Lyrical Touch: Paul Celan and Yunus Emre in the Poetry of Zafer Şenocak

Abstract

AbstractThis article reads Zafer Şenocak’s German- and Turkish-language poetry as a multifaceted site of relation, within which the themes and concerns of Paul Celan and Yunus Emre’s poetry come to touch. In doing so, it develops the concept of lyrical touch or the sensual experience of connecting with others in and through lyrical language. Celan and Yunus Emre touch in Şenocak’s writing in part through his negotiation of each author’s very different conception of the body. Through this process of negotiation, Şenocak sets into motion an interpretive movement not unlike Celan’s theory of the meridian. Connecting the path of Celan’s poems to Yunus Emre’s physical peregrinations as a wandering dervish, Şenocak counters recurrent accusations of hermeticism in Celan’s more pared-down late poetry, pointing instead to his conception of the addressee as a living, breathing, mortal body that is itself in motion.Keywords: embodied experiencePaul Celansufi mysticismthe bodytouchtranslationYunus EmreZafer Şenocak Notes1 Zafer Şenocak, “Berühren oder Begegnen?,” in Zungenentfernung (Berlin: Babel, 2001), 62–63.2 Zafer Şenocak, “Zwischen Herz und Haut,” in Atlas des tropischen Deutschland (Berlin: Babel, 1993), 98–99.3 Zafer Şenocak, “Zwischen den Büchern,” in Das Land hinter den Buchstaben: Deutschland und der Islam im Umbruch (Berlin: Babel, 2006), 211.4 For more on this conception of haptic writing see Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), ix.5 Michael André Bernstein, “In the End Was the Word,” New Republic, 213, no. 18 (October 30, 1995): 39.6 Mark Anderson, “A Poet at War With His Language,” The New York Times, December 31, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/reviews/001231.31anderst.html.7 Ruth Franklin, “How Paul Celan Reconceived Language for a Post-Holocaust World,” The New Yorker, November 16, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/ 23/how-paul-celan-reconceived-language-for-a-post-holocaust-world.8 For an excellent summary of these debates see Kurt Beals, “Alternatives to Impossibility: Translation as Dialogue in the Works of Paul Celan,” Translation Studies 7, no. 3 (2014): 285–86. For more on depictions of Celan’s poetry as “difficult,” “self referential,” “veiled,” and “hermetic” during his lifetime, see also Joanna Klink, “You. An Introduction to Paul Celan,” Iowa Review 30, no.1 (2000): 1–2.9 Grace Smith, The Poetry of Yunus Emre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1–3.10 Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, Yunus Emre: Hayatı ve Bütün Şiirleri, (Istanbul: Altın Kitaplar Yayınevi, 1991), 32–36.11 Ibid., 37–47.12 İlhan Basgöz, Yunus Emre Araştırma ve Şiirlerinden Güldeste (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 5–6.13 Michael Pifer, Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 107.14 Ibid., 111.15 Zafer Şenocak, “Einen anderen Duft als den der Rose: Über türkische Volks- und Divandichtung,” Der Deutschunterricht 45, no. 5 (1993): 18–31, here 20.16 Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 86.17 Zafer Şenocak, Übergang: Ausgewählte Gedichte, 1980-2005 (München: Babel, 2005), 13.18 Ibid., 13.19 Jopseh Twist, Mystical Islam and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary German Culture: Openness to Alterity (Rochester: Camden House, 2018), 49–51.20 Şenocak, Übergang, 13.21 For an excellent analysis of Şenocak’s own poetry as engaging in this type of movement, see Karin Yeşilada, “Poetry on Its Way: aktuelle Zwischenstationen im lyrischen Werk Zafer Şenocaks,” in Zafer Şenocak, ed. Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Cardiff: University of Whales Press, 2003), 112–29.22 For information on the nature of the path see Julian Baldick, Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism (London: Taurus & Co, 2012), 3.23 Paul Celan, “Der Meridian,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 198.24 Emphasis in original. Ibid., 198.25 Ibid., 199.26 Amy-Diana Colin and Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, “Paul Celan’s Bukovina-Meridians,” in Paul Celan Today: A Companion, ed. Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder and Marko Pajević (Boston: de Gruyter, 2021), 5.27 Ibid., 10–19.28 Ibid., 31.29 Celan, “Der Meridian,” 201.30 Ibid., 202.31 Zafer Şenocak, “Paul Celan,” in Zungenentfernung: Bericht aus der Quarantänestation (Munich: Babel, 2001), 96.32 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 225.33 For discussion of God as “No one” see Marlies Janz, Vom Engagement absoluter Poesie: Zur Lyrik und Ästhetik Paul Celans (Königstein/Taunus: Athenäum, 1984), 130.34 For more on the process of unwording, see Shane Weller, Language and Negativity in European Modernism: Toward a Literature of the Unword (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–15.35 For a discussion of the images in “Psalm” in relation to Christ’s Passion see Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 103–4.36 Yunus Emre, Yunus Emre: Selected Poems, trans. Talat Halman (Ankara: Ministry of Turkish Culture, 1993), 24.37 Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad/Dertli Dolap, trans. Zafer Şenocak (Berlin: Dağyeli Verlag, 1986), 40.38 Yunus Emre, The Drop That Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre, trans. Kabir Helminslki and Refik Algan (Boulder: Shambala, 1999), 20.39 For discussion of this conception of the body, see Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 44–45.40 For discussion of God’s immanence as it relates to the body, see Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints' Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 7.41 My emphasis. Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad, 14.42 My translation.43 Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad, 16–17.44 Ibid.,18.45 Yuns Emre, Yunus Emre: Selected Poems, 53.46 Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad, 19. For an excellent analysis of Senocak’s translation style see Joseph Twist, “Translating Yunus Emre, Translating the Self, Translating Islam: Zafer Şenocak’s Turkish-German Path to Modernity,” in Turkish Literature as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 55–72.47 Kugle, Sufi’s, 4, 127.48 Mustafa Özçelik, Anadolu’nun Manevî Irmağı: Yunus Emre (Anakara: Anıl Grup Matbaacılık Yayınlılk, 2018), 29.49 Şenocak, “Einen anderen Duft,” 19.50 Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad, 20.51 Yunus Emre, Yunus Emre: Selected Poems, 137.52 Şenocak, “Yunus Emre,” 95. For a similar analysis, see also Pifer, Kindred Voices, 108. To read the poem in its entirety, see Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad, 20–21.53 Celan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 112.54 Şenocak, Übergang, 64.55 My emphasis. Ibid., 64.56 Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014), 18.57 Şenocak, “Paul Celan,” 94.58 Ibid., 64.59 Yunus Emre, Das Kummerrad, 34.60 My translation.61 My translation.62 Şenocak, “Zwischen Herz und Haut,” 100.63 Ibid., 98. For the full quotation, see the introduction to this article.64 Zafer Şenocak, İlk Işık (Istanbul: Alef Yayınevi, 2016), 16–17.65 Celan, Breathturn into Timestead, 282–83.66 Cited in Tobias, The Discourse of Nature, 80.67 Celan, “Brief an Hans Bender,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 177.68 Ibid., 32.69 Şenocak, “Zwischen den Büchern,” 211.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKristin DickinsonKristin Dickinson is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of DisOrientations: German Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation (1811–1946), which appeared with Penn State University Press in 2021. Her fields of interest include Translation Studies and World Literature; Turkish German Studies; Migration, Multiculturalism and Transnationalism; Orientalism and Occidentalism; Postcolonial Studies; and Mono- and Multilingualism Studies.