It came to mind only after I had penned the first sentence. It was four in the afternoon — before me sit Yassı and Sivri. If I were a little younger, if a dear friend had turned to me and said, “Come on, let’s swim across,” I’d have jumped into the water without a second thought — the islands are that close. I’m sitting on a rock, tickled by the chill of the sea. I’m so close. Just a little stretch and I’d be touching the water with my foot. There is a thin and sparkling line traveling toward me from the shores of Yassı to a point just 300 meters ahead (more or less). The sun hangs directly over it. I watch it race toward its end point; I watch it slowly burning away in the open space.
I was about to choose the word “tract” for “open space.” But I could never figure out just where to use it. The poor word! Why should I blame you? It’s not your fault. My wretched poems are still in my mind:
The tract, ah the tract
I will look into the tract
The colored cataract in your eyes
Will you die for it? Kill for it?
Rocks are all around me. I spy a fledgling seagull — the young ones have dark feathers and dark beaks. He trundles past with purpose in his stride. He knows what’s for dinner, but still he’s as mournful as a civil servant coming home from work. A fly is swirling around me. What are flies doing on this part of the island? Can’t they find the way to that dirty butcher in the little village down the road from here? Only today he jacked up his price of his meat to one hundred seventy-five kuruş …
Beyond the bright line of light I told you about is a dark blue line. It can take you as far as the Bozburun Peninsula. My big toe is pointing right at it.
Once a painter — a friend of mine — gave us a short lesson, and while we were painting he said, “First you need to paint the landscape, and then you add the extra details.” But in a story — as we prepare to paint the landscape … ah, there goes a rowboat — it just doesn’t work. There are two people inside that boat. I can’t tell who they are. They’re speaking Greek. “Ah, that’s Sait,” one says. My dog is with me. What a pain! He never leaves me alone, follows me everywhere. He’s on a rock a little farther along. They must have realized it was me when they saw him.
The weather on Bozburun looks much the same, only a little heavier, a little darker. The hills rise slowly into the sky. Sometimes I can just dimly make out a bare strip of land, or maybe a little smoke or a field of vegetables. The sea is darker here, but I wouldn’t say it was windier because there’s no wind today, just a little nip in the air. The piece of land that stretches to the tip of the rock ahead of me turns a little darker, like the darkening air above it; with the sudden swiftness of lace it disappears. On the stretch of sea that meets the land, two white sailboats — one fading into the blackness, and the other a little closer — but now they slip behind the rocks and are gone. And now they are back. They’re tacking back and forth in ten-meter swerves off the rocks on the shore. Further along, another small hill. Two dark green pine trees with tiny emerald pine cones as fragile as little toys. To my left, a sliver of the moon. Lighting up the face of the moon in a way that makes me wonder if I’m still in this world. So bright that when I take off my glasses it almost snuffs me out. “Now what will happen if we add all this to our scene,” I wonder. On my right, I can see smoke over Sivriada two knots out — to use a captain’s lingo. I stand up to watch a ferryboat pass, because a rock has blocked the view. But what does this mean for us? For you it means nothing at all. For me, it’s the same.
Nothing’s beautiful without people. It’s people who bring beauty into a landscape. But as I sit inside this moment, this beautiful September day, with the moon in the sky and the sun shimmering in the distance, like a crystal garden … there’s no beauty. Just a void. It’s just a landscape, silent and badly painted …
No, I’m not talking about my love. With my love at my side, this would be a paradise even God could not create. But it would be beautiful with others, too. This place is teeming with people on Sunday. The wind ripples through the Greek girls’ dresses, sending them up in the air. You’ll see thin-faced children lifting their arms up and throwing themselves over into the sea. The sun burns my skin. The air tickles my chest. The water licks my legs. Hayırsız Islands, Bozburun Peninsula, smoke over the mountains, sailboats, and the moon, rocks, and those green pines playing on my eyes. They mean nothing, until I can people them. So I sit here, thinking about people — and especially you, my love. Without people, without you, there is no meaning. I’m in love, that’s why.
The rowboat I mentioned earlier has turned around. It’s closer now. I recognize the people inside. They’ve spotted my dog. If they come by once more, I’ll say, “Come on over, let’s have a smoke.” We hardly know each other, but what’s the problem with that? For the last half hour I’ve only heard the buzz of a fly. But the dolphins are swimming by. Oh, if nothing else, the dolphins are swimming by.
Translators’ Afterword
In 1925 Sait Faik was expelled, along with forty other students, from one of Istanbul’s prestigious secondary schools for planting a needle in their teacher’s seat cushion (the instructor of Arabic reportedly leapt up out of his chair, screaming, when the bodkin pierced his buttocks), and Sait Faik was promptly sent to a school in Bursa, a leafy city at the foot of Mt. Uludağ, where he spent much of his time alone in the school garden, pensive and withdrawn. Soon he showed a talent for writing stories — they seemed to race right out from under his pen. They were depictions of the people and the world around him, sketched in an intimate, creative, dramatic new voice. Sait Faik seemed to have the knack to sum up an entire world in just two pages. First he wrote “The Silk Handkerchief” and “The Hairspring,” now two of his most famous stories. Today they are tender memories in the shared Turkish consciousness. He was an original, who wrote as he spoke, celebrating the beauty of the ordinary even as he painted in its cracks and shadows, its silences and secrets. By the time of his death he was one of the best-loved writers in Turkey.
More than half a century later, Sait Faik remains an iconic figure. The nation’s most prestigious short story award carries his name. In the collective memory, he is the embodiment of the humble artist, an ambassador for the forgotten and the downtrodden. Mention his name and you’ll no doubt in response get a line from one of his stories or an anecdote: how he used to send his dog to the local store with a shopping list and a basket, for example. People remember him as an honest man, openhearted, committed to his art, self-critical, unpretentious, and generous (he bequeathed his entire estate to the Daruşşafaka Foundation, which runs a school for orphans and disadvantaged children). He wrote from the gut, or in his words, “balancing on one foot,” dashing off stories under pine trees, in rundown coffeehouses or late at night after his mother had gone to bed. His later stories in particular are impressionistic, surreal, hallucinatory. The selected stories here are presented chronologically, roughly following the years they were first published. There is darkness in them all, but in his last stories, there is also the anguish of a man who knows he is dying too young, and too soon.
Born in 1906, Sait Faik witnessed the First World War, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the founding of a zealously westernizing Republic. These radical political changes were keenly felt and dramatically reflected in Istanbul’s literary circles, with alliances forever changing, and fine wars of words at each turn, but Sait Faik seemed to float above the fray, honing his own approach to writing, drawing on influences both in Turkey and abroad, always fixed on artistic integrity. At the height of the Language Revolution, instigated by Ataturk to cleanse Turkish of Persian and Arabic influence, writers were under relentless pressure to conform. But in the late 1940s, a new literary movement, the Garip or First New Movement, called for a language that was lighter, brighter and less reverent. Sait Faik was a devotee. And so his prose is an odd (and to us, bewitching) blend of the lyrical and a rough vernacular. To do it justice in translation, we often favored mood over meaning, searching for the melody or rhythm to capture an elusive phrase.