Artwork by Jayoon Choi
The full text to Çandar and Gramling’s new translation can be found here.
Read the translators’ note:
Kemal Varol is a Kurdish author from Turkey who writes primarily in Turkish. Kara Sis (Dark Mist) is Varol’s sixth novel, published in 2021. Only one of Varol’s other novels has appeared in English. His 2014 novel Haw, which narrates a fictionalized account of the Turkish-Kurdish civil war of the 1990s through the perspective of a stray dog, appeared in English as Wûf in 2019, translated by Dayla Rogers. We wanted to translate a section of Dark Mist to help Varol’s work reach a wider audience and introduce Wûf’s English readers to another part of Varol’s oeuvre.
Varol’s works often focus on political realities even as he eschews social realism, this being the style that dominates political Turkish novels. Dark Mist is representative of this political bent but also constitutes a divergence. Instead of narrating Turkish political history, as do Haw and Jar (2011), Dark Mist is the story of a prison cell of convicted murderers. The narrative starts with the arrival of a mysterious young convict named Barana whose reticence and quirks throw the cell’s carefully achieved balance into disarray. Recalling the frame narrative of Haw, where the stray dog Mikasa arrives at the dog shelter on the verge of death from mysterious injuries, Barana too arrives on the brink of death, beaten within an inch of his life by the prison guards. But by the end of the novel the story of the cell will take surprising turns, moving us away from the social realist echoes of the first chapters and leaving readers with a puzzling reading game.
Varol’s Turkish is generally straightforward, but the inmates’ language relies heavily on slang. One translation challenge for us was capturing the easy flow of slang and communicating its intelligent crudeness. Varol uses either nicknames or quirky, heavy-handedly metaphoric names for the characters. It was difficult not to make these (nick)names sound forced in translation. Candan İleri, whose name we translated as Soul Traveler, was perhaps the most challenging. In the original Turkish, the name sounds ordinary. In Turkish, both first and last names are often nouns used in regular speech, unlike in English. Retaining the regular-sounding metaphor of Candan İleri’s name was therefore impossible, we decided.
As translators, we were intrigued by Varol’s skill in humanizing this group of men who embody the many traits of toxic masculinity. The chapter we decided to translate, the second of twenty, introduces the inmates. As such, it gives a good sense of the type of men (and crimes) the novel portrays. Three have killed others in the heat of the moment, one has killed for revenge, and two have killed women they “loved.” The text garners sympathy for these men, which is not to say it excuses their crimes. Despite their crimes, they are funny and likeable. The oppression of imprisonment, on the other hand, never appears useful or “deserved.” Is this, then, a novel to be read through the lens of prison abolition, or a commentary on the notorious horrors of the Turkish prison system? Or is it a novel that inadvertently (at best) and insidiously (at worst) lulls us into overlooking the equally notorious ramifications of toxic masculinity in Turkey? In choosing a chapter to translate from Dark Mist, we chose “Gaps” because it begins to signal these questions and complications in the novel without giving too much away.
