Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

naturally all this didn’t develop as smoothly as it would have for Halit Ayarcı. Every so often my soft, complacent, compassionate nature — made softer over time by poverty and despair — would step in to interrupt and alter my course. In effect I became a man whose thoughts, decisions, and speech patterns were all in a jumble.

How eloquently this describes the fate of many human beings, or “things,” forced into alien ways and lifestyles — the hundreds of millions of white-shirted workers with shakily grasped European languages and irretrievably impaired mother tongues. These are the people encountered in passing, if at all, in the works of Western travel writers, marked off from their suave Westernized compatriots by their broken English, seemingly childish naïveté, and residence in a netherworld of perception and awareness.

Max Weber, the tragic prophet of modernity, saw the bureaucratic and technological state as an “iron cage” in which we live as “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” Even worse, Weber feared, “this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” The Time Regulation Institute explodes that presumption by showing us, in our postmodern cages, glimpses of another kind of civilization. It also mourns, more eloquently and sensitively than any novel I know, the obscure sufferings of people in less “developed” societies — those who, uprooted from their old ways of being, must languish eternally in the waiting room of history.

PANKAJ MISHRA

As a young man, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar witnessed the transformation, almost overnight, of the ornate, opaque language we now know as Ottoman into an idiom thought to be more fitting for a modern, westernizing republic. First came the Alphabet Revolution, in 1928. Atatürk gave his new nation just three months to say good-bye to Arabic script and to master the new Latin(ate) orthography. In 1932 he launched the Language Revolution, with the aim of ridding modern Turkish of all words of Arabic or Persian origin. The Turkish Language Society, to which he entrusted this great task, did not, in the end, manage to do away with all such words, nor did it succeed in winning support for the thousands of neologisms it invented to replace them. But it did succeed in reducing the vocabulary by 60 percent. The distance between Ottoman and modern Turkish has grown with every decade, so much so that Atatürk’s own orations, which still inform what Turkish schoolchildren learn about their history, have been translated twice.

Writers were intimately involved in this story from the beginning. Some allied themselves with the state; many others ended up in prison. But support for “pure Turkish” remained strong on both sides of the political divide. Tanpınar was the great exception. He revelled in Ottoman’s rich blend of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. He believed that the way forward was not to sever all links with tradition but to find graceful and harmonious ways to blend Eastern and Western influences. He refused to change his language to suit the bureaucrats. For this he was heavily criticized, dismissed in literary circles as old-fashioned and irrelevant. The Time Regulation Institute , first published in book form in the year of his death, was his last (and most lasting) revenge.

Its hero, Hayri Irdal, speaks a language that, however much it strains to keep pace with modern times, keeps collapsing into its old ways. As much as he tries to embrace new words and ideas, his old ones come back to claim him. This losing battle is evident in Hayri’s every reminiscence. Guilelessly he climbs from clause to clause, as we count the seconds before the edifice starts to teeter.

That’s how it is, at least, for those of us who have had the privilege of reading The Time Regulation Institute in the original. For those of us familiar with Turkey’s traditions of oral storytelling, there is also the pleasure of watching Hayri walk way out on a limb, and then the limb of the limb, as we begin to ask ourselves if he and his author have perhaps lost the thread, the plot, the point, or even their minds. And then, just as our own minds begin to wander, there’s a slap on the table, bringing the story, the chapter, the novel to a sudden and startling end, and all those random details fall neatly, and perfectly, into place.

How to capture these sublime feats in a language that has never suffered political interference of this order? How to convey the changes of register that are the source of so much of the comedy? For us the answer was to go beyond the usual (and in this novel, often insoluble) problems of diction and meaning, to listen instead to the music of the narration. For Tanpınar was one of the great stylists of his age. He was famed for his poetry as well as for his prose. Language was his instrument, and he brought to it all he knew of music, both Eastern and Western. Whatever games he played on the printed page, he played them first with sound.

We did things in the opposite order when shaping his sentences in English. First we put the words on the page. Then we listened for the voice, arranging, rearranging, and changing the words and clauses until we heard something of the Turkish music coming through.

Here we should point out that we are not alone in this: No one can translate Turkish into English without a great deal of arranging and rearranging. Turkish is an agglutinative language. It routinely appends strings of eight, nine, or more suffixes to its root nouns. It has a single word for he, she, and it. It offers no independently standing definite or indefinite articles. It has a much more refined understanding of time than we do. Not only can it distinguish between hearsay and that which we have seen with our own eyes, but it can also change a verb from active to passive with the addition of a two-letter, midword syllable that is all too easily missed by Anglophone eyes. It takes an easygoing approach (in our eyes, at least) to singulars and plurals. It likes cascading clauses beginning with verbal nouns that are as likely as not to be in the passive voice — as in “the doing unto of,” or even “the having been done unto of.” It puts the verb at the end of the sentence, and when this sentence comes from a master stylist who feels unjustly constrained by the politics of language, finding solace in a grammar too flexible for bureaucrats to contain, that verb will often turn the entire sentence on its head.

All this leaves much room, and perhaps too much room, for interpretation. So much the better, then, that there were two of us. It was easier to take a risk knowing that someone was watching to catch us if we fell — or skipped a line, perhaps to escape yet another logic-defying sentence. It was fun having company, on the bad days and the good. Our most difficult day came right at the end, when we were trying to work out the shape and dimensions of the Institute itself. The solution came to Alex in a dream. And, oh, how we laughed when we worked through it the next day, and saw how perfectly this preposterous structure reflected the author’s ideas about modernization-from-above. It was a thrill to bring this metaphor, and this book, into English. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

MAUREEN FREELY AND ALEXANDER DAWE

Finkel, Andrew. Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire . New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Freely, John. Istanbul: The Imperial City . New York: Viking, 1997.

Freely, John and Hilary Sumner-Boyd. Strolling through Istanbul . London: I.B. Tauris, 2010.