A Useless Man

Translators’ Afterword

In 1925 Sait Faik was expelled, along with forty other students, from one of Istanbul’s prestigious secondary schools for planting a needle in their teacher’s seat cushion (the instructor of Arabic reportedly leapt up out of his chair, screaming, when the bodkin pierced his buttocks), and Sait Faik was promptly sent to a school in Bursa, a leafy city at the foot of Mt. Uludağ, where he spent much of his time alone in the school garden, pensive and withdrawn. Soon he showed a talent for writing stories — they seemed to race right out from under his pen. They were depictions of the people and the world around him, sketched in an intimate, creative, dramatic new voice. Sait Faik seemed to have the knack to sum up an entire world in just two pages. First he wrote “The Silk Handkerchief” and “The Hairspring,” now two of his most famous stories. Today they are tender memories in the shared Turkish consciousness. He was an original, who wrote as he spoke, celebrating the beauty of the ordinary even as he painted in its cracks and shadows, its silences and secrets. By the time of his death he was one of the best-loved writers in Turkey.

More than half a century later, Sait Faik remains an iconic figure. The nation’s most prestigious short story award carries his name. In the collective memory, he is the embodiment of the humble artist, an ambassador for the forgotten and the downtrodden. Mention his name and you’ll no doubt in response get a line from one of his stories or an anecdote: how he used to send his dog to the local store with a shopping list and a basket, for example. People remember him as an honest man, openhearted, committed to his art, self-critical, unpretentious, and generous (he bequeathed his entire estate to the Daruşşafaka Foundation, which runs a school for orphans and disadvantaged children). He wrote from the gut, or in his words, “balancing on one foot,” dashing off stories under pine trees, in rundown coffeehouses or late at night after his mother had gone to bed. His later stories in particular are impressionistic, surreal, hallucinatory. The selected stories here are presented chronologically, roughly following the years they were first published. There is darkness in them all, but in his last stories, there is also the anguish of a man who knows he is dying too young, and too soon.

Born in 1906, Sait Faik witnessed the First World War, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the founding of a zealously westernizing Republic. These radical political changes were keenly felt and dramatically reflected in Istanbul’s literary circles, with alliances forever changing, and fine wars of words at each turn, but Sait Faik seemed to float above the fray, honing his own approach to writing, drawing on influences both in Turkey and abroad, always fixed on artistic integrity. At the height of the Language Revolution, instigated by Ataturk to cleanse Turkish of Persian and Arabic influence, writers were under relentless pressure to conform. But in the late 1940s, a new literary movement, the Garip or First New Movement, called for a language that was lighter, brighter and less reverent. Sait Faik was a devotee. And so his prose is an odd (and to us, bewitching) blend of the lyrical and a rough vernacular. To do it justice in translation, we often favored mood over meaning, searching for the melody or rhythm to capture an elusive phrase.

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