Turkish Stories from Four Decades

by Aziz Nesin

English (translation)
Original Turkish

Genres: Short Stories, Turkish

200 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1991

About the author

Aziz Nesin was a Turkish humorist and author of more than 100 books.
Nesin was born in 1915 on Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands of Istanbul, in the days of the Ottoman Empire. After serving as a career officer for several years, he became the editor of a series of satirical periodicals with a socialist slant. He was jailed several times and placed under surveillance by the National Security Service (MAH in Turkish) for his political views. Among the incriminating pieces of evidence they found against him during his military service was his theft and sale for 35 Lira of two goats intended for his company—a violation of clause 131/2 of the Military Penal Code. One 98-year-old former MAH officer named Neşet Güriş alleged that Nesin was in fact a MAH member, but this has been disputed

Nesin provided a strong indictment of the oppression and brutalization of the common man. He satirized bureaucracy and exposed economic inequities in stories that effectively combine local color and universal truths. Aziz Nesin has been presented with numerous awards in Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. During latter parts of his life he was said to be the only Turkish author who made a living only out of his earnings from his books.

On 6 June 1956, he married a coworker from the Akbaba magazine, Meral Çelen.

In 1972, he founded the Nesin Foundation. The purpose of the Nesin Foundation is to take, each year, four poor and destitute children into the Foundation's home and provide every necessity - shelter, education and training, starting from elementary school - until they complete high school, a trade school, or until they acquire a vocation. Aziz Nesin has donated, gratis, to the Nesin Foundation his copyrights in their entirety for all his works in Turkey or other countries, including all of his published books, all plays to be staged, all copyrights for films, and all his works performed or used in radio or television.

Aziz Nesin was a political activist. After the 1980 military coup led by Kenan Evren, the intelligentsia was oppressed. Aziz Nesin led a number of intellectuals to take a stand against the military government, by issuing the Petition of Intellectuals (Turkish: Aydınlar Dilekçesi).

He championed free speech, especially the right to criticize Islam without compromise. In early 1990s he started a translation of Salman Rushdie's controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. This made him a target for radical Islamist organizations, who were gaining popularity throughout Turkey. On July 2, 1993 while attending a mostly Alevi cultural festival in the central Anatolian city of Sivas a mob organized by radical Islamists gathered around the Madimak Hotel, where the festival attendants were accommodated, calling for Sharia and death to infidels. After hours of siege, the mob set the hotel on fire. After flames engulfed several lower floors of the hotel, firetrucks managed to get close, and Aziz Nesin and many guests of the hotel escaped. However, 37 people were killed. This event, also known as the Sivas massacre, was seen as a major assault on free speech and human rights in Turkey, and it deepened the rift between religious- and secular-minded people.

He devoted his last years to fighting ignorance and religious fundamentalism.

Aziz Nesin died on July 6 1995 due to a heart attack, after a book signing event in Çeşme, İzmir. After his death, his body was buried in an unknown location in the land of Nesin Foundation without any ceremony, as suggested by his will.

Reviews

[Gregsamsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

OMG HAVE YOU HEARD? ITALO CALVINO AND MARK TWAIN HAD A BABY! AND HE'S TURKISH!

"One day Jesus sat in a cafe with a plastic surgeon and a car repairman."

There is a uniquely complex sort of irony to the voice in these tales: it is often self-consciously folksy, spoofing somehow both sentimentally simple village wisdom as well as the "sophisticated" perspective that is usually goofed on by earnest versions of such a voice.

"I had another pair of glasses made according to the professor's prescription. These glasses were really good. I could see everything with them. The only thing was, nothing was where it should have been."

Stop reading this stupid review right now and run screaming to your nearest bookseller or library (or if you have time both) and prepare yourself in transit for some desk-pounding and stern declarations. As you travel, do an internal sensate nerve inventory on the outer edge of your pounding-hand to determine just how much fist-banging you could endure doing as you speculate about the upcoming poundable surface and adjust your expectations along the whole granite-to-particleboard potentialities. Clear your throat. You are about to launch stentorian questions and demands. Practice. Sing. Go ahead. Go deep. Go loud.

"It wouldn't have been proper to have showed up at the Minister's evening invitation with a book. I don't like those people who are never without a book under their arms to show people that they are intellectuals, people who don't even go to the toilet without a book. I don't know what they would say about me if they saw me here with a book."

Arrive. Locate a person of control. You: (loudly) "WHY DO YOU NOT HAVE ANY AZIZ NESIN?" (Don't bother checking--they don't. Now pound the nearest surface on the stressed syllables that your particular rhythm of speech dictates). You: (sternly) "I demand you acquire some Aziz Nesin!" (if you are in Europe or North America, please de-stress the non-Western sound of the name and take care to minimize your own personal resemblance to media-disseminated images of terrorists, if necessary, but then again if that's necessary I guess you needn't be told).

"There is another unknown world beside this world which we know. Of that other unknown world with its six continents, there is a seventh continent also, unknown to those who live in the other six continents and in that continent there is an unknown country. So it was that these unknown people of the unknown world of the unknown country of the unknown continent had lived all to themselves since an unknown time."

At this point the functionary you are addressing will respond such that you may need to clarify that you are talking about an atheist author outrageously esteemed in a 95% Muslim country who willed all his proceeds to orphans. If you shop for produce at a local organic cooperative, you already know exactly which lilt of voice to throw on that last bit of information.

"The Emperor in a certain country, like all emperors in all times and in all places, went out hunting when he could spare the time from such important state business as being present at inauguration ceremonies, reviewing parades, reading speeches that other people had written and taking trips."

The resistance you next face may come in the form of one of these two objections: 1) He's not popular enough, or 2) His popularity is already such that interested people already have enough other ways to acquire his work and likely already have. Pound. Again.

"I have always resented the inequalities of nature, as far back as I can remember. People's heights, for instance. Some people don't get what they are entitled to and stay short while their leftovers are given to others who just grow and grow."

1) You: "Go on GoodReads and see that he has THOUSANDS of readers!"
2) You: "Go on GoodReads and see that his English-language exposure is virtually nil!"

"Very long ago, very recently, from before, from behind, from the other side, from this side, from yesterday, from tomorrow and both before I was born and after I had died there was a town on the face of the earth and there was a house amongst the houses of that town..."

Later, after your poundeloquence has snagged you this tight treasure of short tales, it's OK to get pissed at me for the B-list less-impressive stories, but also rejoice in major Samsa-sparked sensuality as you revel in the luxurious linen nest of list A below. OK, I strained the consonance and the conceit because (sorry) he's not a super-sensual writer (nor really strong on character, or, uh, plot, and oh OK style), but that didn't hurt Borges did it? Maybe think Turkish Borges except actually verrrry engagé, more naughty, more populist, more winking, more devious, more familiar with life embedded within a border/boundary/frontier (East/West), where not only is most trade actually smuggling, but narrative is too.

"What have the poor stones, the concrete, the iron, and the wood of the monuments of civilization ever done to us that we should destroy them? As a result of all this research, they succeeded in discovering the neutron bomb. We can thus see that the neutron bomb is a weapon which will save and protect our civilization and is the greatest wonder of our age." (1978)

Part of the A-List:

THE GRAND VIZIER'S DONKEY--A wacky fable about how excess power breeds excess reliance on others to preserve it, and the absurdities produced by the need for those others to always be right.

JESUS AND TWO PEOPLE--Rude violent parody of the Samaritan story.

WE HUMANS--A surreal dream story about (ab)normality

ONE MADMAN FOR ONE HUNDRED LIRAS--Monetary incentive given for capture of asylum escapees multiplies the perceived number of free crazy people.

DON'T YOU HAVE ANY DONKEYS IN YOUR COUNTRY?--Quality spoof of the rarity and plenitude of Turkish antiquities in this haggling showdown between an American collector and a peasant, reminiscent of a Nasreddin Hoja tale.

HOW THEY LOVED THE OLD MAN--An elderly divorced man loses touch with friends, colleagues, neighbors, family, and acquaintances and descends into lonely despair until a much younger woman falls in love with him, bringing everyone back into his life. To chastise him.

While many of the book's fablesque stories are about as subtle as Aesop's, others tangle the usual moral arc into a cartoon nihilism. Some stories rather bluntly jab the reader with a political point that was likely only quite sharp (and risky) in their original social context, while others deliberately do damage to the value of homey illustrative accounts as encapsulated knowledge. They offer the perverse delight of utter pointlessness.

For more Nesin titles in English and some other general info, check out my entry on him at Nathan's Buried Book Club here.

[Caroline]

I will chalk up my underwhelmed reaction to the translation. I could see the potential, but almost every time the story fell flat for me. The translator apparently learned Turkish while in Turkey for other purposes and tackled Nesin as an amateur translator. Given Nesin's status in Turkey, I'll try to find a book translated by someone with better skills.