a turkish literature free-for-all

So the Guardian has also picked Turkey as the next stop on its "World Literature Tour" and thrown the comments open to suggestions for what to read. The resulting list is long and lively. As expected, the nationalist asshats make an appearance (though not as quickly as I'd have expected) as do the devotees of assorted religious leaders (on the spectrum from reasonably respectable to completely looney). But to my great pleasure, the lists of novelists and short story writers, the links with translation recommendations, and best of all, the cut-and-pasted poetry (reams of Hikmet, above all, but also Orhan Veli, Can Yücel, Fuzuli, Yunus Emre, Rumi, and so on) drown out the haters. The pen is mightier, etc.

(Although the ahistoricism of claiming Rumi as a "Turkish" poet does sort of make my brain explode. He was born in what's now Afghanistan, lived most of his life in a pre-Ottoman Seljuk state, and wrote his poetry in Persian. That said, his earthly remains are most definitely located in Turkey--I've visited to his tomb in Konya--and the Turks have showed no hestiation to lay claim to this heritage: his work is widely read and loved in modern Turkish translation, and the Konya complex is a major pilgrimage site. Ditto as to Fuzuli and the other Perso-Ottoman poets mentioned....)

My own echoes of/additions to the list, restricting myself to modern/republican Turkey: for poetry, Hikmet first and always--someone copied 'Things I Didn't Know I Loved' into the discussion thread, bless them--also Cemal Süreyya, who my friend & teacher V. in İstanbul taught me to appreciate, Veli, and Nilgün Marmara; for fiction and essays, Elif Şafak/Shafak (who's probably the most widely available in English after Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal), Moris Farhi, what little I've read of Aslı Erdoğan (Soft Skull Press is about to bring out an English translation of Kırmızı Pelerinli Kent, which is set in Brazil), Latife Tekin with her tales of the great geçekondu "edge city" slums, and I'm just starting to read Ahmet Altan's historical fiction--my mentor R. gave me a copy of Kılıç Yarası Gibi when I left for NY. It's slow going since I'm not used to reading novels in Turkish, but I'm enjoying the fragments so far.