Three rings, p.10
Three Rings, page 10
Kâmil Pasha completed his translation in 1859 and published it in 1862. Himself a poet (sadly, many of his manuscripts were later destroyed in a devastating fire), he gave to his rendering of Fénelon’s elegant French a remarkable literary polish: elaborate rhymes hidden in the prose, meticulous parallel constructions, a deft handling of the references to pagan gods and goddesses, which had to be adapted to suit the sensibilities of Muslim readers. This pressing need for sensitive adaptation of European texts to local tastes was, as it happens, one with which Erich Auerbach would become acquainted years later. Lecturing on Dante one day to his Turkish students, he felt compelled to omit a reference to the horrible punishment to which the Florentine poet condemns the prophet Mohammed, who, in the Inferno, appears in the ninth ditch of the Malebolge, cleaved in half with his insides pouring out, such punishment, as barbaric as it seems to us now, being consonant with medieval European attitudes toward the Muslim peoples of the East, which no doubt contributed to the long history of discord between them.
Kâmil Pasha’s translation immediately won the admiration of his peers. The Minister of Education appended a foreword in which he alerted readers to the fact that although the text they were about to read seemed to be a “story,” it was in fact a book of wisdom. A second edition featured a laudatory preface by another minister who opined with a touching optimism that, although literature consists of a Babel of different tongues, meaning is universal, and a unity exists beyond any cultural diversity—a principle that seems to be demonstrated, if anything, by the fact that this mid-nineteenth-century Muslim official’s words so closely echo Erich Auerbach’s belief in die gemeinsame Verbindung der Kulturen, the communal connectedness of cultures. Or at least that was Auerbach’s belief until he fled to Turkey, at which point, in the words of one expert on his work, the exiled scholar “drew a ring around his European self” and retreated into it, having apparently soured on the idea of connectedness, of there being hidden unities—a souring that, I have no doubt, led to his endorsement, in the work he would write during his Turkish exile, of the pessimistic narrative style.
Kâmil Pasha died in 1876, at the age of sixty-eight. A rich man by that time, thanks in part to the proceeds of his translation of Fénelon, he had spent his final years engaged in making admirable gestures of quiet generosity that adhered to the high principles endorsed by Minerve in Les aventures de Télémaque. One of the beneficiaries of the philanthropies for which Yûsuf Kâmil Pasha became renowned was Istanbul University, into whose possession the large house he had shared with his wife eventually passed, following (since buildings as well as epic heroes can have multiple identities, as we know) stints first as a school and then as an orphanage—the latter being an incarnation that, we cannot help feeling, would have pleased Kâmil Pasha, given his early years as a fatherless boy: a nice circularity. In 1909, the great house, now part of the university, became a science building and then, after a devastating fire in which many of the original owner’s books and papers were destroyed, was repurposed as the home of the literature faculty . . . This is as much as I was able to learn about the house of Fénelon’s Turkish translator, struggling as I did over the course of some weeks to decipher Google translations of documents I’d found online, or relying on acquaintances in Istanbul to summarize articles or excerpts from books. But given that I am an optimist—or, as the last of the Holocaust survivors I interviewed put it, “sentimental” in my thinking about the past and the stories we tell about it—I cannot help believing that, despite the loss of so many books in the fire, the Grand Vizier’s mansion was an ideal place for scholars to work, what with its fabulous views of the Sea of Marmara, shimmering like a mirage below, seeming to defy description: a difficulty that could well inspire someone to start wondering just how description works in the first place, how reality is mimicked in writing, how die Wirklichkeit becomes dargestellte.
This is where we will leave our stranger: staring out to sea, thinking no doubt of home—or at least, the home that he remembers. Let him sit there, at rest after his many peregrinations, exactly where chance or Fate (depending on how pessimistic or optimistic you are) left him in real life. He does not know, as we do, the history of the place he has come to; but then, he has ended up here after a long voyage, not only through space but, it is probably fair to say, through time: beginning with the sack of a great Anatolian city thirty-two centuries ago, then to the moment four hundred years later when the stories of the aftermath of that cataclysm begin to coalesce into a great poem, a poem so great that it is still being copied out many centuries in the future when, after another great Anatolian city is sacked, the copiers are scattered westward and the poem they keep copying so assiduously begins a new life in a new country; so great that two hundred years after that, after the sack of the city and the dispersal of the copiers, it inspires a wise and gentle priest of a religion Homer could not have conceived of to adapt and enhance this poem for the sake of a small child, a prince whose best potential self this new book is intended to mirror, although the prince’s book will be read, over time, by many, many hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in distant places unimaginable to the gentle priest as he labored on his book, one of those places being Istanbul, the City, which is home to a sensitive and subtle Turk who, two centuries after the priest dies in exile, takes the book about the poem about the sack that took place a hundred generations earlier and from that book builds a house that, during yet another great cataclysm, becomes a sanctuary for literature and, finally, a home for our stranger.
No wonder he is tired.
So we will leave our wanderer there and not bother him with all this history, the vast chain of events that has brought him back to the coastline where all the myths began, because, as we know, obscurity has its uses, too: can be as solid and productive, as concrete and real, as illumination is. We do not want to distract him. Now it is time for this exile to set upon his great work, a book that will begin with an account of a technique that is as old as Homer, known as ring composition; a wandering technique that yet always finds its way home, a technique which, with its sunny Mediterranean assumption that there is indeed a connection between all things, the German Jew Erich Auerbach—no doubt forgivably just now, given the awful and twisted route that has brought him here, the dark road which yet, as he will one day finally admit, made his book possible—considers a little too good to be true.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began its life as the 2019 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, an institution I am proud to call my alma mater and to which I was delighted to return for that signal honor. I am grateful to Chad Wellmon and James Loeffler, who originally extended the invitation to bring me home to Charlottesville, and to the many others who, over a hectic period of two years, did so much to arrange and organize my visit: particularly Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Laura Smith, and Creighton Coleman, all of them wonderful hosts. I am further indebted to the team at the University of Virginia Press for their warm support during the metamorphosis of the lectures into the book: Dick Holway, Ellen Satrom, Mary MacNeil, Helen Chandler, Jason Coleman, and my keen-eyed and wonderfully sympathetic copyeditor, Susan Murray.
Elif Batuman lent some crucial help with translation during the early stages of research for this project; I am, further, deeply indebted to a number of admirable works of scholarship on the reception of Fénelon and Auerbach in Turkey, particularly Serif Mardin’s The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought and Kader Konuk’s East West Mimesis.
Every time I make a nostos to Charlottesville I am moved and overjoyed to be able to see once again the scholars who taught me when I was an undergraduate and the friends who have nurtured me ever since: Jenny Strauss Clay, Mary McKinley, Jon and Mary Mikalson, John and Mary Miller, Jahan Ramazani and Caroline Rody. Two people who were not part of that group, but into whose hands I later and happily fell, are the dedicatees of this book: great scholars and true humanists both, from whom I have learned very much indeed over the past twenty years, a rich period of friendship and (for me) apprenticeship that has made so much of my work possible.
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