Review: Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey, Erik Mortenson
By Jeffrey Kahrs
In retrospect the Beat writers, so celebrated and reviled in their time as the torchbearers of bohemian liberation, can now seem like a boys’ club from an island of misfit North Americans surrounded by the sea of 1950s conformity, and their influence, both domestic and abroad, was merely the obverse side of the imperial destiny—and tragedy—that the United States was engaged in and is still attempting to project.
But by leading with the imperial notion of the United States, this statement is also misleading. The Beats’ countercultural leadership served as a formidable foundation for the 1960s world of rock & roll, anti-war protests, and sexual liberation. The reverberations of their influence are very much felt today domestically and internationally—in the United States and Turkey—on issues as diverse as gay rights and the environment.
Studying Beat writers is still relevant, even if, as Dr. Mortenson points out, they are now “less iconoclastic than iconic” in the United States. The situation is somewhat different for these writers in countries like Turkey, where politics and culture tread their own path. Translated in Turkey many years after their initial imprimatur on the cultural scene from whence they came, their dissident perspective still can evoke a strong reaction from the powers that be.
Presenting a theoretically fascinating overview of the warp and weft between the United States and Turkey, the term counterculture is defined by Mortenson as a way of countering the prevailing culture, but then he asks: “what happens when another culture borrows this critique?” This book provides an intriguing look at how the Turkish underground community has developed, and how Beat writers have been re-interpreted, imagined, and mutated to fit the needs of this marginal / alternative / underground Turkish world. Though Mortenson has potentially left himself open to charges of being too defuse, as the chapters vary enough to be published separately as articles, they are all closely linked thematically by subject matter and thus this work sustains the necessary continuum a reader seeks.
Turkish underground writers, including Hakan Günday, Metin Kaçan, Kanat Güner, Sibel Torunoglu and Ayça Seren Unal, are introduced, and as few—if any—have been translated into English, we should be glad that Mortenson follows the plots and thematic actions of a number of their novels to explicate their meaning through an informed dialogue with concepts like cultural conformity and expectation.
Mortenson also often refers back throughout the text to the information he has quantified through survey work to gain a better understanding of the reading public of the counterculture. Presuming the reader isn’t expecting the 35,000 participants of a phase three drug trial, Mortenson’s survey work accompanies his journal through an admixing of theoretical emphasis and physical evidence as he explores material like the countercultural fanzine Underground Poetix, which offered its readers a truly eclectic mix of illustrations and writing ranging from The Beats, Richard Brautigan and Turkish Punk poetry, to the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the French Situationists.
This material is all well and good, but I particularly enjoyed the second half of the book. Those who have read On the Road know Dean Moriarty, the swashbuckling, individualistic dynamo is the hero (or antihero) of the book. In contrast to the adulation of Dean found in the United States, Mortenson discovered “Dean’s tendency to retain his personal freedom at all costs struck many Turkish students as bizarre.” Instead, they admired Sal Paradise and his attachment to his ‘aunt’—a standing for Kerouac’s mother.
In the section on the trial of William Burrough’s book Soft Machine, Mortenson compares its time in court to the famous trial of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1957. Though more than 60 years separate these events, the core argument about what is pornography shows the reader how their outcome helped explain the differences in politics in the United States and Turkey. Whereas acquittal in the Howl trial ushered in an era of cultural expression freed of sexual restraints, the Turkish government intervened on the very day the Burroughs trial appeared to be headed for acquittal, and passed a law, that very day, that put a halt to all obscenity trials for three years. They reserved the right to prosecute later.
My favorite section of the book compares three translations of Ginsburg poems from three different decades. Mortenson’s careful reading reveals how these translators reflected the political, social and, cultural metamorphoses that have occurred in Turkish society for almost 45 years. The 1976 Ginsburg translations were very politically engaged, as one might expect of a text translated before the 1980 coup in Turkey. The next translation, done in 1991, was far more personal, while the 2013 translation emphasized the saintly outcast status of “drug users and illicit sexuality”. Here we have a precise, in-depth look at how translation reflects the times in which the translator lives.
Mortenson’s book is a fine start in investigating the counterculture in Turkey and its relationship to the United States and other countries but there is much more to be done. Great Turkish Rock and Roll in the hands of Erkin Koray, Cem Karaca, 3 Hürel, Moğollar, Baba ZuLa and others have achieved some notice for their hybridity of Turkish and Western influences. They deserve more attention. And what about the great caricature tradition that begins with shadow puppetry and the Orta Oyun Theater of the Ottoman era, continued in the political cartoons of Ottoman magazines like Karagöz, and continues to this day in the illustrations and commentary of Uykusuz and characters like Kötü Kedi Şerafettin (Bad Cat Şerafettin). Mortenson has done a solid exploration of the counterculture, but I await the text that further invigorates the discussion of how Contemporary Turkish Culture has translated from these other genres and made them its own.
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