Poetryzine Magazine presents the interview with award-winning Turkish poet Murat Yurdakul made by Selin Lara Lotus
Can you talk about the journey of literary depth seen in your texts?
Every writer writes to express himself. He shares his thoughts and feelings with his readers. What prompted me to write was to share my own feelings and thoughts, as well as the feelings, thoughts, dreams and hopes of the future of those who could not express themselves in public. Literary depth is gained by seeing and showing reality, not in one dimension but in many dimensions. It goes through the transformation of the vital reality into literary reality.
You show that what is described in your works belongs to the universe of real writing and that it has an author, you remind us of our readership. Writing is written on time, not on paper. What are the ways you searched and found for literature written in time?
Time itself is an abstract concept. Time is the unity of time-space that will embody. As it is tried to be stated in the time-ground phrase of the ancients. The human-life relation within the space-time relation reveals the time of the experiences, the witness of the period. Writing—literature with its poetry, novels, stories—is here historically depressing.
How would you describe your thematic creation style in your works?
Situations that arise from the sum of the contradictions and the relationships that reflect our lives, reflecting the relationships of people with people, people with nature and society; the tragicomic reflections of the tragic of our age, what I try to watch/ have them watched.
Perhaps the most important subject of contemporary philosophy of language is the
creation of a general theory that will explain the phenomenon of meaning in all its
aspects, or at least the search for a consistent analysis of meaning within itself. How
should we read your philosophy of language?
Language is literature. Both stories and poetry are language. My language consists of the most unique words of my mother tongue. Those words should reflect the person with their feelings, thoughts, dreams and what they live or not live. With all its relations, all its contradictions, all its harmony, all its incompatibility with its environment. Each word must be in a string that complements the other.
One of the criteria of classicalization is to survive concretely against the aging and corrosive abstract power called ‘time’. Another criterion is that the author and the work expand the ‘national’ identity and transform it into a ‘universal’ identity. What are the parameters of the author’s transformation into a ‘universal’ identity?
Discovering people, telling people… A person is essentially the same no matter where they live in the world. The author must find and explain this sameness. Colors, eyes, heights, languages, national and geographic borders remain as a pile of details besides the basic common features of human beings. Everything related to the essence of man, the life experience at certain turns, when explained well, gives the impression of lived experience and passes from the writer to the reader with all his feelings. I think there are no other formulas of universality far away, very high. Whatever we see in the works that resist time, they are the characteristics that those who will resist must possess. Those works are death, love, separation; In short, the works that will reach the future and the world from us should show this success, and carry the universal values in our core from us to other people in the world, just as they have been able to reach our time because they touch a sensitive point in us while describing the common states of human beings.
We can say that the domination you have established with the reflex shown against the social system through the common values of humanity, whose suppressed emotions are trapped in your works, is also a matter of confrontation from another aspect, right?
Much more could be said, of course. Writing stories is the work of sitting and writing on the shores of humanity. What doesn’t hit that shore? There is not much for those who just linger with the coolness of foamy water, but if you try to write in the waste that hits people’s face at any moment, these are the things you will see. The text itself is actually a reflection. Whatever you write, it is resisting the overwhelming impulse of the existing, attempting to move in the hope of changing something. Writing is an effort to get rid of all kinds of evil that is poured on you under the name of the social system. In my opinion, that’s the only way it can happen.
You touch a wound in your stories. The source of violence, intolerance, hatred, poor women and children, those who live by their labor, all their oppression, the contradictions in life, the main problems of humanity caused by mistakes, the destruction in humanity, the tragedies of humanity, the courage to walk into the capillaries of literature, trying to look at the depth of literary writing, trying to look at the thousands of years of accumulation of literature. As a writer, can we say that you write stories in a socialist realist line in literature?
When you say socialist realist, you are talking about a very strong vein in the middle of life in both world literature and our literature. It was impossible for me not to be fed from this vein anyway. Even so, I think it would be an overstatement to make this definition for my own stories. I mean that I am not the one who will decide which lane my stories take place. While writing, you do not write with the intention and effort to be involved in a certain movement or to take part in a certain understanding. You are only mentioned there because your ways of expressing yourself overlap with some approaches.
In the philosophical journey of your poem, you confront us with mirrors and rooms, with the things we are afraid of falling into, with ourselves. But on the one hand, people
don’t panic while reading you. Is this style of yours also an attitude you show towards life?
When I look at how inspiration occurs, the conclusion I have come to from my cat experience is as follows; inspiration comes to the calm heart, to the mind. The moment you lose that calm, you fall into chaos and your channels of perception of truth are closed. You say and write ineffective things out of time. The magic and power of poetry is that it conveys the truth to us. Because truth is immutable. And you can reach that immutable truth only when you realize the secret, the hidden magic deep within the seemingly chaotic landscape of the universe. When expressing pain, I do not tear even more what is already broken, torn. I take care of that. Because I believe that; Pain is already there, it’s there for everyone. It is important not to tell what is, but to grasp what is from another dimension, to make sense of it and to change it. When I look at it like this, of course, I write a poem that shakes the reader but does not condemn him to where he is. A poem that can hold the reader’s hand and point to another, brighter place.
In your poems you point to the human devastation that focuses on human tragedies fueled by social realism. What do you see in the fusion of loneliness and birth?
Man is alone when he is born and when he dies. He is born with some characteristics that he cannot change at birth. Ethnicity, origin, gender etc. All of these affect how people will live in the future; How much he will feel the feeling of loneliness is related to these factors. Being in the minority, not being understood, being exposed to racism etc. Pushes people to loneliness.
As an award-winning writer/poet, what are the parameters of a good work that reaches universality in literature? How should we read the ‘spirit of your text’ in your works?
The ascent to the universal starts from the local. First of all, the author should be able to define himself, the society in which he lives, what is lived and what is thought in terms of human, property and environment relations. At the core of my text, the past, present and future of what is lived in contradiction with the relationship of time, space and life should/should lie. The purpose of literature is not just to construct clever plays. Play serves another purpose in literature, such as language. Literature is first and foremost a search for reality. It seeks answers to the questions of what life, existence, reality is or how it is, on an aesthetic creation level. How do you draw your aesthetic creation plane? From this thought, let’s touch on the reality of life, existence...
How would you describe the reflection of your diversity on your translation as a poet, story writer?
Writing is written on time, not on paper. It broadens the horizon of the poet/author’s diversity in terms of translation for the literature written in time; I fully believe that the contribution of intercultural literature to the translator will leave an important legacy for future generations.
What works do you have on your desk for your reader?
“Portrait of Sleep” novel with three different interdisciplinary focus on psychoanalytic, detective and philosophical; I am preparing a selection of conversations on the “Projection Symphony”, which includes authors who left their mark on the world and Turkish literature.
Let's say you're hosting a literary dinner at your home and you're going to invite three dead writers. Who would be your guests?
Albert Camus, Dostoevsky, Orhan Kemal.
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