Chapter 15 "Istanbul" Rahim and Urban Columnist

One morning in the late 1880s—shortly after Abdul Hamid began his thirty-year "dictatorship"—a twenty-five-year-old reporter sat in the office of the Babi Ali tabloid, the Bliss at the table.Suddenly the door swung open, and a tall man in a red felt hat and "some kind of military uniform" with red woolen sleeves strode into the room, glanced at the young reporter, and shouted, "Come here! "The young reporter stood up in trepidation. "Put on your felt hat! Let's go!" The reporter followed the man in military uniform into the carriage waiting at the door and left together.They crossed the Galata Bridge in silence.Halfway through, the handsome young reporter mustered up the courage to ask them where they were going, and then waited for an answer.

"Go to see Basma Beinshi (the chief secretary of the Sultan)! They told me to take you there immediately!" After the young reporter stayed in the palace reception room for a while, the man with the gray beard sitting in front of the big table looked angrily. He glanced. "Come here!" the man called.A copy of "Happiness News" was spread out in front of him.Furiously, he pointed at the newspaper and asked, "What does that mean?" The young reporter didn't understand the problem, so the man cried out: "Traitor! Ingratitude! We should throw your head in a mortar and make a pulp!"

Although half-deadly frightened, the reporter noticed that the trouble was a poem by a dead poet.The refrain in the poem is "Will spring never come? Will spring never come?" He wanted to explain, so he said: "Your Excellency..." "He won't shut up yet . . . go and stand at the door!" said the Sultan's chief secretary.The reporter stood outside trembling for fifteen minutes before being ushered inside again.But every time the young man tried to say that he was not the author of the poem, he was once again met with angry attacks. "Egoist! Beast! Bastard! Shameless! Damn it! Go to hell!"

When the young reporter realized that he could not speak, he mustered up his courage, took out the seal in his pocket, and put it on the table.The Sultan's chief secretary read the names on the seal and immediately understood that it was a misunderstanding. "What's your name?" "Rasim." Forty years later, Rahim recounted the incident in his memoir "The Writer and the Poet". He said that when the chief secretary realized that his subordinates had brought the wrong person, his attitude changed immediately. "Sit down, little brother," he said, "you don't mind if I call you that?" He opened the drawer, beckoned Rasim to approach, handed him five lire, and said, "Come on. Don't say it." So dismissed him.Rahim tells all this with his usual vigor and humor: it is his specialty to spice up the story with the little things of the day.

His love for life, his wit and the joy that his profession brings him - all this has made Rahim one of Istanbul's leading writers.He could balance the melancholy of the post-empire that engulfed the novelist Tempina, the poet Yahya, and the chronicler Hisar with his inexhaustible energy, optimism, and zest.Like every writer who loves Istanbul, he was interested in its history and wrote about it, but because he carefully restrained his melancholy, he never missed the "lost golden age".Instead of seeing Istanbul's past as a sacred treasure trove, or digging into history for authentic voices that might allow him to write a Western-style tome, he prefers, like most of the city, to be confined to the present: Istanbul is an interesting place to be. The place of residence is nothing more than that.

Like most of his readers, he's not interested in East-West issues or "promoting our civilizational transformation."For him, Westernization produced a new breed of posers, whose new affectated gestures were the object of his amusement.His own literary activities in youth—he wrote novels and poems, both unsuccessful endeavors—made him suspicious of anything that suggested ostentation or arrogance, and made sharp jokes.He mocked the ways in which the pompous Istanbul poets read their poems, who imitated the high dancers and decadent poets, and even stopped passers-by to improvise, and his fellow literati had a way of directing any conversation directly to the problems of their own careers, You immediately sense, then, that he puts some distance between himself and the Westernized elite, which, like him, mostly live in the Babi Ali publishing district.

But Rasim found his voice as a newspaper columnist—or feuilletoniste, as the French term was popular at the time.Aside from whimpering and occasional feigned interest, he was not interested in politics.After all, state oppression and censorship make politics a tricky and sometimes impossible subject (he likes to dwell on how his columns are sometimes so heavily censored that they are left blank), and instead he makes the city his own. Theme of. ("If political prohibition and its intolerance mean there's nothing to talk about, then talk about the city council and city life, because people always like to read about that stuff!" This advice, centuries old, from an Istanbul columnist history.)

In this way, Rahim spent fifty years writing about the phenomena of Istanbul, from drunks of all kinds to ghetto vendors, from grocers to jugglers, from the beautiful towns along the Bosphorus to the noisy pubs, from daily news to trade shows, from amusement parks to meadows and parks, market days and the unique charm of each season, including winter fun Snowball fights and sledding, plus publications, gossip, and restaurant menus.He loved lists and taxonomies, and he was good at observing people's habits and idiosyncrasies.Just as a botanist is excited by the vegetation of the forest, so Rahim feels about the manifestations of Westernization, immigration issues, and historical coincidences, all of which provide him with new and eccentric material every day.He exhorts young writers to "keep their notebooks with them at all times" when wandering around town.

Rasim's excellent columns, written between 1895 and 1903, are included in the Urban Correspondence.He never called himself a "city correspondent," except in a mocking tone.Borrowing from France in the 1860s, he complained about city councils, observed daily life, and felt the pulse of the city. In 1867, Namok Kemal - who later became one of the most important writers in modern Turkey, who admired not only Hugo's plays and poems but also his romantic combativeness - published in the newspaper "Blueprint" A series of letters describing everyday life during fasting in Istanbul.His letters, or "City Columns," set the tone, and posterity followed him in the trusting, intimate, complicit tone of his usual correspondence.So they called all Istanbulites relatives, friends, lovers, and succeeded in turning the city from a string of villages into an imaginary whole.

One of the journalists, known as "Afondi the Insightful," was so called because he was the publisher of the "Information" (he published the newspaper under the patronage of the court, so when the newspaper published a random article after the fact, it was considered to be distasteful). He was dubbed "Alfondi the Uninformed" for a while after he was shut down for his distasteful articles).Facing everyday life mercilessly, often admonishing his readers as much as rebuking them, he will be fondly remembered as the most scrupulous Istanbul "letter writer" of his time, though his prose was dry.

These urban columnists who first wrote about Istanbul captured the colours, smells, and sounds of the city, adding anecdotes and humorous insights, and helped establish the etiquette of Istanbul's streets, parks, gardens, shops, boats, bridges, squares, and trams.Since it is unwise to criticize the sultan, the state, the police, the army, the religious leaders, or even the more powerful parliamentarians, the only target of ridicule by the literary elite is the ordinary man who is involuntary, walking the streets minding his own business , Small people in the market who struggle hard to support their families.We owe it to those unfortunates of Istanbul who are less educated than columnists and newspaper readers to know them well - what they do in the streets, what they eat, what they say, the sounds they make - for a hundred and thirty years For these often angry, sometimes compassionate, constantly critical columnists, they made it their business to write about it. Forty-five years after learning to read, I find that whenever my eyes fall on a newspaper column, whether it threatens me to return to tradition or doubles my Westernization, I immediately think of my mother's saying "don't point and point" .