Yusuf and Suleika

 Yusuf and Suleika

'A competent woman is better than a thousand incompetent men.' Mihri

I sat on a bench under a huge tree with bright pink flowers in Vienna, writing. I'd write, erase, start over, and when frustrated, I'd get up, walk around the park, and return to my spot. To finish my poem, I searched for Turkish words, afraid of losing them, as they seeped through the German words I heard. I finally found them. When writing poetry, one has to think about so many things: what I want to write, my identity, my language, even my gender. I tried to learn poetry from women poets I'd never met, who were no longer alive, seeking masters among them. A few months later, when I arrived in Istanbul, I rushed to a bookstore. I wasn't dreaming; the words I'd found were truly printed on the page before me. My poem was published; I could now consider myself half a poet. This was what I had wanted to be most my entire life. I wanted to be a poet. How difficult it had been to dare to write. I had spent years, rituals of reading, long walks, as if to gather this courage. The courage to write poems.

Marianne carefully put down her pen, waiting for the ink to dry completely. If she tried to put the letter in the envelope before her excitement subsided, the ink would smudge, making her writing illegible. As she waited, she began to examine her legs; though she was in her late twenties, they were still the slender legs of a sixteen-year-old dancer. She recalled that most Austrian dancers had thick legs. Perhaps it was this slender body that distinguished her from others and why the old German banker, her husband, had bought her from her mother, amidst a scandal, and taken her to Frankfurt. Once assured the ink was dry, she took the paper and read the letter she would send to Weimar from beginning to end.

"I have read the Divan again and again; each time, such a feeling awakens within me that I can neither describe nor explain it to myself. Since my heart is entirely open to you, if you have fully grasped my inner world and true self, as I hoped and wished (indeed, I am sure of it), then I will not need such incomplete descriptions. You already fully feel and know what is happening within me.

Sometimes, one can do nothing but accept these silver glimmers of life as a gift from heaven.

Wholly yours,

Marianne, Frankfurt, October 1819." She couldn't resist, she looked at the red gold-leafed cover, opened the Divan again, and reread the poem.

"Now because your name is Suleika,

I too shall be praised,

When you praise my beloved,

My name shall be Hatem."

Her beloved, Goethe, who had permeated every cell of her being, unlike the banker she didn't love, and for whom she would give anything, had dedicated an entire section of his Divan, on which he had worked for five years, to her: Suleika’s Book. Suleika and her beloved Hatem resonated in the names they had chosen for themselves. Suleika, Suleika. Goethe was no longer young; he was not the youthful Yusuf but more suited to be Hatem, known for his wisdom. Persian poetry, love, the Hoopoe bird. Everything they experienced had permeated his poems in distilled form. More importantly, Marianne had seen her own poems printed in West-Eastern Divan, which Goethe had sent her. She was no longer Marianne, but Suleika; she had completed her transformation and attained the status of a poet. This was not a dream; it was real.

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I tried to wake from Marianne's dream, walking through the streets of Vienna, where I always felt like a stranger, searching for my own place within this striking Divan, written under the influence of Hafez. The relationship between Goethe and Marianne, the work they produced, their letters... These seemed more exciting, more beautiful than real life. Following books, fictional works speaking to each other. This is why I started tracing the path.

Goethe had read Hafez's Divan and was so deeply affected that he wrote his own West-Eastern Divan. Moreover, a part of this divan consisted of poems written through reciprocal letters with the Austrian Marianne von Willemer, who chose the pen name Suleika. These poems, containing the most elegant examples of East-West dialogue, represented transformation and literary integration. As I read them, I couldn't resist and wrote my essay with the pen name Suleika, not emulating the legendary one, but aspiring to be the poet Suleika.

Persian culture versus German culture. Identity conflict, our country caught in between...Turkish belonged neither to Persian, nor could I consider myself part of German culture. In this text that captivated me, finding no trace of my own culture made me feel excluded. These were the thoughts that occupied me as I wandered, mesmerized by the dialogue between Hafız and Goethe. When I returned home and sat at my computer, an article I came across deeply shook me: "Goethe. The Journey of Hafez from Shiraz via Istanbul and Vienna to Weimar. "Vienna, well, okay, but Istanbul? What was its business in this chain?

---

In a magnificent library in Istanbul, Joseph searched for words in the books before him, reading Turkish words. To fully understand the Persian poems that captivated him, he turned to Turkish commentaries. Gol-bolbol was Persian; in Turkish, these became gül (rose) and bülbül (nightingale). He fell in love with the rose and the nightingale, translating what he would translate into German according to their Turkish pronunciations. Germans reading his translation would call the great poet Hafiz, as in Turkish, not Hafez, as in Persian. It had taken a long time for him to come from his birthplace, Vienna, to Constantinople, but truly, this journey was worth it. The East had changed him, transformed him. The Austrian historian Joseph von Hammer finished translating Hafez in Istanbul and then sat down to write a preface to the Divan.

"Horace and Hafez, like lyric twin stars, the former in the west, the latter in the east, shine among the constellations of fame where they rise with bold peaks.

The present German translation began during his first visit to Istanbul and was completed over a period of seven years. As an aid, he utilized Turkish commentaries, which he had the opportunity to study in Sultan Abdülhamid's library. His aim was not to translate Hafez to the German reader but to translate the German reader into Hafez's world."

Goethe and Marianne had read Hafez from this translation. The rose and the nightingale, the Divan, love, Suleika – all of these were shaped by the influence of Turkish, through Hammer's translation made in Istanbul thanks to his knowledge of Turkish. When the article finished, I was deeply moved by the beauty of the connections and, considering the place Austria held in my life, by the fact that an Austrian was the essential ingredient in this alloy. I couldn't hold back my tears in the face of these magnificent structures created by languages intertwining. I no longer needed to feel excluded; Turkish was the bridge that united East with West and West with East, giving life to Hatem and Suleika; the root of this whole miracle was in Istanbul. As I pursued these connections and understood them, my relationship with life changed. Ordinary, lifeless things branched out, sprouted within me, and turned into huge trees. Moreover, Goethe's identity as Hatem was also related to these places; as I searched, I found so much.

"The most important feature of the Hatem Zograi character in the Divan is the title 'at-Tughra’i,' which lies at the root of his name.

There is a close relationship in meaning and function between Hatim and 'tugra' (the calligraphic seal that is the signature of Ottoman sultans). The tugra is a symbol that validates documents and money. These layers of meaning connect to Goethe's metaphor of 'sealing' (Siegel) in his Book of Suleika." Goethe had sealed his love for Suleika with a tugra.

As I continued my readings about Hammer, the secret hero of the Divan, I suddenly came across this historian's study of Ottoman poetry. Hammer, like the white rabbit Alice chased, called me to unknown literary gardens. Hammer referred to a poet as the Sappho of the Ottomans. My own roots come from the same island as Sappho whom I love; my grandmother was put in a boat from Mytilene and sent to the opposite shore, so when I read about Sappho, I immediately paid attention. Sappho, the queen of women poets. The Sappho of the Ottomans. How interesting could this woman, who lived in the 15th century, be at most? Still, I was curious and began to read.

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One should not speak too soon. When I started researching Mihrî, she only interested me because she was compared to Sappho. It turns out, Mihrî was our only female poet with her own divan. When I saw that she wrote her poems in a Turkish that could be understood with a little effort, instead of Persian, my curiosity about her grew even more. In the 15th century, Mihrî was friends with Sultan Bayezid, fearlessly wrote love poems, and did not marry so as not to harm her poetic standing. Mihrî was a magnificent poet, a great master who could keep company with sultans. The lines in the epigraph mean, "If she is competent, one woman is better than a thousand incompetent men."

There are many sources written about her. I read and read. Mihrî, whom I thought was Sappho, turned out to be someone else entirely, unexpectedly.

"Love made you young like Suleika, Mihrî." Mihrî was the first poetess Suleika in history; female poets began to use this pen name after Mihrî. The feelings I experienced when I read this, to use Suleika's letter, I can neither describe nor explain. And it doesn't end there. Mihrî has a teacher, from whom she learned poetry, and according to some sources, she was in love with him. This person's pen name is Hatemi. Hatem and Suleika in Germany... Hatemi and Suleika in Turkey... What a discovery for someone who sees intertextuality as the secret of life. My words fail me in the face of this magnificent echo.

Hammer, whom we know as an Ottoman historian, and whose poetic side I just learned about, is buried half an hour from Vienna. His tombstone doesn't resemble the Catholic graves there. A historian wrote about Hammer: "He made those who looked at the East ignorantly shut up and think. Even his grave represents a new style. On it, in Arabic, it continues, 'He is the Everlasting, the historian Yusuf bin Hammer, interpreter of three languages.'" The historian called himself Yusuf to break prejudices against the East, and it was written that way on his tombstone. Joseph von, Yusuf bin Hammer. The Viennese Yusuf (Joseph), who taught the Austrian Marianne about Suleika, and me about Mihrî, connecting three Suleikas. Perhaps Yusuf traveled all these paths so that this woman who wanted to write poems—that is, me—could find not just words, but also my poet teacher, who lived six centuries ago, to be reunited with Mihrî. This is not a dream; it is real.

 

Sources:

• Marianne und Johann Jakob Willemer, Briefwechsel mit Goethe,  Insel Verlag

• Marianne von Willemer und Goethe, Geschichte einer Liebe, Dagmar von Gersdorff, Insel Verlas

• On the Meaning of “Hatem” in Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan, Dorothee Metlitzki, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1

• Goethe. Die Reise des Hafez von Shiraz über Istanbul und Wien nach Weimar. Oder: «Europa hatte nie eine reine Seele», Domenico Ingenito - Camilla Miglio,. - In: STUDI GERMANICI. - ISSN 0039-2952. - STAMPA. - (2013), pp. 247-264.

• Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis (Übersetzung: Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall) (http://www.deutsche-liebeslyrik.de/hafis/vorrede1.htm)

• Baki, M. A.: Baki´s, des größten türkischen Lyrikers Diwan. Bearb. v. J. Hammer. Wien: Beck; Paris: Dondè-Dupré 1825 (Beschluss der im vorigen Stück abgebrochenen Recension)

• Aus der Geschichte der Osmanischen Dichtkunst von Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1836)

• Mihrî Hatun, performance, gender-bending, and subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History, Didem Havlioğlu, Syracuse University Press

Courage

In front of me is a white page. It could be a computer screen, a sheet of paper, or a canvas. It’s in my hands to write or draw anything on it. At the same time, the page is looking back at me. Everything that has shaped my identity up to that day—my life experiences, all the books I’ve read, the things I want to tell, what I know of art and literary history, everything that makes me who I am—meets the white page in a gaze. In my hands is the greatest freedom in the world, so vast that the thought of it makes me dizzy. I can write whatever I want on that page. It could be a poem, or I could talk about my favorite books. But as I look at the paper and as sentences begin to form, I notice how my freedoms grow increasingly constrained. Forms, the rules set by those who wrote before me, the structures that make a novel a novel, a story a story, the voices that say: don’t write inverted, write straight sentences. And yet the works that have moved me most have always come from artists who ignored these molds, who created their own language, their own world with a silent revolution. The writings I can’t get enough of reading—Anne Carson slipping incredible insights about love into academic books, or producing anachronistic translations of Antigone, for instance.

In her last few pieces, she speaks about how Parkinson’s disease has distorted her handwriting, and of the sorrow this causes her. But what a way she has of telling it. One reason I love Anne Carson so much is that the artists who have influenced us both are often the same. There is a powerful bond in being able to see magic in the same lifeless things—or in things that others find dull. Anne Carson doesn’t know me, but as a reader I know she is aware of my existence; she writes for me even without knowing me. Otherwise, she wouldn’t turn a mention of her handwriting into a meditation on Cy Twombly or Catullus. From a personal perspective, she opens a door into the worlds of literature and painting; both of us use that door. Anne Carson speaks of her trembling hand, of fears born of age. She is not the only one with trembling hands or advancing years, but she is the only one who connects that trembling to Cy Twombly. Through her words, we stand together before a painting; we look at it together, and I hold her trembling hand.

“Who is Cy Twombly?” asks Roland Barthes in his essay on the painter. Before a huge blank canvas, Twombly draws lines that seem childlike to us. Like every painter before him, he is bound to perspective and compositional rules, yet he doesn’t care about them. Carson once wrote that Twombly fell in love with certain poets at different times and created works inspired by them. Reading that makes me smile, because in an essay I once wrote about Anne Carson, I too had said that what I feel for her is a kind of romantic love.

I’ve just learned that poems describing works of visual art are called ekphrastic poems. What Twombly does isn’t ekphrasis, but Barthes says they can’t really be called paintings either. He explains their relation to calligraphy and writing. What Barthes writes is so beautiful that as I read, I feel Twombly’s paintings might exist only so these words could be written. Scribbles on canvas, more like scrawls, with “Virgil” written large. According to Barthes, this “Virgil” is not just a word; everything Virgil represents condenses and pours into the painting. The painter, deeply influenced by Mallarmé, is compared to the poet by the author of A Lover’s Discourse. He says Mallarmé dismantled the language of poetry as a tool of revolt; both artist and poet use letters as other things, until letters themselves cease to carry any graphic representation. I keep rereading to grasp what he means. The terms, the languages intermingle. 

Why do I care about all this, why does it give me such pleasure, and why do I think of her as I read? I am not an academic, I was simply someone who loved reading novels. What brought me here? That’s what I try to weigh. Perhaps it is language itself that creates this effect—language that produces novels, these paintings, everything. This is also what binds me to Anne Carson. Though she writes in English and I in Turkish, we share a common language. What matters is not the tongue but that her words reach me in my mother tongue. Mallarmé said: everything exists only to end up in a book. For me too, life counts as truly lived only once it has been written. Writing demands so much of us. To write something truly worth reading, we must either create new worlds or lay ourselves bare like an open wound. All our insecurities glare at us in a magnifying mirror, with sharp teeth. We try not to look up, and keep writing while the teeth sink into us, tearing flesh away. We read our words aloud, we cut and dissect ourselves again, we say the cruelest things to our writing, we despise it, we tear it up. Because at the end of the road lies the reader—that hypocrite, elegant monster who will dissect our work, even our lives, strip flesh from bone, swallow and digest us whole. We know this. That’s why all the effort.

They call what Catullus did in poetry a revolution, and dying at thirty didn’t stop him from being one of the greatest revolutionaries. It affects me too, that he and Sappho came from the same lands as I. Barthes wrote that Twombly’s works evoke a Mediterranean effect. The Mediterranean is also the greatest identity I hold on to. Living in different countries makes one reflect deeply on who they are. Even in being ourselves we are not free; there too, molds and rules exist. Yet the dark winters I endured without the sun were real, not learned traits. To swim in the Mediterranean, the Aegean, to feel salt in my hair, the sunsets, olives and figs—these are my identity, what fills my blank page from top to bottom. To grasp this, I had to survive sunless winters, freezing hands in the cold. The Mediterranean is an immense blend of memory and sensation; the Greek and Latin inscriptions we find in Twombly, the mythological, historical, and poetic culture, the entire form, color, and light born where land meets sea, Barthes says. Isn’t that marvelous? I recall Kalyopi, a friend I met by chance in Athens, who said: it is the light and sun of the Mediterranean that created this culture. An American painter using classical culture only to rebel against it, producing something utterly new within all the constraints of form (form always matters—think of Treplev in The Seagull, shouting, “We need new forms! New forms! And if we cannot have them, it would be better to have nothing at all!”). By adding childlike lines (though Barthes insists: never like children, for children struggle to produce such formless marks, whereas Twombly makes them with effortless irony), by sneering under his breath, he makes himself irresistible. From these tangled lines, Anne Carson writes one of the most sensitive essays I’ve ever read about aging, trembling hands, death. And with it she hurls me from one place to another.

I look at one of Twombly’s watercolors, Souvenir de l’Île des Saintes, hoping it will grant me the courage to write formless words that flow freely, words that can drift away in freedom.