TE16 Turkish Delight

Jürek and Qan 1 (novel excerpt) by Nazli Karabiyikoglu Translated from Turkish by Eylül Deniz Doğanay

Leaving the buzzing cities in a wagon’s window The moors we want to run across barefoot are no longer Mother Nature. —Hüseyin Ferhad, “Tünel”

A man named Noah His torsoonly filled thewidthof the streets. Hedidn’t like the city, where skyscrapers penetrated through people, who weren’t there in its nicestmomentswhen birdswould sing out loud. If hewasn’t frequenting the bars at inner corners where the homeless took shelter from the freezing cold, he would have been completely alienated to his temporary habitat, which would be more than necessaryof analienation. Every timeheheard hismother tongue in this European city, where nothing even remotely resembled his hometown, his loneliness lost some of its strength. Although he was often disgusted by that strange Turkish infused German accent, he couldn’t stop the warmth of the trust beginning to develop within him. Under the layer of gable roofs, he was one of them, although he pretended not to. He was in the country of voluntary exiles, and those who crept under the shadow of another language.

1. Kazakh. “Heart and Blood” The words are Yürek and Kan in Turkish 289