To the Spring, by Night

In the spring of 2004 I was asked by an international translation revue to put into English some excerpts from a long poem by a French language writer whose name was unfamiliar to me: Seyhmus Dagtekin. I soon found out that he was not French by birth; rather, he was a Turkish Kurd who had arrived in Paris in his early twenties, had begun writing in French four years later, and who was now a prolific poet. The passage I was given to translate was headlong, surreal… and difficult.  We communicated by e-mail and then by telephone to deal with some of those difficulties. That was our first contact.

At about the same time I saw that he had recently published a book of prose called, in French,  À la source, la nuit:  To the Spring, by Night. Intrigued, I ordered it. What was my surprise to discover that this novel/memoir, in contrast to the poetry, was written in a quiet, limpid, seductive, and deceptively simple style that seemed to have emerged from another part of the brain:

I was small. And my village was small, I came to know that in time. But when I was small it was big for me, so big that when I had to cross it from one end to the other, I was afraid.

It was as if I had to pass through seven countries and three continents, as many seas and as many mountains. As if I were navigating the highest heavens and the earth’s depths. Every hundred metres the landscape was different, and so was I.

So it began. I instantly fell under the book’s spell, and what wove the spell, in the first instance, was the language. This relative newcomer from a distant culture had somehow managed to exploit the genius and the muted musicality of the French language with a discretion and a finesse that was truly impressive.

And as the book unfolded, I was progressively drawn into a world apart. A tiny Kurdish village tucked into the mountains with no electricity and little literacy where each animal, artefact, stone, stream, spring was inhabited by its own spirit, where sunlit dust motes served for divination, where wolves made off with children and men lived with wolves, where the heavens rained down manna in time of famine, where shadowy hangings and massacres were village lore, where the dead reappeared as shooting stars, where smugglers came and went on the plains below, where a small boy learned to find his way to the far end of his small world, a world as timeless as that of the Homeric epics with which Dagtekin felt a strong affinity.

A translator is at times possessed by a sense of mission, by an obsessive desire to make a much-loved book accessible to a wider readership. So it was, in my case, with To the Spring by Night. It was a long road, and along the way I sometimes felt as if I were “navigating the highest heavens and the earth’s depths.” But thanks to the dedication and support of McGill Queen’s University Press, the book is now there, beautifully produced, in English. I fervently hope that it will get the readership it deserves.

 

No comments yet.

---

* Get an image next to your comment by visiting Gravatar.com and uploading a photo that links to your email address.

Post a Comment All fields are required, unless noted.
Name
Email Address
URL (optional)
Comment