The Jazz Season: Selected Poems by Edip Cansever, translated by George Messo
Shearsman Books
Edip Cansever was born in Istanbul in 1928. He grew up in a country transitioning from the Ottoman Empire into a modern Turkish republic. As a student of law and sociology he was widely influenced by Western modernism and Eastern mysticism. To the outside world, Cansever's was an unremarkable life, spending most of it in Istanbul's Covered Bazaar where he worked as an antiques dealer. It's entirely fitting that a poet who came to define Turkish modernity should have made his living among the residues of its past. His extraordinary poetry speaks of familiar twentieth-century conditions, of rapid change, migrations and transports, of historical realities and ethnic diversities. His language mirrors the unique human landscapes of his city, a geopolitical cross-roads, of people dispersed by conflict and poverty, renewing themselves in a world unmapped. Cansever's poetics are marked by simplicity and depth. Often colloquial and irreverent, his accessibility belies the turbulent sexual and emotional undercurrents that run through much of his work. He's off-hand and humorous just when he's at his most serious. He can be profound and silly in a single breath. Central to Cansever's poetic idiolect are the demands he makes on its linguistic resources, stretching the expressive capacity of language to breaking point, a kind of jazz, alive to its own fluid semantic possibilities and cognitive riffs. Throughout the poems Istanbul emerges not merely as a backdrop but as a living entity that reflects the complexities of human interactions. The natural world is never far away, but it is a more urgent urban earthiness that Cansever so memorably places before the Turkish reader, a landscape of pimps, thieves, petty criminals, prostitutes, and vagabonds. It would have been familiar to many but rarely seen in Turkish literature before his time.
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