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  • Yaşar Kemal, Son of Homer
  • Barry Tharaud

In his memoirs and interviews, Turkish novelist Yaşar Kemal has expressed his kinship with Homer and on at least one occasion has referred to himself as "Homerosoğlu"—son of Homer.1 Since Kemal2 was an Anatolian âşık, or wandering bard, before he learned to read and write, and since he transformed modern Turkish language and literature to create stories and novels that use techniques and perspectives from Homeric epic—in addition to a variety of other traditions—I propose that we take Kemal's self-styled lineage seriously. In his memoirs,3 Yaşar Kemal refers to Homer on four different occasions and specifically to the Iliad on seven additional occasions, and he makes clear that Homer is at the head of a living oral tradition that extends to "the Turkish and Kurdish Homers of my time" (35). It is also clear that, although he does not go into specific examples, Kemal sees the Iliad as a source for a "method of narration and [. . .] techniques of framing character" (54) and that themes from the Iliad can still be found in contemporary folklore—a field that Kemal aspired to follow at the outset of his career (96). Moreover, on another occasion he compares himself to Kazantzakis and states, "'I am the Greek.' My conception of the novel is closer to Homer" (113). And in passing he comments that Gogol and Tolstoy "greatly admired Homer, particularly the Iliad," and that "[t]he innovative quality of the Russian novel, with its grandeur as well as its individual features, owes a great deal to the understanding of popular forms and the epic genre" (140). In the essay that follows, I will survey conventions and themes that are common to Homer and Yaşar Kemal. My purpose is to illuminate Yaşar Kemal's Memed, My Hawk by comparing and contrasting themes, techniques, and sociological contexts associated with oral traditions that are common to Kemal and Homer. My project will provide some traditional foundations to Kemal's novel and to some degree integrate it into traditions familiar to Western readers without mitigating its innovative qualities in relation to traditions of modern Turkish literature. At the same time, our illumination of Kemal's novel can make us better aware of some technical and thematic aspects of Homeric epic. I begin by considering mainly the Iliad of Homer, and of Yaşar Kemal's more than forty works to date I limit myself mainly to Memed, My Hawk [End Page 563] (İnce Memed, Vol. 1), his first and best-known novel translated from Turkish into English. My critical perspective is that of comparative literature, or intercultural studies in the more comprehensive sense that translation studies has brought to those fields during the last two decades.4 I also make use of Northrop Frye's myth-based genre criticism, as well as his concept of high- and low-mimetic modes, which create a context wherein he relates perspectives on tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony.5

At first glance there might seem to be considerable differences between Kemal's mixed-mode novel, Memed, My Hawk,6 which is summarized in the appendix below, and the tragic and comic perspectives of the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively. But on closer consideration there are a surprising number of points of comparison. I will focus on both authors' use of epic conventions, their portrayal of the nature versus culture theme, which is closely related to the theme of the individual versus society, and the way the Homeric poems and Kemal's novel expose the inherent contradictions in the value systems of the societies they portray. In so doing I leave behind traditional definitions of epic that focus mainly on narrowly specific conventions such as invocation of the muse, dactylic hexameter verse, the machinery of the gods, and beginning in medias res. The most significant aspects of the Homeric epics provide a helpful context for exploring Kemal's novels. Aside from creating works of significant length and seriousness, both Homer and Kemal, while portraying societies in crisis, share several conventions and themes that help us to mitigate their differences in language, culture...

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