One last round | Son bir şans

Once I had one language — a spotless sunshine of clarity that I didn’t know I had before losing it. Now I have two, Turkish and English — a confusing abundance. It is still easy to choose the language when the audience and the aims are givens, that is to say when you write about politics as I do. Yet when it is literature, the lingua franca of the human essence, who is your audience? Literature should not — or simply cannot — imagine its reader. You are truly on your own. Which means that choosing the language of a novel, when beginning it, can become an infinite spiral down into the writer’s core. That’s where I am now, stuck in a turnstile. For the last two years, I’ve been asking my trusted people which language I should write the novel in, a question that I know only I can answer. In the end I began to imagine a bilingual editor, an alien eye made from my retina, a soul made of my own. Below is my letter to her. She knows well that the language chosen will shape the story, the voice, and eventually the storyteller. From then on — for good? — I will be that person and only that person.

Dear _______,

In English, the story would begin with this:

Hamburg, Winter, 1951
The house is burning.
I am the only one savoring the spectacle.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have shared this idea of a novel with anyone yet, as the character is still in an embryonic stage. But the question of which language to begin this novel has recently become a paralyzing dilemma. A horrifying sliding-doors problem: the language I won’t choose — as if — will orphan me for good. It is better to go through the text together and break the problem into manageable pieces, if only to soothe my fear of losing half my heart.