Edouard Roditi and the Istanbul Avant-Garde

My introduction to Edouard Roditi and his work occurred in the form of "The Vampires of Istanbul: A Study in Modern Communications Methods," as reprinted in Méditerranéennes 10: Istanbul, un monde pluriel. Originally published in 1972, this wicked and surreally funny satire consists of news stories, editorials, and letters to the editor from the fictional newspaper Yeni Aksham, all related to the shocking discovery of a case of vampirism in Fener, "an ancient and impoverished district of the Golden Horn." The documents date from February to September 1960; the letters issue from an array of correspondents including professors of history and psychiatry, the president of the Pan-Turanian Association of Shamanistic Vampires, and a belly dancer professionally disadvantaged by a swollen buttock. Among the hapless targets are Turkish journalists, political pundits, pseudoscientists and, not to leave anyone out, American imperialists. The brilliant command of local detail bespoke an easy familiarity with the city and its not infrequently volatile inhabitants on the part of the author. Who was he, and how had he come by his knowledge?

I learned that Roditi was born in Paris in 1910 and was something of a child prodigy, publishing surrealistic prose poems in transition at the age of eighteen and appearing thereafter in Blues, Tambour, Pagany, and other little magazines of the place and time. Both Léon-Paul Fargue and T. S. Eliot smiled on his youthful work—an unusual phenomenon indeed— and he was enlisted, along with Samuel Beckett, to help translate James Joyce into French. He was an early friend and benefactor of American authors Charles Henri Ford and Paul Bowles, his fellow contributors to transition.¹ In the 1930s a brief residence as a student in Nazi Germany raised his consciousness of his Jewish roots and led him to write poetry of a more traditional turn, some of which was published as Three Hebrew Elegies in 1941. In the late 1930s he continued his studies in Chicago and Berkeley and, when World War II broke out, he moved to New York. There he worked the French desk at the Voice of America studios while also aiding Jews trapped in occupied France. At the same time he contributed to View, VVV, and other outlets of the avant-garde, many of whose European practitioners had taken refuge in New York because of the war. His translations of André Breton and Alfred Jarry, commissioned by View, were the first in English. His book on Oscar Wilde appeared in 1947 and another collection of poetry—Poems 1928-1948—in 1949. In all this work there appeared little, really, to do with Turkey.

Yet in 1961 the Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal's Memed, My Hawk was published in English, with Edouard Roditi as the translator of record. What was the connection? A simple question on the face of it, one that I had no idea would lead so deeply into the byways of mid-century Turkish art and culture. But then Roditi seems always to have been a man of surprises.

As good a place as any to begin is with the artist Aliye Berger (1903-74), whose studio on the upper floor of the gently decaying Narmanlı Han was a gathering place for Istanbul writers and artists in the 1950s and 1960s. The han, a massive edifice surrounding a tree-shaded courtyard, gave onto what was once the Grande Rue de Pera, the central boulevard of the city's European quarter. Built in 1831, it had housed the imperial Russian Embassy for most of the nineteenth century. But now the Grande Rue was İstiklal Caddesi, Pera was Beyoğlu, and the han had for a long while been home to artists and writers such as Berger, the painter and poet Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, and the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, author of The Time Regulation Institute and pathbreaker for future Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. Aliye was the youngest child of a legendary Ottoman family that included scholars, artists, and pashas, even a grand vizier. Her parties were famous and her Narmanlı Han address, equally art studio and literary...