This interview first appeared in Near East Review in 2002.

GEORGE MESSO: You’d written three books in England, The Bed (1981), The Goodbyes (1982) and The Branching Stairs (1984) before you moved to New York in 1985, where you went on to write two of your finest collections, Disbelief (1987) and The Burnt Pages (1991). Evidently New York was a productive city for you creatively. So I’m curious to learn why it was, a decade or so later, you decided to move not just geographically to the other side of the world, but culturally from the New World to the Old World – why Turkey? And why Istanbul in particular?

JOHN ASH: Well I’ve been asked this question many times, often aggressively by paranoid Turks, some of whom suggested I might be working for the CIA or other ludicrous things. It was very simple really, I’ve been visiting Istanbul and Turkey since 1967. I came here when I was a teenager and I always loved this area, Greece, Turkey, the Eastern Mediterranean in general. I love Syria and Lebanon as well. I’d been in New York, and I was getting a little tired of it. I had to find a new place to live, and finding a new place to live in New York is impossible because you know it will be a shit hole and it will cost you two thousand dollars a month. So I thought, well, I can’t do this. I’d recently been to Turkey twice, doing research for my book, A Byzantine Journey, and I also felt that New York really was too far away from what you call the Old World. I love ruins. I love ruined cities. I love crumbling ancient buildings or even crumbling nineteenth century buildings, which is what I’m living in now. And all of that was too far away from New York. In a way, you know, I felt that my… much as I enjoyed New York, much as it was very productive for me, much as I met huge numbers of wonderful people there, some of the most wonderful people on earth, I felt my soul dwelt somewhere around here. Does that make any sense?

Absolutely. But what particularly drew you to Istanbul?

Well, if you’re going to move to the Near East, if you’re going to move to Turkey, as far as I’m concerned you have to live in Istanbul. It’s the most interesting city, the most vital, but curiously neglected by the West. You rarely have articles about Istanbul, except when I write them for The New York Times. You know, it’s an infinitely fascinating city, just topographically or geographically it’s fascinating, all the hills, and the islands out in the Marmara, the European shore of the Bosphorus, the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, you know, vast contrasts all the time. That is another reason because living in New York you’re also used to vast contrasts between the suburbs and Manhattan, and within Manhattan great opulence and great poverty. And here you get the same kind of contrasts and juxtapositions, strangeness and confusion, but also a kind of energy that is exciting and makes you want to do something. You have to respond to it. It’s a huge city and it’s much bigger than New York. I feel I have to record in some way what is happening here, which I think is very interesting, with all the rural migrants coming in, people from the Black Sea, from the Anatolian plateau and the Kurds, adapting themselves to city life, sometimes not very well.

Many of the poems in The Anatolikon, not least the title poem, seem to draw upon the same rich material as that of your travel book A Byzantine Journey. How crucial was the writing of that book in relation to the poems in The Anatolikon?

The writing of that book was very important because I became so obsessed with the material, it became another reason why I had to move here. In fact A Byzantine Journey seems to me now completely inadequate because I’ve found so many more Byzantine towns and monuments in Southern Turkey that are not in that book. I found twelve Byzantine towns in a very small area to the east of Silifke, which are not in any guide book, and they’re absolutely magnificent, almost perfectly preserved. And I found a sixth century Byzantine Mount Athos near Demre in Lycia, where there are these huge churches of cathedral size, of which there are no photographs, no studies, nothing.

The title poem of The Anatolikon is almost like the pocket version of the entire book, boiled down into a few pages. Although I wrote that poem when I was still in New York, that started the book and started the process of me moving here. Virtually all of the other poems where written after I moved. So, ‘The Anatolikon’, the title poem, is full of a yearning to be in this Old World, the Eastern Mediterranean and to drop shopping malls, and delli’s and whatever else, though there is a shopping mall in Istanbul I’m very fond of…

In a recent article for The New York Times (‘Celebration Istanbul’) you say that “in Istanbul you must orient yourself in time as much as in space.” This statement seems just as applicable to your own writing about Istanbul, Anatolia, Turkey. In what ways do your poems represent a crossing, conflating or even a re-conceptualization of the limitations or possibilities of time?

Oh my God! You have to remember I’m just a poet, not a philosopher. I don’t even regard myself an intellectual. The question is certainly very relevant. I am very much concerned with time and how time affects us and how people lived in the past and how finding something beautiful that is thousands of years old and perfectly preserved can actually make you feel as if you can touch the past, which is especially true of the Byzantine sites I was talking about. There are moments in specific places where you can feel the past and touch the past, and it sort of enters you. I was in Northern Syria exploring the Dead Cities, of which there are 820 would you believe – I saw 21. That was incredible. You enter a Byzantine town of the fifth or sixth century and everything is still there, the churches, the houses two or three stories high, the porticos, the olive presses, the wine presses, the baths, everything. So I think in a way that’s why I’m so obsessed with ruins because there I think you can feel you can make contact with the past, contact with past lives.

It was Edwin Muir who said ‘The past is a living past, and past and present coexist… [imagination] opens the past to us as part of our own life, a vast extension of the present’. That could easily, however, have been said by you – and I’m thinking not just of The Anatolikon but of The Burnt Pages and in particular your poem ‘Forgetting’ in which you say:

‘I know I mix the present with the past,
but that’s how I like it:
there is no other way to go on.’

In The Anatolikon historical details are constantly rising to the surface of the present, details that are perhaps both temporally and culturally remote, if not ancient. What is it about those particular historical archives – Byzantine, Selçuk, Ottoman – that draws you imaginatively and in which you’re able to situate your present self amid so much chronicled history?

The important thing is the Byzantine connection. As soon as I discovered the existence of Byzantium, when I was a teenager, I became completely fascinated because no one had told me about this and if something is not generally well known or no-one has told me about it I have to find out about it, historically. I’m now obsessed about the Parthians. Who were they? No one tells us anything.

Who were they?

Well, they were an Iranian tribe who were originally nomadic who for almost four centuries ruled Iran and Mesopotamia. They wore baggy pants and had huge moustaches and wore make-up when they rode into battle. They were constantly at war with the Romans who they found rather puzzling and thought “why do they keep bothering us” because they were busy fighting with nomads on their eastern border… Anyway, so that’s one example. You know as a young gay man I sort of identified with the Byzantines who had been consistently slandered and abused, for example, by Gibbon and the nineteenth century historians and it was only really in the second half of the nineteenth century that people began to appreciate the magnificence and beauty of the Byzantine heritage and how much it contributed to Western European civilization. I mean without them we would not have the plays of Eurypedes, for example. So that was a big draw and I felt then, I still feel, a very personal connection with that culture because it’s hybrid, it’s… well, the Byzantines are almost postmodern, which is a sort of a ridiculous thing to say. And compared to Western Europe during the Middle Ages they were vastly more tolerant and cultured and literate, and they of course were also obsessed with the past. The reason Byzantine poetry isn’t very good – some is okay – is that they felt that they couldn’t possibly surpass the work of the ancients so they just imitated it in archaic forms of Greek. And that I find on one level rather sad but it’s also deeply sympathetic.

Nazım Hikmet has a vitriolic poem in which he lambasts Pierre Loti for his “romancing the Orient”, and of Anatolia Hikmet writes that it’s

‘The common property of everyone
except those born to it.’

Returning, then, to Edwin Muir’s remark, to what extent, if at all, do you think imagination alone might legitimize the appropriation of other people’s pasts, of cultural histories to which the writer is “foreign”?

I don’t feel that I’m appropriating a cultural history of Anatolia or Istanbul because, as I said in response to your last question, it has contributed so much to what we laughingly call Western European civilization that it’s a part of a civilization I was born into. I mean, you could regard my coming here as a search for the roots of the civilization I was born into. It began here. Virtually nothing I encounter in Anatolia strikes me a foreign. I have a sense of recognition rather than a sense of strangeness or orientalness. It just seems normal. The only thing that’s strange about it compared to North Western Europe is that people immediately invite you into their houses and say “you must sit down and have tea”. Their traditions of hospitality and politeness have not been eroded by too much contact with the West. And of course the same is true in the Arabic countries too. I remember the first time I went to Syria and when I first came back my colleagues at Bogaziçi University said “well what were the Syrians like?” – I think they actually said “what were the Arabs like”? You know, Turks are so prejudiced against the Arabs – And I said actually they were rather like Turks.

It’s partly to do with the dominance of the English language. If something is going to be expressed now, to be known to the outside world, unfortunately it has to be said in English. Turkish is a very beautiful language but how many people in the most powerful nations of the world speak Turkish? So for Anatolia to be expressed in English doesn’t seem to me an example of colonialism or orientalism. Of course it depends what you say. But it’s a way of making it known, a way of making it real to other people, a way of making people aware of how essential it was to the development of civilization and how important it still is. So I don’t have any guilt feelings about writing about Anatolia or Istanbul. I think that’s ridiculous. I hope I don’t write about it in any kind of condescending way. I just write about the things I encounter. Especially now, my poems are getting more and more brutally direct. It’s just in your face. There you are, you’re here, in Istanbul, you’re in Anatolia: deal with it.

In a review of the Talisman House (U.S.) edition of The Anatolikon, Robert Kelly discusses your poems as “travel literature”, particularly what he calls “a poetry of being there”. Several of the poems in The Anatolikon openly depict travel, while others seem to imply the idea of a voyage or quest. How would you describe your relationship to travel literature and that idea of the travel writer? And in what ways can your poems themselves be understood as travel?

Well I have written a travel book and I’ve written a lot of poems which are about travel but I would hate to think that I’m just writing travel poems, or what I call “tourist poems” – the poem written by a young American in Fiesole with a hangover, all about art and culture and how wonderful it is. I hope I’m not doing that. I hope I’m really writing about being here. But the idea of travel and the experience of travel are very, very important to me. I’m actually happiest when I’m traveling, in Anatolia or Northern Syria particularly. The Bekaa Valley I love as well, despite Hizbullah and Syrian soldiers threatening me with guns all the time. I think travel is probably one of my, to use an awful phrase, central metaphors, of finding something, of looking for something, finding it in the past, finding it in the present or wherever, or it’s possible existence in the future. All of that is very important to me. One of the things that feed my poetry is my ability to travel and to see everything. I’ve traveled with other people and they just don’t see what’s going past from the bus window. I virtually have no eyelids when I’m traveling. And if I have a talent that is exceptional it’s that. I see things and I can turn it into words. I see details, I see people, I see buildings, landscapes and I see all the details of a landscape and I remember them for the rest of my life.

What advantages or disadvantages might there be for a writer, a poet, in actively choosing to live outside of his native language community, as opposed to having been forcibly expelled from it?

Now we get on to the subject of exile. I don’t regard myself as an exile. I can go back to England whenever I want. I’m an expatriate. I chose to live outside my country. Ovid was an exile. He was sent to a dismal town on the western shores of the Black Sea. Also I haven’t lived in England for over sixteen years now. Before I moved here I was in New York.

Is the language thing problematic in any way though?

It frustrates me because I do not have any ability to pick up Turkish. My Turkish is perfectly adequate in that I can buy what I want, I can go to restaurants, But I can’t have a real conversation with the very nice guy who runs the büfe on the corner, which I find completely annoying. A friend of mine has been here only three years and she’s picked up fluent Turkish without having any lessons. I find it incomprehensible. I don’t know how you can do that. My mind doesn’t work like that. So that is annoying. But of course not speaking a foreign language can have its advantages. If you’re in a restaurant and they’re speaking complete bullshit, you don’t know.

But the linguistic thing is very interesting. The strangest thing is that some times Turkish sounds to me like English. I’m so used to hearing it around me that I almost think I can understand it. I was once in Iznik, I was on my own and had no one to speak English with and I started having these linguistic hallucinations. It was totally weird. Everyone was talking Turkish and my brain was translating it into English, but into the most weird sentences and phrases. “Dancing on a glass floor with fish underneath it”, for example, and another was “Oh I have to go to this ridiculous country club”. I said “John, get a grip on yourself, you’re losing it!”

Finally, The Anatolikon has been released already in North America, in a beautiful bilingual edition in Turkey and is soon to be published in England by Carcanet. The Carcanet edition, I understand, will also include a hitherto unpublished collection of poems called To The City – what can you tell us about those poems? I assume the city is Istanbul?

Istanbul means ‘to the City’ in Greek. For me it was very interesting writing that book because it was like a sudden visitation. I’d been working on a guide book commissioned by Yapı Kredi for three years. My whole life was occupied with writing this guide book so I didn’t write any poetry. And then when I handed the disk in: Boom! Poems started streaming out of me. I would write three a night, minimum, and mostly quite short, some of them longer I guess. For me what I’m doing now is in a new style. It’s much more direct, much more brutal, it’s much more in-your-face. I’ve reached the age of fifty-three. I feel as if I don’t have to disguise my feelings, I don’t have to fool around, I don’t have to dress things up anymore, and I’m just saying what I feel. And I’ve no idea how people are going to respond to these poems.

So it will be coming for the first time from Carcanet?

Yes, it will be coming out in April. I don’t really know how I’m going to feel about it. Since writing that I’ve also written most of another book as well. I had another explosion of writing recently, so I now have forty-six new poems, including a long dialogue with my dead mother, which will be one of the most bizarre and morbid exercises in literature. But I like it, and it’s one hundred and twenty-six lines long. So I really feel that moving to Turkey, moving to Istanbul has actually been very good for my writing. It’s pushed me in another direction. It’s made me try and write in a new way, to try and escape my own cliches.

I know that your Turkish translator is Güven Turan and he in his own right is a very well established and well regarded poet. Are you at all influenced by contemporary Turkish literature?

Güven is a lovely man. He is my best translator. I am influenced by Orhan Veli. I love Orhan Veli. I could never write really short poems, and I always wanted to. I think it was really his example that has enabled me to do this. Though, the content and everything is completely different from Veli’s. He’s a very important poet for me. More important than Nazım Hikmet who I think, much as he’s wonderful, there’s a certain amount of bullshit in there. Whereas Orhan Veli is just perfect, and you look at those poems and you think it’s so easy to do this and it’s the most difficult thing. Writing a poem about sitting in a tea-house, seeing the waiter and looking at the Bosphorus and bumph! That’s it. It takes an enormous amount of skill to be able to do that.

I also like, though I don’t understand at all, Ece Ayhan. He’s a completely demented poet. Wonderful. Also impossible to translate. So I don’t know what kind of version of his poems I’m getting because it’s full of puns and plays on words. But the general tone of his poetry is absolutely fascinating and he’s a very important poet, not just for Turkey, but for the rest of the world.

We shared from the tree’s open arms
a slice of fabled fruit — moonlight —
In life’s dark hours cascading starlight
and peace emptying from your palms.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Translated by George Messo

Andy Brown‘s new book of poems, The Fool and the Physician, is out from Salt, as of today. Not to be missed.

The 2011 Popescu Prize went to Judith Wilkinson for her remarkable translations from the Dutch of Toon Tellegen. My review of her award winning book can be found online at the website of World Literature Today.

Alev Adil‘s informed review of İkinci Yeni: The Turkish Avant-Garde also appeared last year in Modern Poetry in Translation and is available online here.

And finally, a poem from my translated selection of Gonca Özmen‘s poems, The Sea Within, can be viewed on the blog of the literary journal Absinthe.

I know, it’s not easy to live,
To fall in love and sing to the one you love,
To stroll in starlight at night,
To warm yourself by the light of day,
To find time like this to meet
On Çamlıca Hill for half a day
—A thousand blues flowing from the Bosphorus—
To forget everything in these leagues of blue.

II

I know, it isn’t easy to live,
But there
A dead man’s bed is still warm,
Someone’s watch still ticks on his wrist.
Living isn’t easy, brothers,
But neither is dying.

It isn’t easy to leave this world.

Orhan Veli KANIK
Translated by George Messo

Bjarni Bjarnason: Well, I think the whole of Icelandic literature is on the wrong path, and has been for a pretty long time, so obviously I’m on the fringe. I am actually rather surprised that I’m published at all, after having been underground for a decade.

I think Icelandic literature is stuck in solipsism. Icelandic culture is sold as something exotic and mystical, and most Icelanders are naïve enough to believe this myth.

All this started in the nineteenth century when we were a Danish colony. Like so many other colonies we had to find our own identity, to have some identity to fight for freedom for. So we were very busy finding what was Icelandic, collecting folklore and folk music, producing a lot of nationalistic poetry, and so on. This was necessary when we were creating an independent nation. Now we have been independent for a long time, but still the main question is: “What does it mean to be Icelandic?” I think the main question should be: “What does it mean to be human?” Or even just: “What does it mean to be?” So this is very simple.

One example of my being on the outside is the novel, The Return of the Divine Mary. It was published in 1996, after a lot of trouble finding a publisher. Even though it was published as late as 1996 it is the first novel in Icelandic literature that has absolutely nothing to do with Iceland. We have had fantasies before, even rather free flowing fantasies, but they have always, in the end, had something to do with Iceland. It’s just absurd that we haven’t been able to accept a novel that has nothing to do with Iceland before 1996. That fact indicates that we have really stuck our heads somewhere deep in the mud, and haven’t been able to get it loose.

Iceland is neither the beginning nor the end of the universe. Not even the United States of America is that. If you want to look at some geographical unit locked up in some historical time, and inside it, find a picture of the human spirit; it would be a better idea to look at the Roman empire. But even there, in the end, you would be staring at unanswered questions.

So I seem to lack a bit of respect when it comes to Icelandic Literature, because in that phrase people focus more on the word Icelandic than on the word Literature. And they focus on the surface rather than on the core, because they find that the matter which is talked about in our literature defines it as Icelandic, when it is really the way the matter is seen and how it is talked about that defines it as Icelandic. And I think that when you take the essence, the long tradition of Icelandic literature, which is the oldest in Scandinavia because all the literature about the Vikings was written in Iceland, and you point it at something other than the question: “What does it mean to be Icelandic?” then something special might happen. Then you take the Icelandic way of seeing and reciting, and focus it on the world.

So even if I don’t mention Iceland in my book about Mary, it is just as Icelandic as anything else that an Icelandic writer might write. You might even argue that because I forget Iceland as a material fact you get an even more Icelandic spirit in the work, because the special Icelandic way of telling a story stands out clearly when you don’t tangle it up with Iceland all the time.

But to analyze what makes the Icelandic way of seeing, or telling a story, special is rather fruitless. You should just enjoy it, because the story is older and more original than the analytical way of thinking. The core of Icelandic culture is storytelling, that’s why Iceland has been called “The Story Island”. Personally I think calling Iceland “The Story Island”, as people love to do when creating the exotic and mythical Iceland, is taking it a bit too far, because the core of most people everywhere is the story. The story is the basic unit in understanding.

But to use storytelling to answer the question: “What does it mean to be Icelandic?” when the essence of the word Icelandic is storytelling, is just asking for trouble. When defining a poem you should do like the poet Olafur Haukur Simonarson does, define it with a poem:

The poem is the bird
after it sat on the branch
but before it flew away.

The same thing counts with the self, as W. H. Auden said:

The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious mind
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.

So I try not to despair and look at something else with my writing.

After a decade on the outside, the writing of The Return of the Divine Mary propelled you from the “underground”, as you say, to the very surface of Icelandic literary life. That was your eighth book, and your second novel. Its nomination for the Icelandic Literary Prize brought you a lot of attention. Two years later your novel The City Behind the Words received the Tomas Gudmundsson Literary Prize and in 2001 with your fifth novel, The Cannibal Woman and her Husband, you won the prestigious Halldor Laxnes Prize. How much of a departure was The Return of the Divine Mary in terms of what you’d already been doing? And following on from that, what new possibilities for your writing did the recognition bring?

BB: The Return of the Divine Mary was a departure from what I had previously done, in the sense that when I wrote it I was more conscious that the daily whale-like reality going on around me, which some might have called Icelandic reality, had very little meaning for me.

Being an autodidact-outsider meant I was anonymous, and nobody expected anything from me. But after I had a book published and nominated for the Icelandic literary prize, suddenly the whale called Icelandic reality noticed me in its stomach, and people who hardly saw me before started forming opinions about me and what I did. This could have influenced me and my writing much more than it did if I hadn’t moved abroad directly after the nomination.

If the recognition had any influence on my writing at all, then maybe I became even more protective of what I was doing, and began writing in an even more cryptic kind of way, which was closer to what, at least at the time, I preferred reading myself. This was a possibility since I had been accepted as strange. The Return of the Divine Mary was so unusual in the context of Icelandic literature, that after it had been accepted, I could be as strange and incomprehensible as I possibly could. People didn’t expect anything except something absurd from me.

When you are accepted as strange you are in some ways free. The problem is that you are partly placed on the same shelf as a lunatic, who is also accepted as strange. One is in some respects seen like a child. Critics say, just like one might say about a creative child, “the boy certainly has great imagination!” and then leave it at that, without going into what lies behind this imagination. Like a creative child you are somewhat admired but not taken seriously.

Were there any stylistic changes?

Since I wrote The City Behind the Words, I have been working with a lighter and more accessible style. In the book I’ve just been finishing (Faces) I work with what I call kitchen-table-style, that is, the kind of style you use when you tell a friend a story from your life over the kitchen table. This book is close to an oral tradition of telling a story. When you tell a story orally the quality of the style can best be judged by how well you hold the crowds’ attention. You are judged like an orator. If the listener forgets everything around him, even the storyteller, and is all ears, then the style works.

It’s very hard for me to go back and find out why my writing went from one place to another and say if this or that influenced me. A story is the logic of feeling, feeling is life, and life, of course, is a mystery.

For me it is important to die after every book, and, hope to be reborn.

And is there ever a script for the rebirth?

I don’t make a plan for what I am going to write in the future, because then I feel I’m tying up my soul with ideas. The soul is important, but ideas are like aeroplanes, there will be another one going tomorrow. Besides, creation is unexplainable and unpredictable and after finishing something, you can’t count on being able to create anything ever again. One has to accept this complete uncertainty in what one is doing, and love it.

A writer is just a persona, a role, made up because we need an excuse for those of our fellow men who have a need to look at the soul, independent from science and religion, history, and, if possible, the world.

A writer (or rather the subject behind this role, feeling its way forwards in murky waters) is someone allowed to look into the arcanum of life, and bring as much back to us as he can tell in a fairly accessible tale.

The huge facade we call “culture” covers this up and makes the ultimate personal meeting of the human spirit with the unknown look just as a new book by some named writer who is there and there in his career and writes in this and this style about this and this known subject who we can place in a curtain place in a discussion we already know by heart. Some writers even believe in this merry-go-round, and actually consider themselves the role, that is, writers. But this is just a social game one has to join to be allowed the position of the whisperer, the one who whispers secret words to strangers he will never meet.

This “meeting of the human spirit with the unknown” is one of the imperatives informing your novel The Return of the Divine Mary, newly translated into English by David MacDuff. You tell a story of a young woman who may or may not be the Virgin Mary returned to the late twentieth century. What was it that prompted you to want to re-write or re-situate the character of Mary? What is the story trying to make known? And what philosophical/theological reasons did you have for choosing Mary as a subject, if any?

What becomes known while you’re reading something of value is very simple and in a way banal. What becomes known is something that we almost all the time take for granted and put to the side by calling it a fact. What becomes known is this simple sentence: There is life.

I never got the idea to re-situate the character of The Virgin Mary in the twentieth century. I was just writing about this young woman, and suddenly found out that to me she resembled the Virgin Mary in many ways. So the person came before the myth. And the story came before I could analyze what it was saying.
It’s obvious, both in films and literature of today, that it’s easier to create a memorable foul character, in the spirit of Dracula or Hannibal Lecter, than a good, innocent, and beautiful character. The contrast seems to be normal/evil. We take it for granted that the normal is good, which is, to me, a bit scary. George Bush goes out as the normal guy, but how good is he exactly?

This, among other things, prompted me to try to write out a prodigious and interesting character who is all at once innocent, good and beautiful.

The Virgin Mary is a very special symbol in the sense that the amount of basic text about her in the Bible is amazingly small. In total it’s hardly more than two pages. When you compare this to the four hundred pages which, for example, Dracula has to sustain his “life” as a major symbol, it is hardly worth mentioning.

So there are few major symbols in the western world based on such a small amount of basic text. Maybe that is indicative of the qualities, and the characteristics, that the Virgin Mary stands for, so fundamental in human nature that we don’t need several hundred pages to tell us who she is. It would be like having some stranger telling us all about our own mother. Innocence, goodness and beauty are so basic in us that most of the time many of us go around thinking that the human being is basically a monster.

Iceland is a Lutheran country. The Mary of your novel, however, seems very much to exist in the spirit of Catholicism. How conscious were you of the different interpertations of the Virgin Mary by the Lutheran and the Catholic church while writing the book? And in particular were you conscious of any religious impulse in yourself?

I wouldn’t call myself a christian, I didn’t want to be confirmed, for example. But still, I felt it would have been much too easy to disrespect the traditional view of the Virgin Mary, especially the view of the Catholic church.

The Catholics had a problem with Mary. After the Fall from Paradise, everybody was conceived in sin. But Jesus was obviously unstained by sin. So, what about his earthly mother?

After discussing this question for decades, even centuries, the Catholic church came to the conclusion that a sinless being like Jesus Christ, had to come from a sinless mother. And suddenly Mary was presented as the first sinless human since the Fall.

The Catholics didn’t have a problem with the fact that if they where going to use this argument fully it meant that the parents of Mary also had to be without sin, since they managed to create her sinless.

As usual the Catholics put a brake on the logic before it got out of hand and every forefather of Jesus up to god, who is both Jesus´s father and forefather at the same time, was declared sinless. If that had been the case, then Jesus of course, wouldn’t have had a thing to do on earth. His life would have been meaningless and he would probably have been analyzing the absurdity of being, his nausea and angst. With a sinless human race ruling the world poor Jesus would have become unemployed. The world had to be as full of sin as possible so that when he took the sins of the world on his shoulder, and freed his followers, he was instantly a great hit.

Now, when the Catholics came to the conclusion that Mary had to have been born without sin, they had another problem. What was her sinless body like? Was it made out of earthly or heavenly matter? If it was made out of earthly matter, then she was definitely buried somewhere on earth.

After thinking about this for a century or so, the Catholics came to the conclusion that the body of Mary was made of heavenly stuff and therefore, after her earthly breath had passed from her lips, she was, body and soul, taken into heaven. To me this seems to mean that she was literally all soul.

These beautiful beliefs of the Catholic church I respect in my book. Even though Iceland is a Lutheran country, the book is, as you point out in your question, in the vein of Catholic belief and this alienates it still more from the average “Icelandic” way of thinking.

And that was something you wanted to emphasize?

When I used the Bible as a source of inspiration for the book, I used the Catholic Bible, not the Lutheran one. For example, I call Mary’s stepmother Judith, a name Catholics recognize spontaneously as coming from the Bible, but to Lutherans it’s just another name. The story of Judith is told in the apocryphal books which belong to the Catholic Bible, but not to the Lutheran. When Luther read them he said that they certainly made good reading, but were less holy than the old and the new testaments. So he cut them out of the Lutheran Bible. This wasn’t good news for the women in Lutheran countries because the most memorable descriptions of women in the Bible, those of Judith and Susanna, occur in the apocryphal books. These women get much more space in the Catholic Bible than the Virgin Mary.

If you were to try to come to the bottom of the phrase “femme fatal” I guess you would end up analyzing the story of Judith in the apocryphal books. The Judith I present in my book about The Virgin Mary is, in every way, I hope, true to the traditional presentation of Judith as the archetype of the femme fatal. With Judith I don’t try as hard to brake out of the myth as with Mary, mainly because she hasn’t got that much space in the book. What was interesting to me was to let these two great women of the Bible interact, and in a way, measure their strength against each other.

Another thing more alive in the Catholic church than the Lutheran is the idea of Hell. How does this figure in the novel?

In chapter four of my book, which to my great delight you’re publishing, I have the protagonist, Michael Von Blomsterfeld meeting Mary and hiring her as an assistant in his Circus, which he calls: The Circus of the Divine Order.

The circus is, for Michael, a place where the laws of nature are worshipped to the extend that the things that are done within the arena sometimes seem miraculous. The miraculous is, to him, in a way just an illusion, a trick. He creates a mechanical circus, which produces miracle-like images. This he can do since he is a brilliant technician, and therefore has better control over things in time and space then the ordinary man thinks is possible. The mechanical circus is a metaphor for hell. Michael is showing hell in the streets and people applaud. But in the end it explodes and out of it flies a dove.

There are those who argue that if a law of nature is universal it means that everything in the universe must obey it, and that includes god. So then god wouldn’t be almighty if he had to obey laws of nature. Michael Von Blomsterfeld would agree with this, so that’s why, when he calls his circus, the Circus of the Divine Order, there is a hint of conscious, or unconscious irony in that name. He is, in a way, provoking God with his circus. The circus is a picture of his religious crisis. When Mary steps into his circus arena the crisis rapidly evolves into psychosis.

Maybe this psychotic state is in a way hell, and since Mary is attracted to Michael she has to go through hell to get to know him. Perhaps one always has to go through hell if one really wants to get to know another person. But it’s difficult to say where exactly that hell is located.

Usually locations stay where they are supposed to be but people wander. But hell seems to wander like a person. Even if you have found paradise, and decided to stay still there, one day you are in hell. And you don’t even know it.

Not knowing where you are and who you are might be an indicaton of that.

This interview took place shortly after Bjarni Bjarnason and George Messo met at The Centre for Writers & Translators on the Greek Island of Rhodes in 2001.

İlhan Berk, Çiğnenmiş Gül. YKY, 2011. The unmistakable voice of İlhan Berk, as much alive as ever. [in Turkish]

Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, in a marvelous translation by Dick Davis. A spellbinding book of the pre-islamic Persian Kings. Penguin Books, 2007.

Evliyâ Çelebi’s Seyahatnâmesi, Book 2, Volume 1. Çelebi’s account of his journey to Trabzon in 1640 is one of the most important and compelling portraits we have of the city in Ottoman times. YKY, 2011. [in Turkish]

Evliya Çelebi, An Ottoman Traveller: Selection from the Book of Travels, trans. by Robert Dankoff & Sooyong Kim. Eland, 2010. Indisputably the most important single work of translation from Turkish to English for a decade. Long overdue, and not to be missed. The greatest travel writer of the Ottoman Empire, Çelebi has been described as a Turkish Pepys, a Muslim Montaigne and an Ottoman Herodotus. His interests range from architecture to natural history, through religion, politics, linguistics, music, science, food and the supernatural.

Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, trans. by E. R. A. Sewter. Penguin, 1966.

Pindar, The Complete Odes, trans. by Anthony Verity. Oxford, 2007.

Birhan Keskin, Soğuk Kazı. Metis, 2010. Keskin’s stunning, untranslatable eighth book. [in Turkish]

Turki Al Hamad, Shumaisi, trans. by Paul Starkey. Saqi, 2005. The second part of this Saudi novelist’s explosive coming-of-age trilogy. An extraordinary view into one of the world’s most secretive and hidden societies.

Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity & Memory. I. B. Tauris, 2010. An interesting overview of the contemporary cinema scene in Turkey, notable for its treatment of Nuri Bilge Ceylan – the first significant assessment of his work so far in English – and for overlooking Semih Kaplanoğlu.

Andrew Brown, Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared. Granta, 2009.

Faruk Duman, Sencer ile Yusufçuk. Can, 2009. The fifth collection from a master of the Turkish short story. Is there anyone writing like Faruk Duman? What a shame you can’t read his work in English. [in Turkish]

Samuel Hearne, A Journey to the Northern Ocean. TouchWood, 2007. One of the greatest adventure narratives ever written, the story of Hearne’s three-year trek to seek a trade route across the Canadian Barrens in the Northwest Territories. First published in 1795.

Memet Can Doğan, Attar. YKY, 2009. The fifth collection from this fascinating young Turkish poet. [in Turkish]

David Thompson, The Travels, 1850 Version. Edited by William E. Moreau. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. The book jacket says it all in describing Thompson’s Travels as “one of the finest early expressions of the Canadian experience. The work is not only an account of a remarkable life in the fur trade but an extended meditation on the land and Native peoples of western North America.” A mesmerizing read from cover to cover.

When our loved ones leave
Amira,
as you left,
an endless migration in us begins
and a certain sense takes hold in us
that all of what is finest
in and around us,
except for the sadness,
is going away —

Mohammad Ali, one of Palestine’s most celebrated contemporary poets, knew all about migrations, both of the body and the soul. At the time of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, aged 17, he fled with his family to Lebanon after their home and village was destroyed. They returned a year later and settled in Nazareth, where Mohammad Ali remained until his death on 2 October, 2011.

His only book in Britain, So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe, 2007) was widely reviewed. Edward Hirsch made a comparison to the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet for his ‘emotional forthrightness and unflinching honesty.’ He could be subtle and unsentimental about his own personal history, and at the same time his ‘certain sense’ of shared loss and survival – the need to survive – compelled some of his best known verse:

I’ll linger on — a piece of shrapnel
the size of a penknife
lodged in the neck;
I’ll remain —
a blood stain
the size of a cloud
on the shirt of this world!
(from ‘Thrombosis in the Veins of Petroleum’)

Mohammad Ali’s poems showed many of the concerns of his fellow Arabs, Mahmoud Darwish, Jamal Qa’war and Samih Al Qasim – dispossession, exile, and cultural marginalization. In Gabriel Levin’s valuable introduction to So What… we’re told that Mohammad Ali’s poetry nevertheless ‘eschews the heroic mode’ associated with much contemporary Palestinian poetry ‘and is set in the context of everyday experience… This doesn’t mean that political and historical events are glossed over, but rather that feelings of collective humiliation, shame, rage, and disillusionment are modified by a highly individualized voice…’

It was Mohammad Ali’s particularizing of life under occupation that made his verse so intimate, so movingly direct and accessible. His poems foreground human action and feeling, disarmingly simple and lucid:

We did not weep
when we were leaving —
for we had neither
time nor tears,
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting,
so where would our weeping
have come from?
(from ‘There Was No Farewell’)

We could guess at the life behind the words. Mohammad Ali made that complex political reality vivid and credible. The poetry, in Levin’s words, was ‘at once lyrical and blunt, graceful and harsh in its veracities.’ His translators, Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin, created a memorable and important voice for him in English. We have their translations still, and the poet’s voice continues to speak through them, even after Taha Mohammad Ali has gone.

For almost five decades Menashe existed on the margins of American letters. His first book, The Many Named Beloved, was published a continent away in Britain in 1961, and despite a forward written by Kathleen Raine, he quickly disappeared for another decade. His second book, No Jerusalem But This (1971), was again published in Britain and promised to raise him from obscurity when it came to the attention of Donald Davie and Stephen Spender. Davie’s characteristically distilled perception of Menashe as a religious poet is one that has largely remained to this day. What he called Menashe’s “liturgical and devotional intent” was one “directed to releasing the worshipful potentialities of language.” Spender, on the other hand, saw him more narrowly as “a poet of entirely Jewish consciousness”. He wasn’t. Not nearly. Menashe’s poems were too open, too generous to be tied to one particular creed:

Apotheosis

Taut with longing
You must become
The god you sought—
The only one

The poems bow to no orthodoxy; Menashe’s tentative soundings were so unique, so individual, they could be viewed as neither tradition nor fashion, and Davie even hinted at this as a cause of his neglect.

Though isolated and largely ignored, Menashe showed remarkable resilience. His art became even more refined; change meant polish and perfection. It would take his inclusion in Penguin’s Modern Poets series in 1996 for us to recognize him as a poet of weight not bulk, capable of talking across continents and cultures.

In 2004, when Menash was almost 80, The Poetry Foundation bestowed on him the inaugural Neglected Masters Award. It may have been late in the day for Menashe, but in honoring him The Library of America (2005) made a large body of his poetry available, introducing his work to several generations of new readers. This was followed in Britain by his New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009), issued together with Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s tender DVD film Life is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe.

It was typical of Samuel Menashe, that he should slip away, quietly in his sleep on the evening of August 22, 2011, at a time when he was becoming most visible. But we have his poems, as Stephen Spender wrote, “intense and clear as diamonds.” They were minute and his output restrained and measured. He was, in Derek Mahon’s phrase, a master of “compression and crystallization.” We could never mistake him for anyone else.

Now

There is never an end to loss, or hope
I give up the ghost for which I grope
Over and over again saying Amen
To all that does or does not happen—
The eternal event is now, not when

Click here to watch the video.