Letter to a Young Girl from Antalya

Abstract

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62), the face of Turkish literary modernism, owes much of his popularity in the anglophone world to Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe’s recent translation of Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute). The novel, originally published in serial form from 1954 to 1961, recounts the beleaguered attempts of a government agency to synchronize all the clocks in Turkey, satirizing the modernization project that took place in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. In the process, the novel captures the fallout of Turkey’s political, social, and linguistic transformation through the 1920s—a decade when Tanpınar himself was in his twenties. The philosophy of composition that underpins The Time Regulation Institute, as well as Tanpınar’s 1948 novel Huzur (A Mind at Peace), finds its most explicit expression in his 1961 “Antalyalı Genç Kıza Mektup” (“Letter to a Young Girl from Antalya”), translated here into English for the first time. This letter— an endearing twist on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet—doubles as an artistic credo. A bit of mystery shrouds its writing: the letter was in fact addressed to a high school boy from Antalya named Mustafa Erol (İnci). Tanpınar apparently receivedmany letters from young people seeking advice, and early editors of his diaries mistook Erol for another correspondent, a young girl who was also from Antalya, and gave the letter its misleading title. While Tanpınar implies that his letter was composed in haste—“I was not able to get to your letter in time,” he begins in a huff—the existence of at least one additional amended version of the letter suggests considerable forethought. Tanpınar had reason to consider its reception: today the letter is widely viewed as a chronicle of his path to modernism. While his tone appears wary at first, Tanpınar’s guardedness soon melts as he opens up to the high schooler. His correspondent is from Antalya, a city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast where Tanpınar lived from 1916 to 1918. Sketching his experiences