Introduction for Murat Nemet-Nejat, Bowery Poetry Club, 11/1/2003
Poet, translator, and essayist Murat Nemet-Nejat is the author of
The Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies; I, Orhan Veli; The Bridge; State of the Union; and The Peripheral Space of Photography
In his anthology of translations from the Turkish, forthcoming from Talisman, he introduces the concept of eda. Eda is variously defined therein as
a continuum, a psychic essence, a dialectic which is an arabesque
the distance of a translation from its host language
the play of ideas through the body of Turkish
not just the poetics of Turkish poetry in the 20th century, but the extension of the language itself, the flowering of its inherent potentials
the alien other
the trajectory, poetics of a trip on a map
Eda emerges out of the inherent qualities of the Turkish language, which, unlike English, is agglutinative. As Murat writes, Turkish has,
” total syntactical flexibility. Words in a sentence can be arranged in any permutable order, each sounding natural.
The underlying syntactical principle is not logic, but emphasis: a movement of the speaker’s or writer’s affections. Thinking, speaking in Turkish is a peculiarly visceral activity, a record of thought emerging.”
It is only a small leap, then, to see the principle of eda at work not just in Turkish but in innovative English poetries of this century and the last, whether in “spontaneous bop prosody” or “the continuous present,” in the work of poets like Coolidge, MacLow, and Mayer, and probably that of just about everyone in this room.
If Murat is linguistically predisposed to liberate English from its post-enlightenment rationalism and constrictive syntax, it is not only because he is a Turkish speaker, but because the very fact of his identity is eda itself. His essay “Questions of Accent”, which you can find online, is essential reading. In it, he asserts that all poetry written in English is written in a non-native language., because, “The American poem (and poet) is always trapped in the space between words, in the crack between his/her vision and the language he/she is using, in the discontinuity (as opposed to cultural unity) between the self and his/her language.”
The essay opens with this bit of autobiography, or edabiography:
I am not Turkish. I am Jewish. In the fifties most Jews in Turkey were Sephardim and spoke Ladino Spanish. But I am not a Sephardi; I am a Persian Jew. My parents had moved to Istanbul on business, and I was born there in a Jewish neighborhood. But I learnt no Ladino, barely understood it. Jewish kids in the neighborhood thought I was Moslem, an outsider. At home, my parents spoke Persian with each other, which also I barely understood. Brothers among ourselves spoke Turkish. My mother spoke in an immigrant’s broken Turkish to me (my father barely spoke to me at all). Turkish became my mother tongue. I spoke Turkish in the street. I was, linguistically, most comfortable with other Turks, who mostly despised Jews. My speech became almost Turkish. Loving a language not completely my own was my first act as a Jew. And, despite my almost accentless speech, my first act of rebellion was to tell my Turkish friends I was not one of them. I was a Jew.
He goes on to describe his relationship to English as an American immigrant (who has, I hasten to add, lived in this country longer than I have). Lifelong an interstitial dweller (as historically we Jews have always been), he embodies “the distance of an individual speaker from his host language.” In his playful, dramatic, profound writing, we see more evidence of eda: “the play of ideas through the body of the poet,” “the flowering of the possibilities of total syntactical flexibility,” and “the poetics of a trip on a map of consciousness.”
