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Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.58.1.0228

1528-4212

Kenan Behzat Sharpe,

Music History and Culture

Translating the Counterculture represents a welcome addition to a slew of works reconsidering the writings of the Beat Generation from a comparative and global perspective. The book is informed by the transnational turn in U.S. American Studies and situates itself within a more global current of Beat Studies. The 2018 publication of a Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature and the activities of the European Beat Studies Network are just two of the most recent signs that a process of deprovincialization of Beat literature is underway. Mortenson's book builds on these developments while also offering new directions to be explored.Translating the Counterculture dives into the case study of Turkey to show how the afterlives of the Beats can be studied in periods and locales distant from the original postwar context of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and company. Mortenson reveals alternative possibilities for the Beats, decentering the familiar U.S. American version of the Beat generation as the final arbiter of its meaning. By exploring the reception of the Beats in the 1990s and early 2000s in Turkey, Mortenson offers readers “a glimpse of other possible trajectories for their interpretation and deployment” (4).Deployment, use, utility: these are important words for a book that emphasizes the necessarily creative and agential aspects of literary reception. Drawing on the lessons of translation theory, Mortenson repeatedly stresses the “interested” aspects of the Beats' reception in Turkey and—by extension—elsewhere. Depending on the needs of a particular translator or historical conjuncture, the source culture of the Beats is adapted, modified, and adjusted. While Mortenson seems to suggest that all literature is available for this kind of creative reinterpretation, the malleability of Beats to suit different purposes in target cultures means that they “are no longer simply an American phenomenon” (198).The book's first two chapters explore the cultural and historical legacies that have shaped the reception of the Beats in Turkey. Mortenson explores the concept of the “underground,” attentive to how the term's meaning shifts as it travels between the Cold War context of the U.S./Western Europe of the 1950s and 1960s to the post-coup environment of 1980s/1990s Turkey, with its photocopied fanzines and subcultural publishing houses. Though the Beats may have lost their critical edge in places like the United States, where they are comfortably ensconced in the (counter-)cultural canon, in Turkey, Beat writers can still be called on as a transgressive resource for challenging local orthodoxies and mores.The uses to which the Beats can be put are various. One chapter focuses on the 2011 obscenity trial against a Turkish translation of The Soft Machine (1961). Mortenson shows how a certain version of William S. Burroughs was created through translations, critical essays, and activism, which was useful for challenging censorship and homophobia in Turkey. Another chapter, focusing on the reception of Kerouac's On the Road (1957), reveals a moment where cultural translation goes haywire. The difficulty Turkish young people face in identifying with the particularly American notions of mobility and freedom in the novel reveals that “Beat rebellion is not timeless and universal but rather relies on a particular postwar U.S. context for its articulation” (93–94).Chapter 5, “Howling in Turkish: Appropriating the Many Faces of Allen Ginsberg,” is the book's high point. Here Mortenson analyzes three translations of Howl (1956), each of which emphasizes a different aspect of Ginsberg based on the exigencies of the moment. In a 1976 translation, Ginsberg's anti-capitalist credentials were stressed. In 1991, he was presented as a more personable and intimate figure, while in 2013 his spiritual side is most apparent. Mortenson's central argument is that long as new readings are possible, the Beats, “never remain static” (161). He also builds on responses given to the three translations by a focus group of Turkish undergraduates. Looking closely at the single line “the madman bum and angel beat in Time” from Howl reveals the ambiguity inherent in the English and the linguistic and cultural difficulties that inhere in the very concept of “Beat” (172). The chapter then narrates a rare moment of direct contact between Beat writers and their Turkish counterparts. For Mortenson, the June 1990 meeting of Ginsberg with poets Melih Cevdet Anday, Can Yücel, Özdemir İnce, and others in Istanbul reveals both the possibility and limitations of transnational collaboration. Ginsberg's Turkish hosts—all left-wing victims of state repression or censorship at various times—are disappointed to find that their American guest is more interested in discussing human rights abuses and drugs than literature. Mortenson also includes some poetry spontaneously composed by Ginsberg and Yücel that evening at the drinking table. This helpfully uncovered historical document reveals mutual recognition across distance.Translating the Counterculture seeks to challenge lingering U.S. American exceptionalism when it comes to the Beats. The book puts forward a framework for discussing translation and influence without falling into a normative model. For, as Mortenson recognizes, “an insistence on the universality of the Beats [….] as a premier site for dissent raises the specter of imperialism in an inverted form—the American counterculture becomes the model for countering the neoliberal order inaugurated by the United States itself” (5). The book's solution is to emphasize the agency inherent in local reception. Mortenson gives interpretive legitimacy to alternative readings of the Beats from abroad, showing how the target culture (Turkey) transforms the source text (the canonical Beats). Even more suggestively, he seems at moments to be suggesting that the source itself is irrevocably transformed by the encounter: knowing how the Beats are read elsewhere, they cannot be read the same old way again.However, Mortenson's emphasis on “use”—on the Beats being used to fill a particular need in the target culture—ends up reifying certain differences between Turkey and the United States. He writes, “Turkey lacks the same sort of tradition of a resistant cultural poetics” exemplified by the Beats (82). Such statements provide a limited picture of the 1960s and 1970s as it was lived in Turkey. According to Mortenson, before the violent repression of the 1980 coup in Turkey, “communism remained a viable political option” for the Turkish left. As a result, “Turkey had yet to embrace the short of identity politics and celebration of individual freedom inaugurated by the 1960s [U.S.] counterculture” (161). This is where the Beats are useful for Mortenson's argument: “as Turkey switched from political to cultural forms of dissent” in the post-coup period, the Beat Generation gets adopted as a useful predecessor (159).While differences between the long 1960s in the two contexts of Turkey and the United States are undeniable, they are overemphasized in the book. A series of strong oppositions run throughout the text: politics/culture, Old Left/New Left, communism/counterculture, West/non-West. Turkish youth are presented as needing something useful that (only) the model of the U.S. counterculture could provide. It is true that in Turkey strictly political dissent was dominant in the 1960s, whereas after 1980 cultural dissent was more emphasized. However, by using the Turkish 1960s as a strawman rather than giving a nuanced depiction of the period—and by stressing U.S. influence in the politics-to-culture shift over and against local or even other foreign models (the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos in Özdemir İnce's translations from the 1970s, for example)—the book risks falling into the kind of exceptionalism it is otherwise so vigilant to avoid. A slight shift in emphasis could remedy this impression. The 1960s in Turkey was more than a “Marxist left vying with a nationalist right in often violent clashes” (30). The period witnessed a cultural renaissance, with artist-activists such as director Yılmaz Güney or rocker Cem Karaca dominating the fields of cinema, music, theater, and literature. Culture and politics were not always opposed.The most significant development of the period, in relation to Mortenson's argument about cultural dissent, was the rise to prominence of the poets associated with İkinci Yeni, or the “Second New.” Starting in the mid-1950s, at roughly the same time as the Beats, the poets Cemal Süreya, Ece Ayhan, Edip Cansever, and others were writing experimental poetry dealing with themes of sex, pleasure, politics, minority cultures, and underground lifestyles. In the 1960s, a major debate ensued in the Turkish left's little magazines about whether these poets were reactionary or revolutionary. (Detractors—including Can Yücel, who Mortenson erroneously describes a member of the Second New in his single mention of the poetic movement—even described these bohemian poets pejoratively as a rip-off of the Beats.) In recent decades, Turkish young people have been rediscovering this poetry, using it a model for rebellion, which is political and countercultural. More emphasis on these and other local precedents, and a more detailed description of the 1960s in Turkey, would have provided a fuller picture of the “particularly Turkish concerns, systems, and institutions” that shaped the reception of the Beats (9).