First we would choose a story, one that resonated for some reason or another. One of us would draw up a first draft and wing it off to the other. There would follow a long, leisurely, collaborative back and forth as we consolidated ideas, fine-tuning the lilt and tenor in the new idiom, settling on the right rhythm of a phrase, tracking the story to its final form. In some of the livelier poetic passages, it was easy to get stuck, and it was always helpful to run them through countless revisions with each other, shaking down the original passage over and over again for new flecks of gold.
Many of the stories in this collection first came to our attention during conversations with Turkish friends. We would list the names of the stories we had already chosen, and they would cry, “But what about ‘The Boy on the Tünel’?” Or: “Don’t tell me you’re leaving out ‘The Serpent in Alemdağ’!” We quickly learned that Sait Faik was not only a masterful short story writer — he was a dear friend to his devoted readers. Though his stories are often opaque, fragmentary and oddly plotted, they never fail to conjure up a mood that lingers in your mind for days. They are fleeting meditations, blurred pictures full of explosive creativity; intimate portraits, odes to beloved individuals or avatars (Barba Antimos, Yani Usta and Papaz Efendi); slices of everyday life, a casual remembrance, a crystallized childhood memory, a veiled and deeply personal confession. Sait Faik depicted the lives of lovers, deviants, idlers and the working class: fishermen, builders, off-the-wall philosophers, penniless widows, lost souls pocketing dreams in old countryside coffeehouses. His writing was never rooted in a fixed set of ideas; rather, his stories are stills of life organically unfolding.
Today, he risks being swamped by nostalgia. For the Istanbul he described — the city of a million souls, where, despite the ravages of politics, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Muslims continued to live side by side in noisy and exuberant peace — is no longer. The further it recedes into the past, the greater the temptation to find in his stories the bitter sweetness of lost innocence. But as we read our way through his collected works, we came to the view that even his most charming tales had dark and troubling, silent and painfully knowing souls. And then there were the ones lit only — and only intermittently — by a six-watt bulb. The nostalgia hunter might find little to admire in these glimpses into violence, cruelty and perversion, but when we set them alongside their better-behaved cousins, we came to understand that there is a point in almost every story when he pulls the carpet out from underneath our feet, throws open the curtains to reveal the truth for which we are least prepared.
For most of his life, Sait Faik lived in an opulent family villa — a grand, four-story, wooden Ottoman mansion (now the Sait Faik Museum) not far from the pier on Burgazada, one of the quieter Prince’s islands, where he took shelter from the crowd and wrote. Life for him was idling with the local fishermen and tradesmen on the island, exploring its quiet corners with his dogs, and, every now and then, jumping on a ferry to booze until the sun came up with other writers in the bars of Beyoğlu. Few islanders ever knew he was an accomplished writer until the day he died. Now a monstrous statue of him stands in the center of the main square, a strange twist of fate considering one of his last stories, “I Can’t Go into Town,” in which, on his deathbed, he remembers with a pang of nostalgia the familiars on the island and their crazy stories. Now it seems he’s condemned to stand there for time eternal. Sait Faik died of cirrhosis when he was just forty-six; it was the same disease that took Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey — both had a wild passion for rakı, the national drink also known as lion’s milk, and no doubt the lifestyle that came with it.
In his poem, “Letter II,” Sait Faik writes about the great Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul; for him, it is forever bound up with his memories of a Greek girl he once loved. It is by weaving them together in words that he captures the essence of his beloved city: the idea that these monuments gain meaning only in the intimate stories we can share on common ground. As we bid our guide farewell, after three years of following in his footsteps from ferryboat to coffeehouse, stopping along the way to admire the birds and the violets, the gardens and the fountains, we would like to thank him for illuminating our Istanbul with his.
Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely
Glossary
Ağa: a landlord; also used to address a man of status or power
Balgami: chalcedony, a semitransparent or translucent quartz
Bedesten: a covered bazaar
Beyefendi: esteemed gentleman
Bohça: a bundle made of rough cloth
Çüpra: a more colloquial term for bream
δεν εíναι: “isn’t it” in Greek vernacular
Dramaduna: also Tramontana; northern wind
Dülger: john dory, a fish native to the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean
Efendi: sir, master or lord
Efendim: sir; literally “my lord”
Eskici: a peddler of old clothes and furniture
Günbatısı: western wind
Gündoğusu: easterly wind
Han: a former Ottoman inn; many today still remain as they were hundreds of years ago
Haram: an action, thought, food etc. forbidden by the tenets of Islam
Hasapiko: A Greek folk dance; literally the “butcher’s dance”
Helva: a sweet dish made of semolina and flour
Kalinikta: “goodnight” in Greek
Karayeclass="underline" northwest wind; the mistral
Keşişleme: southeasterly wind
Kuruş: a cent of a Turkish lira
Külhanbeyi: a hoodlum or ruffian with a unique way of dressing; historically a young man who tended the fires of a Turkish hamam
Lodos: a southern wind
Maestro: Northwestern wind
Mastika: a type of rakı made with mastic
Mavrodaphn: a black wine grape indigenous to Northern Greece
Meyhane: a Turkish tavern
Meze: an appetizer usually made with olive oil
Panaya mou: Mother Mary
Poyraz: a northern wind; Boreas, the Latin God of the north wind
Sakız rakı: rakı made with mastic; mastika in Turkish
Salep: a hot drink made with milk and orchard roots, traditionally served in winter
Simit: a ring-shaped pretzel covered in sesame seeds; also a life-buoy
Sinağrit: sea bream
Suma: the grape pomace used to make rakı
Tüneclass="underline" a short, one-stop funicular in Beyoğlu, Istanbul
Usta: master or artisan; also used as a term of affection
Viresi: “Hey you” in Greek vernacular
Yassı and Sivri: two smaller uninhabited islands in the Marmara Sea, part of the archipelago known as the Princes’ Islands