Daily Blague

I don't know about you, but when I'm looking at a text in a language that I don't know, I go for the proper nouns first. I was quick to learn serhat (frontier) and şehir (city), because the name of the Border City Gazette appears with no little frequency, and the Turkish for 'gazette' is about the same as the English. I was curious to know the original name of the important character who is known by his nom de guerre, Blue - a radical Islamist with deep blue eyes. I didn't have the dictionary then, so I couldn't check it out, but when I looked up 'blue' in the dictionary this afternoon, and found mavi, I knew that that wasn't what the author had called his character. Sure enough, in the original novel, Blue is called 'Lacivert.' (Remember, 'c' is pronounced like the 'j' in 'John.') What does the dictionary give for lacivert? An answer that makes it clear that Mr Pamuk (Orhan Bey) was not thinking of English when he wrote Snow. Lacivert is the Turkish for 'ultramarine.' A beautiful word in English, and a beautiful color in any language. But Mr Pamuk must have agreed with his translator, Maureen Freely, that calling a radical Islamist Romeo by the name 'Ultramarine' would not have worked. The only people called 'Ultramarine' are wearing, well, a lot more makeup than radical Islamists ever would. Too bad, really. Lacivert is certainly more something than Blue.

But why was a novel set in Kars, a provincial town very close to the Armenian border, called Kar?

I haven't checked the elevation, but Kars is well above sea level, and because the city has changed hands a number of times in the past century-plus, there are grandiose architectural proclamations in the various occupants' vernaculars, most notably the (abandoned) mansions built by Armenian merchants. There is also a lot of snow in winter, and that is what the title refers to: Kar means, simply, 'snow.' But get this: the hero of Kar, who travels to Kars, likes to call himself 'Ka,' after his initials. (Well, so do I!) But doesn't the regression (Kars: Kar: Ka) point inexorably to  K, without a doubt the most pungent literary letter in the Twentieth Century's alphabet?

In other words, we haven't even started the book and the puzzles are whirling. Given the novel's pedal point of paranoia, one's own puzzles about the book as a reader are as compelling as the characters' life-threatening riddles.

It was an advertisement, casually glanced, on Istiklal Caddasi that reminded me to look up the name of the novel's principal love interest, the beautiful İpek. (Like İstanbul, the name begins with a dotted capital. İ and I are different, if related, letters in the Turkish alphabet.) What was a woman's name doing in an ad? Yesterday, I found out. İpek means 'velvet.' And the name of İpek's sister, Kadife, means 'silk.' Are these common girls' names in Turkish? (Orlando, help me out.) The name of another young woman, Teslime, comes from the word for 'surrender,' teslim. Teslime is one of a group of local girls, much talked about at the beginning of the novel, who have taken their lifes in resistance to secular pressures opposed to the wearing of head scarves.

Right there, you can feel the squeeze of Snow. Islamists claim the democratic right to enforce religious scruples in the teeth of the militant secularism that, until recently, suppressed Turkish intolerance. Attentive Americans will have become familiar with the French struggle over head-scarves, but the problem in Turkey is logarithmically more dangerous, and one cannot read Snow without considering the consequences of a European decision to exclude Turkey from the EU. (I will get to these weighty matters in another post.)

So I have a bone to pick with the book's editor at Knopf. It's all very well and gallant to retain the Turkish spellings of proper names - at least of those proper names that haven't been translated into English (another ticklish turf). Having done so, however, I believe that the English-speaking reader has a right to pronouncers, the guides that tell you now to turn a series of letters into correct speech. The differences between the Turkish and English alphabets, as regards pronunciation, are tiny and easily explained. There is no excuse for Knopf's having presumed that American readers will know from other sources how to pronounce the names of characters whom they come to care for. There's an idealistic young man whom I think all readers will admire enormously, and it would be helpful to know that his name, Necip, is pronounced 'nedjip.'

And what d'you know. necip means 'noble.' Why is the beautifully named Lacivert transformed into a banal 'Blue,' while the lovely Velvet and Silk remain hidden behind their Turkish names? Why aren't the meanings of Necip and Fazıl explained to the reader? Did Knopf think we'd all toss the book if the slightest effort to learn a little about Turkish were thrown in the reader's face? Snow is too big a novel for such parochial decisions.