız found just the place on 1955 in Beyoğlu, on Kallavi Sokak No:20 right above the tiny but bustling Maya Art Gallery, founded five years ago by Adalet Cimcoz, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu and Orhan Veli. She never had a chance to exhibit her work in Maya, which closed for good around the time of her move. The government- backed, vicious anti-Greek riots took place around the corner from her studio (about which she would leave behind a single photograph) around the time she started using it. Nevertheless, she followed Vickers’s advice and started to hone her skills in portraiture by hosting a steady stream of friends and acquittances in her studio; Istanbul’s incredibly close-knit network of public intellectuals sat in front of her camera; one- time movers and shakers of the mythologized gallery downstairs, humanist scholars, theater impresarios, musicians, and even politicians.

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She once said in an interview that the best portrait photographer was Yousuf Karsh (“the Canadian Karsh”), the Armenian artist who learned his trade under the Boston-based John Garo, an older Armenian émigré.(IV) Though Karsh is perhaps best known for this portraits of Winston Churchill, Moran’s portrait of the ceramic artist Füreya Koral in profile view on the pottery wheel, her hands in action, posing in front of an enormous window, is most reminiscent of Karsh’s 1956 portrait of Georgia O’Keefe. Karsh’s portrait of the American artist also presents the sitter in profile, the same sense of calm pervades the space, one hand is feeling the tree bark, in place of Koral’s clay.

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Moran wonderfully internalized the ways in which her sitters wanted to be photographed. Her better known Adalet Cimcoz series is exemplary of the way she saw her portraits as character studies in a theater’s pre-performance photo-call. Vickers’s mentorship was key in unpacking the tactics in operation in her own Istanbul studio. “A photo-call is a very special show… with an audience of two, you and your camera,” advises Vickers in one of his many articles on photographing theater performers and performances.(V) When Moran made portrait studies of her mother in her later years, she presented Nemide exactly the way in which she was photographed by Vandyk, in profile and stoic, like a cameo.

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In Moran’s collection of letters, the most intimate ones are from her friend Sue Cook (later Fairfield), an impassioned woman of Javanese and Maltese heritage (with both professional and familial links to Delhi as an only recently collapsed British Raj) from their time living in the same Bloomsbury boarding house. Sue lavishes details on affairs, on love, lovers, polygamy, marriage, morality, and divorce, on the mundanity of her in-laws, on discontentment with work, on uncensored updates about mutual friends, on Moran’s devoted friendship, on race (that of being “Asiatic” as opposed to “Western”).

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Moran’s portraits of Sue are deliberate opposites of her mother’s photographic representations with the intensity of Sue’s frontal pose, the directness of her gaze, and frankness of her smile. Women like Sue encouraged Moran to be boldly playful in her photographs, legs with balloons discussed below is one such example. What else but Moran’s smart friskiness engender a set of undeniably erotic, water-drenched photographs of (male) sculptural Roman fountains titled “Nietzsche also liked Roman fountains.”

 

II          John Vickers, “Photography in the Amateur Theatre,” Drama 17 (Summer, 1950), 20.

III        John Vickers to Nemide Moran, June 24, 1952.

IV         Yüksel Söylemez, “San’at aleminde: Kapanmıyacak Bir Sergi,” Son Saat, March 6, 1955, 4.

V          Vickers, “Photography in the Amateur Theatre,” 20.

 

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BORDERS

 

Within a decade of the Turkish Republic’s founding, Anatolia as the newly congealed geography of the nascent state was traversed, documented, historicized, collected, and depicted both by state agents, as well as adventurous individuals, local and foreign (Albert Gabriel and Josephine Powell, to cite a few). Perhaps the most well-known of the Anatolian discoveries were undertaken by artists, financed by the state under banner of “Country Tours” (yurt gezileri) between 1933-1937.(VI) Every year approximately ten, mostly male artists from the state’s fine arts academies, were sent to predesignated regions to represent the peoples, geographies, and sites of the nation. Their works would then constitute the state museum collections and be exhibited to inhabitants of big cities. Ideologically, this initiative coalesced with the founding of village educational institutes (köy enstitüleri) as well as the Herculean literary translation project to make global literature, including but not limited to Greco-Roman literature which spoke directly to segments of the Anatolian heritage, accessible to a much larger swathe of Turkish citizenry. While much has been written to politicize the history of these state-endorsed developmental / civilizational projects, each of these interlinked initiatives have not been fully intellectualized.

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Orhan Burian (d. 1953), a young, enterprising, and prolific scholar of English and one of the first to formulate the notion of a national humanism in his journal Ufuklar (Horizons, later New Horizons), would undertake solo trips to various parts of the country, sketch and write about them. These unrehearsed trips found their corollary in Cevat Şakir’s blue voyages along with his friends, loosely constituting a group called the Anatolian Humanists. They, too, relayed their Aegean experiences on the pages of Burian’s journal. Principally a literary scholar (though a tireless translator of plays of Muhsin Ertuğrul’s productions), Burian was thinking discursively about the fictional trend of writing village novels. He called the neo-pioneerism that he identified in the way that urban writers of the eastern United States were handling subjects and sites in the American West sınır edebiyatı (“border literature”).(VII) He then suggested that the speed and fury with which Anatolia’s past and present was now queried, not only by novelists, but geographers, art historians, artists, bards, and physicians, was means of accumulating a Turkish border literature in its own right.

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In the trajectory of organized documentary trips across Turkey, those undertaken in the 50s by İpşiroğlu, Eyüboğlu, their wonderful cameraman Aziz Albek, occasionally Adnan Benk (French literature professor and critic) and Ruhi Su (composer), various foreign collaborators, and a very young Yıldız, became the cross-disciplinary and multimedia examples of Burian’s border literature. Istanbul University’s Faculty of Arts and Letters facilitated these trips, which resulted in a variety of scholarly publications as well as internationally renowned documentaries including but not limited to Hitit Güneşi (“The Hitite Sun,” 1956), Ahtamar (1959), and Karanlıktaki Renkler (“Colors in the Dark,” 1959). The team was also in the process of setting up a film institute within the university, which would continue to make similar documentary shorts on the many “civilizations” of Anatolia.(VIII) Moran traveled far and wide and photographed prolifically alongside this group and ventured into spaces that had seen incomprehensible violence in recent history, among them Van, and Kars. She photographed monuments in ruin, landscapes of sublime and savage beauty, women and children in their most intimate domestic settings, raffia and felt, wild flora, quotidian objects, and archaeological fragments with intention to exhibit, but also to contribute to scholarly volumes on Turkey. Inspired by the potential of the moving image and her experiences with Albek and others, Moran, in her exhibition-related interviews throughout the 50s, was also signaling her desire to become a film producer. Her bookshelves retain books from the time on movie production. Moran’s border visions require intense analysis, but for now it should suffice to argue that she was one of the pioneering photographers of the Anatolian humanist project.

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After Moran had developed a set of photographs from her travels with the Istanbul University group, she started exhibiting her new work in Istanbul and Ankara. She knew that her Anatolian border visions merited audiences in the United States. With self-determination, she penned a letter to Edward Steichen, the Director of Photography at MoMA, enclosing a portfolio of “material on Turkey, Turkish people and their way of life.”(IX) Her cousin Emel Esin, whose husband was a part of the UN diplomatic mission at the time and in New York, would ensure that Streichen saw the photographs. Moran wanted Steichen to give “authoritative and constructive criticism of [her] work,” especially because he was now globally renowned for his 1955 exhibition, entitled, The Family of Man, which claimed to have instigated postwar humanistic photographic practices to reconnect mankind through representations from life to death across the world. After about eight months, on January 1959, Steichen responded with a brief, occasionally misspelled, discouraging letter:

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While these photographs are technically and pictorially interesting, they are too much in the standard pattern of a great mass of present day photography to warrent [sic] an exhibition. Individually, as works of art, they do not achieve museum standards in so far as they do not add anything to the stature of photography as an art medium.

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In addition to the technical merits that they have, they would require a deeper more penetrating understanding of the land and the people of Turkey.

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…Your work reveals talent and interest, but you have a long hard hard road ahead of you to reach achievement.(X)

 

The letter is presumptive about many things, the most frustratingly opaque one being Steichen suggesting there were certain conditions, which made up “the stature of photography as an art medium.” He deemed Moran too much of an amateur to share them, when she had asked him for constructive feedback. Then again, he had included only a handful of women photographers, all American, to his 1955 exhibition. If he found a little too much historical and national specificity in Moran’s photographs, it was the lack thereof that Barthes, Berger, and Sekula’s based their eventual denouncement of The Family of Man as populist ethnography, and aesthetic colonialism. Moran, the photographer, held course, and left behind a panoramic archive of Cold War Turkey.(XI)

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VI         Among many publications on these trips, see Amelie Edgü, Yurt Gezileri ve Yurt Resimleri (Istanbul: Milli Reasürans, 1998);

            Burcu Pelvanoğlu, “Cumhuriyet İdeolojisi ve Yurt Gezileri,” Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 5 (2006): 155-163.

VII        Orhan Burian, “Ozanlarımız Üstüne” (On Our Bards), in his posthumous anthology of essays, Denemeler, Eleştiriler

            (Istanbul: Çan Yayınları, 1964), 83-88.

VIII       For an accomplished overview of Istanbul University’s Film Center and its documentaries, see Muhammet Oytun Elacmaz,

            “Imaginations of the Anatolian Landscape: The Films of Sabahattin Eyüboğlu,” Master’s thesis, Sabancı University, 2020; also see,

            Cenk Demirkıran, Filmlerle Anadolu Destanı Yazmak (Istanbul: Derin Yayınları, 2011).

IX         Yıldız Moran to Edward Steichen, July 25, 1958.

X          Edward Steichen to Yıldız Moran, 8 January 1959.

XI         Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 100-102; Allan Sekula,

             “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 60, no: 2 (1981): 220-222.

 

 

LEGS

 

The January 1957 issue of Yenilik (Novelty), one of the many monthly “ideas and art” journals of Turkey’s 50s, chose Moran’s photograph of the legs of a ballerina on pointe with balloons as props. For today’s viewer, it is not an easy image as it deliberately crops the woman’s body, implying a fetish so incredibly normalized for the period. The composition mimics a magazine ad but without signaling what in the photograph is exactly on sale: slippers? When Moran took this photograph and analogous others as a photography student in London, she was likely practicing how best to achieve different textures, the satin of the slippers against the rubbery sheen of the balloons, the fishnets standing in for crosshatchings in a painting, versions of which she attempted with paper bats on netting in earlier photographs. She was certainly friends with her models, there was banter in the studio and bonding over cigarettes, cards, peanuts and records.

However, as a journal cover in 1957, the columnar legs were indexing the adjacent column headlining the male artists of the era: Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (a modernist-nationalist “bard” not a mere poet, as Burian calls him)(XII), Fikret Ürgüp (psychiatrist, writer, friend to Sait Faik Abasıyanık), Özdemir Asaf (poet, Moran’s lover), Ara Güler (preeminent photojournalist) among others. There is a lot to be said about a journal that occasionally makes room for women artists choosing this from among Moran’s diverse selection of photographs in 1957—Ara Güler’s portraits of Reşat Nuri Güntekin and Cemal Ekrem Tolu, two towering writers indicate the circle of intellectual belonging for this journal. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek’s overtly sexual, blatantly voyeuristic eulogy to women’s legs—a poem rescinded by the poet himself after his Islamist turn but one straddling an easy Romantic-Surrealist line from Venus de Milo to 50s pin-ups—is enough to imagine what Moran’s photograph awakened in the journal’s contributors and readers. Kısakürek had written it for Mustafa Şekib Tunç (d. 1958), a Freud-Bergson- (William) James fan, translator, and philosopher. I am certain the hand-off from poet to philosopher was unoriginal in its androcentric eroticism. The critics of Moran’s Istanbul and Ankara exhibitions, who urged her to take photographs of society beauties, newspapers that put Moran’s photographs of Svetlana Kassasinova (the dancer and owner of the cropped legs) below the masthead, were participants of the same representational world order of Kısakürek and Tunç.

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The powerful feminist critiques that underlie letters from Moran’s girlfriends are filled with a collective awareness of and absolute resistance to being objectified. How can one not see the colossal woman’s legs spread-eagled over one of Moran’s subversive Cappadocia landscapes, a wagon as outline of her genitalia, and the tiny male peasant running behind the wagon and into the cavernous space of the two hills. Moreover, so many of her Anatolian photographs of women are about consent: women either let her in to their domestic worlds, have their backs turned, or utilize their veils to control what is revealed of their bodies.(XIII) She was also adamant about getting verbal or written consent from people she wanted to photograph.(XIV) There are other routes to understanding Moran’s intent, not necessarily in taking these photographs at the first instance, but reproducing them and allowing their journalistic circulation. The same sense of subversion with which she shoots portraits of women with their tongues out is at play here. Moran knew the unnerving quality of exposed legs: the balloons if popped would prompt the idle male onlooker into self- awareness: stop staring!

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Adalet Cimcoz, too, seemed to fixate on images of cropped legs. When writing a posthumous portrait of Cimcoz, Bilge Karasu, a younger generation writer who was like many others intoxicated by Cimcoz’s gender and orientation-defying charisma, would recall that whenever she sent him a new translation (from the anonymous B. Traven, or Ephraim Kishon) she would wrap these gifts up on German or French magazine pages of the late-60s with pop-art imagery of women’s legs bursting out of a bitten apple!(XV) Karasu considered these images as historically locatable somewhere in between Joseph Losey’s Harold Pinter film adaptations in the late-50s and 60s and the savagely poppy paintings of mutilated female bodies in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971). Moran’s complex photographic imaginary is certainly positioned closer to Cimcoz’s layered surrealist connotations than the blandly and superficially motivated male gaze instrumentalized by Kısakürek for Tunç. One of Cimcoz’s closest intellectual companions was Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, the prolific historian of literature and art, a disgruntled poet and an experimental writer of short stories. Burian would signal out Tanpınar’s short story “Dreams of Abdullah Efendi” (1943), a sequence of nightmares that this timid efendi goes through in struggling to come to terms with his subconscious, his sexuality, and the impossibility of observing himself fully from the outside as an outsider.(XVI) It is the exposed legs of a woman which he observes at a restaurant that triggers the fracturing of his selfhood. Encounters between Cimcoz and Tanpınar, between Cimcoz as mentor and Moran, the semiotics of women’s bodies in the 50s, Freud, psychoanalysis, friendships with Koptagel that delight in foregrounding the subconscious are interlinked contexts in which Moran’s photographs are situated, not on covers of monthly journals.

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Moran did not lock away her camera in a single decisive act as has been suggested in the repeated biographical interjections of children interfering with her profession. An unresolved infection of the veins on her legs that was the source of her inability to continue her practice. She might have naturally veered towards taking images of cropped legs, not only of ballet dancers, but little girls feet leading to epigraphic stones along the Carian routes. [Page 68] The legs that carried her through the multiple trips in Anatolia and ones that required her to remain upright and in motion in her portrait studio were not cooperating. One of a handful of letters that are by her—she must have kept a copy for her records—she pleads an American medical supply company for larger gauzes of a kind that seem to alleviate her ulcers: “I am 46, mother of three boys aged 12, 15 and 16 and a photographer by profession. I can hardly walk 200 yards.”(XVII) Even before then, a letter to a close friend, discloses that she is waiting for the construction of their family home in Çamlıca—never realized—to return to photography, because it would allow her boys to run around the garden and give her space to set up her developing room.(XVIII)

 

XII        Orhan Burian, “Ozanlarımız Üstüne” (On Our Bards), in Denemeler, Eleştiriler, 83-88.

XIII       Ayten Tartici, “Turkey’s Photography Doyenne,” New York Review of Books (March 9, 2019),

             https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/09/turkeys- photography-doyenne/ (accessed April 5, 2023).

XIV       “Bir Konuğumuz Var: Türkiye’nin İlk Kadın Fotoğrafçısı Yıldız Moran,” Ses Dergisi, June 26, 1983, 37.

XV        Bilge Karasu, “Bendeki Adalet Cimcoz,” Öteki Metinler (Istanbul: Metis, 1999), 137.

XVI       Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, “Abdullah Efendi’nin Rüyaları,” Hikâyeler (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 2017), 11-51.

XVII      Yıldız Moran to Duke Laboratories, Inc., January 30, 1979.

XVIII     Yıldız’s biographical entry is in Özdemir Asaf, To Go To (Istanbul: Sanat Basımevi, 1964), 7.

 

 

TRANSLATIONS

 

In the Turkish cultural imaginary, Moran’s artistry is often inevitably paired with her marriage to Özdemir Asaf (né Halit Özdemir Arun), one of the Francophile doyennes of abstract modernist poetry. During Moran’s time as an active photographer, though they never collaborated, their works would appear alongside one another on pages of culture journals like the Yenilik. Their professional networks knew about their semi- clandestine, premarital romance and made room for their partnership, at least, on print.

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When Moran became a professional English-Turkish translator—like many multilingual women in Turkey of her generation, the job was fairly gendered—when her words rather than her photographs took flight in the 60s, she began to collaborate with Asaf. In order to provide for her family, she translated her husband’s poems into English, which attented to his international reputation; much later she also worked for a trading company, helming all its English correspondences. For Asaf’s first poetry collection, Dünya Kaçtı Gözüme (1955), which she would translate to To Go To (1964), she first handwrote her translations on paper, but as if they were already placed on a printed book page. She would go through multiple iterations, because she needed to approximate in English the precision and restraint with which Asaf chose his Turkish words. In the pithy biography of her husband at the book’s introduction, Moran wrote:

 

His use of the Turkish language helps the stimulation in his form and content, in that he achieves great field of expression with very few words.

Özdemir Asaf’s form is as condensed as his content.(XIX)

 

Now let’s rewind the clock. In 1955, Adnan Benk, one of a handful of academics who dedicated themselves to the development of robust literary criticism in the new republic, would pen a scathing formalist review of the first poem (entitled “Yakın”) of Dünya Kaçtı Gözüme.(XX)

 

YAKIN

 

Bir ışık düşerse üstüne basma.

Daha yakınlaşır, korkarsın.

Bir leke, silmeye-gör

Leke kalır, sen çıkarsın.

 

Bir gölge, nereye gider.

Gözlerince gider, bakarsın.

Bakarsın girer gözlerinden.

Leke onun peşinden, bakarsın.

 

Bir ışık düşerse üstüne basma,

Gözlerine basarsın.

 

Asaf structures the poem on the interplay of light, a mark, shadow and eyes. Benk identifies the poem’s elemental subjects, which he calls the poet’s data (“şairin verisi”), and reads the light-eye likeness as one of now cliched poetic convention. He expends a few paragraphs on the poet’s choice of the verb basmak (to step on), which begins and ends the poem, and denies its place in the poem’s meaning making. He accuses Asaf of misguiding his reader by stringing along words as beats over words as signs of meaning. It is a scathing review but one that deliberately matches the poem’s succinct form, taking each word, phrase and imperative for what it implies.

Below is how Moran translates the poem, including more notational punctuations, a deliberate and singular capitalization (‘Fright’ as a warning sign like the balloons in her photographs), and the elegant choice of “whilst” for the -ince (when) suffix.

 

CLOSE

 

If a light falls don’t step on it.

It gets nearer, you’d enter Fright.

A mark, try rubbing out,

The mark remains, you’d get out.

 

A shadow, where does it lead;

It leads whilst your eyes, you’d look.

You’d look to see it enter through your eyes

Followed by the mark, you’d look.

 

If a light falls don’t step on it,

You’d step on your eyes.

 

The translator recovers meanings that were lost to Benk in its Turkish original. The poem is crisper because she knows the material of language, but she is also intimately familiar with ‘the poet’s data’ and an expert manipulator of them: light as the fickle companion to the photographer, marks that Moran would not want while developing a photograph, shadows which were her favorite subjects (she had titled one of her photographs “Kindness of the Shadow”), and her eyes through which all of these are filtered. Perhaps basmak too indicated the act of developing a photograph and doubled the meaning of the verb that so elided Benk. There is every reason to believe that throughout their courtship, Asaf observed Moran in her studio, and discussed photographic technique. (When the first issue of Asaf’s book was out, Moran took a portrait photograph of her sister-in-law Gülen, holding it.) If that is evidence of quiet collaboration, Moran’s translation of Asaf’s transference of her practice into his, is a powerfully discreet closure, but not an ending to her artistry: if not in photographs, then words.

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XIX             Adnan Benk, “Özdemir Asaf’ın Şiir Kitabı: Dünya Kaçtı Gözüme,” Çağdaş Eleştiri: Söyleşiler Yazılar (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2001), 491-495.

XX             On Benk’s centrality to the cultural scene of 50s Turkey, see Fatih Altuğ, “Adnan Benk’’in Eleştiri Eylemi” (Adnan Benk’s Act of Criticism),

                  Punctum (7/22), https://www.punctumdergi.com/post/adnan-benk-in-elestiri- eylemi_fatih-altug (accessed April 5, 2023.​​

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