A Poet in Transition

On tuesday, 8th of december, the poets Efe Duyan(Istanbul) and Matthias Göritz (Frankfurt Main) will have a common reading at Panayia Apt. on Emir Nevruz Sok.  (Near Istiklal Caddesi), presenting their own works and first results of their cooperations in translation.

Matthias Göritz spent two thirds of his adult life abroad.

The poet and novelist is currently an artist in residence at the Cultural Academy Villa Tarabya in Istanbul and came to Istanbul two months ago. „Dwelling“ in a new and often foreign language, he says, would always put him back into dialogue with his own. Also, a language always entails the literary traditions realized in it. To get more precisely involved with some of them, Göritz spent parts of his live in France, Slovenia, Poland and the United States. His writing has also been widely influenced by poets and techniques from Japan, China, Korea and Morocco. In 1995, the main motivation to move to Moscow for one and a half years and learn Russian was an interest in the poems of Michail Lermontow, that the German translations couldn’t quite satisfy.

Writing, he says, was always a kind of movement, quite comparable to a walk in a foreign city, charged with both memory and discovery, with collection and imagination, and also one in which the poet as well as the reader can stumble into unexpected landscapes. This way, poetry can, by employing only a slight shift in perspective, inhere experiences and spaces not known before to either author or reader. Sometimes, when things go right, these landscapes, these spaces can be shared ones.

A special field in the task of sharing poetic landscape might be translation. Matthias Göring has been translated into and translating from multiple languages. Since the beginning of his Residence, he is now working with the Istanbul based poet Efe Duyan on translations of his poetry for a collection drawn from his three previous books that is to be published in Turkey next year.

Beside their strong involvement in the international exchange and networking between poets, the two authors share an interest in the role of humor in writing and a talent to react to specific political and social events without falling into didactic or supposedly simple truths.

“It is the / to and fro, what fascinates us. The un- / determined”, Göritz writes in his poem “How to work” and adds, in conversation: the gap. “Between people, countries, everything, there is always deficiency.” Literature now drew it’s strength from exactly that moment of lack, having to fill the vacancies with imagination, with something undetermined.

Matthias Göritz about New York and Istanbul

That moment also reoccurs in the difficulties and the joy – mostly the joy – of translation.

On tuesday, 8th of december, Efe Duyan and Matthias Göritz will have a common reading in “Koska Helva Üstü” on Beyoglu’s Istiklal Cadessi. The venue is newly installed and supposed to host numerous events involved with Istanbul’s vibrant literary scene.

Efe Duyan, born in Istanbul in 1981 is an author of prose and poetry and editor for several poetry magazines, among them the newly installed Cevrimdisi,that will go into print next year. He has been invited to festivals i.a. in France, England, Lithuania and Germany and his poetry has been translated into more than 15 different languages. He’s currently teaching history of architecture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul.

Reading and Talk

08.12.2015, 19.00
Istanbul
İstiklal Cad. Asmalı Mescit Mah. Emir Nevruz Sok. Panayia Apt. Kat: 4, Beyoğlu / İstanbul (Koska Helva üstü)

Organizer Goethe-Institut Istanbul