The Mad Nomad: Interview with Talât Sait Halman

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 5 (1997) : 43-58. The Mad Nomad: Interview with Talât Sait Halman Gönül Pultar In the beginning The poet created loneliness Then God found it Shadows of Love Talât Sait Halman, who is one of the members of the Advisory Board of JAST, spent the Fall ‘96 semester as a visiting professor at Bilkent University. I took the opportunity to interview him. Poet, scholar, academician, translator, columnist, statesman, Halman (1931- ) is a many-sided personality. Born in Istanbul to a patrician family of Black Sea origin, he studied, from the age of twelve onwards, at Robert College (Note 1), an institution of secondary and higher education run by Americans, broken thus at a tender age into the biculturalism that is a salient feature of his personality. He went to the US in 1952 to study at Columbia University, and has been more or less there since, except for the year 1971 when he served as the first Minister of Culture in Turkey and was decorated “Knight Grand Cross, G. B. E., The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” by Queen Elizabeth II. He has thus spent what amounts to an adult lifetime in the US as a permanent resident, teaching Turkish culture and literature for many years in such universities as Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Though a frequent visitor to Turkey, he now lives in New York City, dividing his time between writing and giving lectures. He is a much-sought keynote speaker who travels to the four corners of the world. In fact, when I asked him how he wished to be labeled in this introduction, he said: “Put simply ‘The Mad Nomad.’” While Halman is the author of numerous scholarly works in English published in the US on Turkish literature, and the translator into Turkish of American poets ranging from Langston Hughes to Wallace Stevens, this interview concentrates on his aspect as a poet. He has so far published two books of poetry in English, and ten in Turkish (he is one of the few living Turkish poets able to write in aruz). He published The Shadows of Love in 1979, and A Last Lullaby in 1990. The latter is a bilingual book containing a selection of his poems originally written in English and then translated into Turkish by himself, as well poems originally written in Turkish he then translated into English. (Note 2) The interview was begun in his third-floor office at the Faculty of Humanities and Letters building in January and ended in New York City in early spring. How did you become a poet? You said your mother wanted you to be an engineer ... Poetry burst in me shortly before I started going to school. I was already reading and writing, having been taught by my sister. But even earlier, I had developed a passion for rhyme and rhythm, for word-play and sounds as a sensuous experience. Most children experience the same joy of language, but unfortunately—perhaps fortunately in some cases—they outgrow it. Somehow this curiosity about words, sound patterns, juxtapositions, about the verbal sculpting of pain and exhilaration, about the mysterium of imagination never left me. From age six onwards I have lived with an obsessive commitment to reading and writing poetry. Like most parents, my mother and my father took great pleasure and pride in my poems, but knew that the poetic vocation seldom makes a viable career. My father was a naval officer, an admiral, who had written and translated a considerable number of books. At the beginning, he was convinced one could combine a military career and poetry. Later he saw that I was unfit for military life—I was too delicate in health (I had many serious illnesses: diphtheria, rheumatic fever, hepatitis), too sensitive, too much of an individualist and nonconformist, and perhaps worst of all, too uneasy with authority, too unwilling to take or give orders. My mother had sensed this all along and thought that engineering—a profession she admired as “creative in a concrete way”—might serve best since I was “exceptionally good in math and had a structured mind.” I felt that I should become an engineer specializing in road and bridges, but devote all my spare time to literature, especially poetry. (At that time I had no inkling that virtually no engineers have ever produced impressive poetry.) A poet-engineer until 40, I would go into politics and become a Member of Parliament. At 48 I would become a Cabinet Member and at 52 the President of the Republic! Virtually on the day I turned 13, I dropped engineering from my agenda, and decided that I should pursue a literary career first and foremost. Profession? Earning a living? I thought of that, in my wild adolescent fancies, as a disease that could miraculously heal itself in time. My mother then began to urge me to go into the diplomatic career (“a combination of elegance and eloquence, a luxurious life in civilized cities.”) My father, still anxious for some tenuous connection with the naval field, tried to get me interested in practicing and teaching maritime law. Both ideas appealed to me in some respects. Consequently, after graduating from Robert College, I studied political science, international relations and international law at Columbia University with the intention of going into the foreign service or pursuing an academic/legal career. Yet, having completed my graduate studies, suddenly I found both prospects too constricting, almost claustrophobic. Like Macbeth I felt “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d.” I chose freedom in poetry. Freedom of intellectual and emotional exploration. Freedom in creative prospects. That gave me, in practical terms, freedom to seek diverse careers—business, academic life, journalism, public service, cultural diplomacy—and to do work in a variety of intellectual disciplines. In a sense, my strategy has been “verse as versatility.” When I think of all the different directions my life has taken—is that “discordia concors”? Have I found unity in diversity? I am at a loss to provide a coherent, lucid answer. But I must say all this change in my life has been stimulating, exciting, often scintillating. I have enjoyed being a Turkish Walter Mitty. Freedom to transform one’s identity can be both startling and deeply satisfying. It constitutes the architecture of disquietude, the sculpture of dynamics. If you keep your core culturally and emotionally, you can undertake ventures in all directions without dissipating your energy in mere adventures. This certainly lacks the snug comfort of a circumscribed life and of an achievement in depth. But a multi-dimensional exploration has its contentments despite its perturbing restlessness. But then all this might well be the poetic life—or poetry itself. I offer no apologia. This is the way my passion for poetry gave hectic direction and inchoate shape to my life. When the delegate to UNESCO is a poet ... or Halman’s Nauru Poem: On 4 November 1995, The Executive Board of UNESCO discussed the admission of the Pacific (...truncated)