Pauline share news from our April Story Cafe…
Wendy welcomed everyone and thanked us for coming to Story Cafe on such a lovely day. She was featuring Turkish writers today and welcomed Turkish author Asli Tohumcu, who was on residency with GWL for two weeks, researching and writing her new book. Asli would be talking about her work and in the second half reading poetry in Turkish, while Wendy would be reading them in translation. (I had a day off from the reading).
In the first half Wendy featured the work of Turkish novelist and writer Elif Shafak. We had an interesting Story Cafe a while back reading from her novel The Island of Missing Trees but today Wendy read from her short book How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division and from her online writing Unmapped Storylands. From How to Stay Sane Wendy read about the importance both of being heard and of listening. I was particularly struck by this sentence “The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning.” Elif has lived in several countries but feels most at home in Storyland. For her the question “Where are you from?” is complicated and often leads to “Yes, but where are you really from?” a question some of us felt should never be asked.
In her essay Searching for the most beautiful word in the English Language she says “we live in a strange world where we are told that …[this] is…tariff. She goes on to explore some of her favourite words, including petrichor (the smell of earth after rain), and hiraeth (from Welsh English, a homesickness for a familiar place that no longer exists, a longing for a home you cannot return to, a nostalgia for a past that never was) . We had a lovely discussion about some of our favourite words.
Asli spoke about her writing and the modern fairy tale about selkies she’s working on at the moment. Fairy stories are common among all cultures and often focus on similar themes wherever they are from.
Poetry after the break was read in both Turkish and English. First the poetry of Karin Karakasli, born in 1972 in Istanbul, who writes in both Turkish and Armenian. We read Fate’s Stone, Q & A, Galata and Salep. Karin is a close friend of Asli – what serependity! This was followed by In the Temple of a Patient God by Bejan Matur, a bold new Kurdish voice in women’s poetry from the Middle East. Finally a poem by Yasar Nezihe who was part of the international socialist movement – we read an excerpt from her poem for May 1 1924 (an early celebration of May Day!).
Wendy thanked Asli for joining us today, enabling us to hear the poetry in its original language. We hope that she will return and join us again.
Bilingual poetry books by Bejan Matur and Karin Karakasli, published by The Poetry Translation Centre, are available from GWL .
