Image from Şenocak’s 2024 release, First Light. Zephyr Press.
Abstract: Berlin-based writer Zafer Şenocak will read from his new bilingual poetry collection First Light (Turkish and English). Readers will find explorations of migration, exile, memory, identity, and the fine line between reason and belief — themes that have appeared throughout his career as a leading Turkish-German intellectual, but which gain new shades of meaning as he articulates them in his first language. Some poems reference mystical Islam — exploring both hidden and evident aspects of the world, the real and the dream-like — as well as Turkish poetic traditions. These poems movingly give voice to what his translator Kristin Dickinson calls “moments of cross-cultural contact and entanglement.”
The follow-up discussion with Şenocak and Dickinson will be moderated by CENES’ Markus Hallensleben.
About the Speakers
Zafer Şenocak. Image from Another Chicago Magazine.
Zafer Şenocak is a prolific Turkish-German author and public intellectual, who has published ten books of poetry, seven novels, five essay collections, and numerous articles over the past 40 years. Born in Ankara in 1961, he has lived in Germany since 1970 and in Berlin since 1989. He wrote exclusively in German early in his career, but he now frequently writes in Turkish. He has won several prestigious awards in Germany, and is a frequent contributor to nationwide German newspapers. Another volume of his German-language poems appeared in English translation as Door Languages in 2008 (trans. Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright, Zephyr Press). His essay collection Atlas of a Tropical Germany was edited and translated by Prof. Leslie A. Adelson in 2000 (Nebraska Press).
Kristin Dickinson. Image from Michigan University.
Kristin Dickinson is an associate professor of German studies at the University of Michigan. She is a scholar of German and Turkish literature, with interests in questions of world literature, translation, migration, and multilingualism. Her book, DisOrientations: German Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation (1811-1946), was published by Penn State University Press in 2021. Together with her diverse articles, it challenges racial, ethno-linguistic, and geopolitical definitions of German- and Turkishness by highlighting longstanding histories of literary-cultural contact and exchange. Her translations from German and (Ottoman) Turkish have appeared in TRANSIT, the Turkish-German Studies Yearbook, Words without Borders, EuropeNow, and a PEN Translation Slam.
How to Attend
This lecture will be hosted online over Zoom on November 6, at 2:00pm Pacific Time. Please register here in advance for this meeting.
This event is co-sponsored by the UBC Narratives Group in the Centre for Migration Studies.
