Chapter 11 "Istanbul" Four lonely and sad writers

I knew very little about them as a child.The one I know best is the great fat poet Yahaya: his poems are famous all over the country, and I have read a few of them. — I was intrigued by the diagrams of Ottoman torture that he attached to the article.I knew each of them by name by the time I was ten, because my father had books of them in his study, but my developing perception of Istanbul had not yet been influenced by them.When I was born, all four were healthy and lived within a half-hour walk of my house.By the time I was ten, all but one were dead, and I never saw any of them in person. Later, when I recreated the Istanbul of my childhood in black and white in my mind, the elements that made up Istanbul from the pen of these writers were all intertwined, and it was impossible to think about Istanbul, or even my own, without considering all four of them. istanbul.When I was thirty-five I dreamed for a while of writing a great novel in style, about Istanbul, and I liked to imagine these four writers roaming the streets and alleys where I had hung out as a child.For example, I knew that the fat poet used to dine at Avanti in Beyoglu, and my grandmother used to eat there once a week for a while, and the boss always came home with an unhappy complaint about the bad food.I like to imagine Kociu the historian passing by the window while the famous poet is having lunch, searching for material for the Istanbul Encyclopedia.The historian-journalist had a soft spot for teenage girls, so I imagined a young and lovely newsboy selling him a newspaper with an article by the novelist Tampina.I imagine that at the same time, the Bosporus Chronicle

Hisar, the white-gloved author of The Record — a tiny man with a seldom left home and a clean freak — is arguing with a butcher who didn’t wrap the offal he bought for his cats in clean newspaper.I imagined my four heroes standing on the same street corner at the same moment, walking the same alley in the same storm, passing each other. I would open the famous Croatian insurance map of Pevitić for the Beyoglu-Taksim-Cihag-Galata region and look at every street and every building my heroes passed, if Failing to remember, I fantasized about the details of every florist, café, pudding shop, tavern they might have been in.I imagine the smell of food in the store, the foul language, smoke and alcohol in the tavern, the crumpled newspapers in the cafe, the posters on the wall, the street vendors, a certain apartment building near Taksim Square (now demolished) A string of news headline letters on the top of the building—these are the common points of reference for my heroes.Whenever I think of these writers at the same time, I think that the identity of a city is not only in its topography or architecture, but in the fact that its residents have lived in the same street for fifty years—as I did—and every chance encounter in memory , the sum of each memory, letter, color and image.At this time, I imagined that at some point in my childhood, I also happened to meet these four sad writers.

During my earliest wanderings with my mother in Taksim, I must have passed the novelist Tampina.He is the writer I feel closest to me.We used to go to the Hachette French bookstore in Tunnel, and so did he.The novelist (he was nicknamed "The Down and Out Kid") happened to live in a small room in the Narmanli Building across the street from the bookstore.When I was born, while the Pamuk Apartments were still under construction, we lived at the Ongaon Apartments in Ayaz Pasa, across the street from the Park Hotel, where Yaha Yaan, a mentor and friend of Tampina, spent his later years.When I lived across the street from the Park Hotel, did Tampina use to visit Yahya at the hotel in the early evening? Later on when we moved to Nishantashi, I may have passed them too because my mother used to go to the Park Hotel The pastry shop buys cakes. Hisar, the author of "Bosphorus Chronicle", often went to Beyoglu for shopping and dining, as did the famous historian Kochu.I may have brushed past them, too.

It's not that I don't know that I'm like a "groupie," knowing so much about the lives and movies of my beloved idols that I use them to fantasize about coincidences and chance encounters.But the poems, novels, stories, articles, chronicles, and encyclopedias of these four heroes, whom I will mention from time to time in this book, made me aware of the soul of the city in which I lived.These four melancholy writers draw strength from past and present, Or the tension between East and West as Westerners call it, so they taught me how to combine my love of modern art with Western literature and the culture of the city I live in.

These writers have all been fascinated at some point in their lives by the brilliance of Western (and French in particular) art and literature.The poet Yahya spent six years in Paris, deriving from the poems of Mallarme and Verlaine the concept of "pure poetry," which would later suit him in his search for a poetics of nationalism.Tempina, who revered Yaha Adam almost as a father, admired these poets as well as Valéry.And Hisar, like Yahya and Tampina, admired Gide most.Tempina learned how to describe landscapes with words from Gautier, another writer whom Yahya admired. The modern-Western approach of their own writings was animated by these writers' youthful—sometimes almost childlike—admiration of French literature and Western culture.They wanted to write like the French, there is no doubt about it.But a part of them also knows that if they can write exactly like Westerners, they will not be as unique as the Western writers they admire.Because they learned from French culture and modern French literature that a great work must be unique, authentic, and faithful.These writers were troubled by the tension between these two imperatives—conforming to the West while remaining authentic—and this unease can be heard in their early works.

They also learned something else from writers like Gautier and Mallarmé, the concept of "art for art's sake" or "pure poetry," which helped them strive for authenticity and originality.Other poets and novelists of their generation were also fascinated by French writers, but what they learned from them was not the value of the work itself, but the value of writing.This is also dangerous, because it leads the writer either into didactic literature or into the chaos of politics.But writers of the latter kind play with the ideals gleaned from Hugo and Zola, while writers like Yahaya, Tempina, and Hisar ask themselves how to draw ideas from Verlaine, Mallarme, and Proust. benefit from.Such pursuits were largely constrained by domestic politics—their youth had witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, after which Turkey seemed destined to become a Western colony, and then the age of republics and nationalism.

The aesthetics they learned in France taught them that in Turkey they would never be able to achieve the same forceful and authentic narrative style as Mallarme or Proust.But after careful consideration, they found an important and authentic theme: the great empire in which they were born was in decline.Their deep knowledge of Ottoman civilization and its inevitable decline prevented them, like many of their contemporaries, from falling into the diluted nostalgia, simple historical pride, or malicious nationalism and communitarianism, which also became a part of the development of certain civilizations. basis of a poetics of the past.Istanbul, where they live, is a city full of ruins, but it is also their city.They discovered that they could find their voices by devoting themselves to sad poetry about loss and destruction.

In "The Philosophy of Creation," Poe follows the same dispassionate pattern as Coleridge, stating that his primary concern in writing "The Raven" was to create a certain "breath of melancholy." "I asked myself - of all the sad subjects, based on our general understanding of human beings, what is the saddest? It is obviously death." the center of the poem. The four writers with whom I passed so many times in my imaginative childhood never consciously followed Poe's logic, but they did believe that only by looking at the city's past and describing in words the melancholy stirred up Find your true voice.They look back at the old glory of Istanbul, their eyes fall on the dead beauty that collapsed by the roadside, they write about the ruins around them, and endow the past with a certain brilliant poetry.This eclectic vision, which I call the "sorrow of ruins," suited their nationalism to the oppressive situation of the time, freeing them from the overwhelming authoritarian edicts of their contemporaries who were equally interested in history.The reason we appreciate Nabokov's memoirs, rather than being dismayed by the fact that he came from an immaculately wealthy aristocratic family, is that he understands that the writer's voice is another language from another time: we always know that time has long since Gone, gone forever.The game of time and memory is so in keeping with the Bergsonian style of the times that, at least as far as the enjoyment of beauty is concerned, it can temporarily evoke the illusion that the past still exists.Using the same technique, our four melancholy writers bring back old Istanbul from its ruins.

Indeed, they describe the illusion as a game that combines pain and death with beauty.But their starting point is that the beauty of the past is gone. Hisar, mourning what he called "Bosphorus civilization," sometimes pauses (as if he had just thought of it) to say: "All civilizations are as ephemeral as the dead. Just as we are mortal, we And one has to accept that civilizations that come and go don’t come back.” These four writers are united by the lines they create with this realization and the melancholy that accompanies it. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Yahya and Tampina go in search of melancholy images of "Ottoman Turkey" Istanbul - with no precedent in Turkey, they follow in the footsteps of travelers from the West, prowling the ruins of impoverished urban areas Roaming - the population of Istanbul at that time was only half a million.By the end of the 1950s, when I started school, that had roughly doubled; by 2000 it had grown to ten million.If we leave the Old City, Pera and the Bosphorus aside, Istanbul today is ten times larger than these writers knew.