The Mad Nomad: Interview with Talât Sait Halman
Keywords:
Talât Sait Halman, Poet, Scholar, Academician, Translator, Columnist, Statesman, Interview, Writing Process, Self-TranslationAbstract
This article is an interview with Talât Sait Halman, a Turkish poet, scholar, academician, translator, columnist, statesman, and visiting professor at Bilkent University. The interview focuses on his aspect as a poet, discussing his journey into poetry, the inspiration for his work, and his process of writing and self-translation.
(The abstract and keywords were prepared retrospectively for indexing purposes using AI-assisted tools and editorial review, based on the original article. They did not appear in the original publication.)
References
Established in 1863 initially as a missionary school, Robert College is the oldest
American College outside the US. A fictionalized account of life at Robert College
in the second half of the 20th century can be found in Maureen Freely’s The Life of
the Party (1984; Penguin Books 1986), a roman à clef portraying the likes of the
late Hillary Sumner-Boyd whom Halman mentions.
2 His poetry in English was made the subject of a presentation at a panel devoted
to American literature in English by Turkish Americans at the 1997 MELUS
(Multi-ethnic Literatures of the US) Conference in Honolulu. His Turkish-language
poetry written on US soil is anthologized in The Longfellow Anthology of
Multilingual American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, to be published in
1998 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
3 A Last Lullaby contains poems in two versions, Turkish and English. I have
interspersed this interview with three examples of such poems. Which version was
written first? Which version is better? It is up to the reader who knows both
Turkish and English to decide. Eversince authors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and
Samuel Beckett wrote the same works in two languages, a debate has been going
on as to whether self-translation elevates both versions to the status of creative
originals. I publish the poems in the hope of rekindling the debate.
4 Halman’s translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Turkish have reached the
fifth edition (1997).
5 In 1986, the Translation Center of Columbia University awarded him its
Thornton Wilder Prize.
