Ferit Edgü’s Noone is newish in English translation from Contra Mundum Press.
Here’s translator Fulya Peker’s introductory note to the volume:
Written between 1964 and 1974, between Paris and Hakkari, Ferit Edgü’s Noone approaches politics from a poetic standpoint and transforms a social-realist setting into a metaphor for a self that is in search of a subject for a sentence, or rather, that is subjected to a sentence.
As a record of history that is both personal and universal, Edgü depicts in Noone the severity of alienation, the difficulty of communication, the importance of memory, and the hidden rhyme of ‘existential’ and ‘survival,’ two grand words pronounced by pronouns suffering oppression and isolation. Noone compels us to consider the politically imposed idea of “the other” and how this “other” is not somewhere outside, external to us, but within. It prompts us to reflect on questions concerning the failure, or inability, to communicate, not only with others, but with one’s self due to man-made borders, whether lingual or geopolitical. Edgü’s acute and subtle observations about adverse living conditions that reduce humans to creatures of mere subsistence echo not only the current political climate in eastern Turkey, but also the general climate of despotism in many parts of the world.
While people are constantly forced to be ‘noone,’ the traces of history are buried (or frozen) under snow, and memory is dismantled, Noone reminds us of tomorrow, by re-momenting the past and keeping a record of the moment.
Biblioklept 