A Case for Ten Turkish Words More Captivating than Hüzün
İllustration: Cins
In early 2019, Efe Levent, old friend and neighbor, wrote a satirical publication called Guide to Every City. Illustrated by Alaa Alhassoun, this ostensible “insider’s guide” to a “sprawling palimpsest of symbols, buildings and roads'' where “modernity meets tradition” - groan - bears more than a little resemblance to how Westerners tend to describe Istanbul. The guide features interviews with a myriad of characters, perhaps most notably among them, an all-too-familiar character named Maji Homsin. He is a writer whose “name has almost become synonymous with Every City...after receiving an international prize for literature”. Homsin’s books “are renowned for their descriptions of the City as a place overflowing with a collective sense of melancholy. He uses the local word nüzüh to describe this sentiment.” That line, along with the one referring to yallah, the alcoholic spirit favoured by the locals of Every City, was the tonal paradigm I held in my mind as this article slowly took shape, first as a lark and then for real. Fun with words aside, it is a laugh-out-loud depiction of the cheesy self-orientalizing that is the signature flourish of a certain West-facing band of the Turkish intelligentsia. Its target audience are Western writers and journalists waiting to pounce on such pontifications, in the hopes of indulging their audience’s superficial fascination with the peripheral world.
At some point around that time I found myself embroiled in a brief argument with an expat-friend who went to heartfelt lengths to explain to me the singularity of the word hüzün, countering my arguments towards its blandness with wide-eyed, earnest convictions of “no, no, those aren’t exact translations. There really isn’t a word quite like it. It’s really special.” Well alright then. In an escalating bit of frequency bias, when the subject of hüzün came up in the following months with other people with foreign connections, some recounted a variety of similar confrontations involving a foreigner randomly captivated by the word.
With every utterance the word felt more and more cloying. I beg to differ on its uniqueness, and not just because - as my experience in translation informs me - there are approximately five hundred words in the English language denoting hüzün by various degrees of accuracy, inasmuch as untranslatability seems to become an inevitable, resounding defence in any banality’s favour. It is trite because an entire culture hinges on its continued affectation.
As for this particular bit of hype? It goes back to 2005, when Orhan Pamuk published the English-language edition of his book Istanbul: Memories and the City, which was reviewed on the Washington Post as follows:
According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun [sic], a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) [five times people, very important] denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” […] According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. “What I am trying to explain,” he writes in this delightful, profound, marvellously original book, “is the huzun of an entire city: of Istanbul.”
That’s a lot of words... The general idea is that hüzün was a prevalent feeling in a lot of cultural works produced in post-Ottoman Istanbul. When I make an effort not to be contrite, I have to give it to Pamuk that considering Istanbul’s long, multifaceted and often ugly history, hüzün may be a standout descriptor hovering in the cloud of signifiers that characterize the city - if you had to pick only one. As it is, however, making such a sweeping statement feels tantamount to claiming that Istanbul is the only city on the planet with a storied, sordid past. Also, who are these depressed millions? I’ll come forward and vouch for my own depression, and for those of a lot of people, I know directly or indirectly – worldwide. Is it exacerbated by living in Istanbul? Definitely – Istanbul is in the world. You’re bound to go off on all sorts of tangents when complex topics are wrapped up in neat blurb-worthy bows. The truth is when I go outside in Istanbul - or tune into the news cycle - and am confronted with its past and present in unexpected, rude ways, I’m usually moved to amusement or more likely anger, not so much hüzün. The former are active verbs, whereas the latter feels analogous to misty-eyed idleness.
How much longer do we need to milk our helplessness in this way? Depending on who you ask, the romantic desperation that has indeed become a trademark of Turkish culture, trickling from the higher echelons to the lower and compounded by decades of accumulating political turmoil, internal migration, and poverty, is most likely to be interpreted as a) a societal sickness in which we fall in love with our painful circumstances - after all, it’s what made us who we are, or b) a form of state-propagated crowd control keeping us from rising up against our string of incompetent and/or corrupt oppressors; all this with a hefty side of toxic nationalism and genocide denial. It’s impossible to pursue those arguments in the space of a sentence or two, if in any capacity at all. All I know is that the melancholy, self-pity or whatever you want to call it, is inextricable from the self-righteousness of a society of help-rejecting complainers. The neverending cycle of deference to and abuse of power could only be upheld so consistently by a society with a high pain threshold. When the rebound came, it was during Gezi as a generation discovered there wasn’t much that couldn’t be improved or made less scary through gleeful mockery. This quickly proved to be the opposite side of the same coin. It often seemed in hindsight that people had banded together, only to laugh themselves silly and then go home.
But here’s the thing: Istanbul’s particular legacy of continual destruction – that of nature, history and the city itself – is certainly a source of great chagrin and resignation for its denizens. But not just that: a great deal of fight, discourse, resistance, civil solidarity and determination swirls around these issues, renewing one’s faith in humanity in new ways every day. Wish I could make like Efe’s Homsin and romanticize resignation atop an ivory tower, but some of us have to live here, you know.
I remember as a kid, on one occasion I was making my mother late due to being glued to the anime I was watching on TV, her finally screaming at me, "Quit watching that weepy, exploitative bag of tripe and get over here NOW!!" Her reductive view of the genre aside – though to be fair, given its insane popularity in Turkey during the 90’s, in all likelihood I was watching Candy Candy – I knew even then where this strong reaction was coming from. In keeping with the secularly-reared, well-educated emerging middle class of her generation, she’d developed a strong and rather judgmental aversion to all culture that she felt made token tropes of self-pitying, fruitless longing, wistfulness, and suffering. I admittedly have her to thank that this word now even more strongly conjures up for me only a hyperbolic anime imagery: a sad girl with the quivering membranes swimming back and forth across her huge wet eyes. However, I’d like to believe my own visceral reaction to reducing an entire motley city to a platitude stems from my own aversion to being bludgeoned over the head with other people’s highly subjective and populist description of states and places literally “shared by millions”. In the succinct phrasing of national football coach Fatih Terim: “what can I do sometimes?”
I’ll tell you what I can do sometimes: I can suggest for my friend, and for anyone else who cares, some alternatives to hüzün on which you can base all sorts of things, like your novel about a spice merchant in 18th century Istanbul or whatever.
Sus/kes/hadi lan
This is a great way to say STFU or TFOH. But it’s also an appeal for the main speaker to share more with you. If you say, “Hadi lan!” with an incredulous tone of voice; for instance when someone tells you that hüzün is the most captivating word in the Turkish language, they will be prompted to enforce and deliberate till the sun comes up.
Mostly derived from single-syllable shouts coined for yelling at herd animals, exclamations like lan are great for delivering some punch. These are peak untranslatable. (In my translating work, I usually turn to, “hey!” or “dude” or some approximation mangled out of an appeal, like “c’mon now”.) You’ll know a foreigner has gained a decent grasp of colloquial Turkish when they’re peppering and punctuating their sentences with be and lan.
Eşek
Having evoked herding animals, I cannot bypass the great eşek, the power animal of the Turkish peoples. Put to work all over the world, donkeys carry all kinds of shit and never complain, yet somehow in our language they have come to personify assholes. When you call a person a donkey, it means that they are obstinate, incorrigible, cantankerous, or a brat, and just generally despicable. A vast majority of Turkish mothers have been known to refer to their offspring as donkey foals.
Anyone who’s actually seen a donkey, however, will attest that they’re soft, sweet animals with very pretty eyes (in an incomprehensible twist, donkey-eyes is a compliment in Turkish) willing to carry the load, and that their foals are objectively way cuter than human children.
Story time: recently a couple of donkeys wandered into the backyard of my apartment, which is a rare enough sight that everyone ran out to their balconies to look at them, and we heard the elderly man living downstairs calling to his wife: “Gülay, come quick, your friends have come a-calling.” I’d contend he was being affectionate rather than abusive. At some point in the last decade, a wave of wokeness generated in the Twittersphere that it’s not alright to call murderers, rapists, corrupt people et al. donkeys or dogs, because it’s discriminatory towards innocent animals. It’s bizarre and has my full support.
Kahkaha
An onomatopoeia, kahkaha translates to laughter or mirth, but most accurately conveys a burst of such. Out of context and on its own, it’s that volley of sound you release when you’re taken off guard, throw your head back, and go, “Hack-ack-ack-ack!”. I love it, because it has a distinctly female aura. In 2014, when the then-Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç advised sagely that the proper woman “ought not to laugh out loud in public”, that was the word he used. Sadly enough, he was merely echoing a sentiment shared among many: as it is, kahkaha really is a word more closely associated with women, in particular the archetype of an immoral woman, cackling where the whole neighborhood can hear her...tövbe tövbe. My grandmother, a veritable she-devil, had a proper kahkaha: crackling from decades of smoking, rakı-guzzling and wisecracking at the top of her lungs at dinner parties. Syntactically, a kahkaha is often something that you throw. It’s the difference between “laughter” and what Ursula Le Guin once described, flawlessly, as “uncouth simian behavior”.
Günah
My boyfriend and I were having dinner one day with his mom, who is from Artvin, a city of Turkey whose locals are famously apolitical and pacifistic (not to be confused by the ride-or-die lefties of Hopa). We were complaining about the ant infestation in our flat, which had become wildly unmanageable despite the array of natural deterrents I’d tried. I told her about a method I’d found online that purported to be final: you buy some borax and scatter it around the ants’ territory, they mistake it for sugar and carry it back to their colony to eat, which they all do, and the entire colony is wiped out. I told her I was considering it - in my defense not only had they at this point started sprouting wings and flying around, but were also so dense on some surfaces it was hallucinatory - but it seemed too harsh to me. She dismissed that option immediately with a shake of her head: “No, that’s awful. Günah.” Now despite being a tolerant yet devout Muslim woman who once scolded us for “not believing in anything”, what she meant wasn’t that she really thought killing a bunch of ants would earn me a celestial demerit. In this use, the understanding of günah was closely tied with her personal ethics. It was about the unfairness of not fighting like with like but using my cranial advantage to extinguish a small colony of living beings instead of just diverting or tolerating them. She wouldn’t want bugs going to town on her kitchen either - she’s way more obsessively clean than I am - and she was sympathetic to my plight. Yet clearly no amount of obsessiveness could merit declaring war on an opponent at such an obvious disadvantage.
Particularly intense in the past couple of decades, Turkey’s politics have always been dependent on the exploitation of wholesome Muslim values, if not founded on them altogether. Günah is only one concept to lose its appeal due to its being thrown around in a didactic, gratuitous manner. In a story as old as time, the more I hear it used to police people’s behavior in their personal lives, the less I can remember its potential as a sweeter sentiment, a litmus test to gauge one’s own morality, if not for such moments.
Küsmek
Küsmek is basically pointedly ignoring someone in order to punish them, and though it can be literally translated as “silent treatment”, “cold shoulder” or “sulking”, it has a further element of drama, an appeal to publicly resolve (or dissolve). As such, the word has an overall infantile feel to it and a kid’s first encounter with it is bound to be in the schoolyard, probably because it takes disinhibition due to the aforementioned element of drama. When two kids are on the outs and one of them has had enough, he goes up to the other and holds up two hands, one with the fingers crossed and the other making an O, asking, “Küs or peace?” and the other kid can let him know by undoing the former to resume their friendship or the latter to not do that. I actually kind of wish the code endured into adulthood so I could do that instead of screaming internally and willing people to leave me the hell alone.
A few years ago I randomly stumbled upon the works of Edward T. Hall, a now largely-forgotten anthropologist who coined the term proxemics, basically the study of humans’ use of space, their perception of it in relation to the body, and the culturally ingrained ways boundaries are determined, in so many words. I enjoyed his digestible writings, and his use of a triarchic model to illustrate interpersonal relationships, with the American, Japanese and Arabic cultures at its poles; having lived and worked in all three, his depths of personal, affectionate feeling for each are tangible in his examples. Nonverbal communication is tantamount yet all but invisible, he maintains, though there are innumerable culturally determined ways of self-expression, all of which involve a passive aggressive declaration of boundaries at some level. In that context, no wonder küsmek - often quite literally ghosting someone while they’re in plain sight - is one of the first protocols to be established by the newly socialized ie. grade schoolers. But look at me, all humanities and shit! It’s almost like you can take any word and make an argument about how summarily it conveys a thesis.
Dost vs. arkadaş
When I was eight, I got into a deeply intellectual discussion with a kid in my neighbourhood about what constitutes an arkadaş and what a dost. Though both mean friend, one tipping rather more towards cohort and the other buddy, there seemed to us, even at that age, to be a well of other meanings there. (As per my original point about the mutability of language and the impossibility of finding one term for something that fits all.) I maintained that arkadaş is just a run-of-the-mill friend, whereas a dost is a closer, more genuine chum; a confidante, a homegirl, et al. - while she countered patiently, “No, see, an arkadaş is someone you get along with and see every day and tell most stuff to, whereas a dost is someone you see every once in a while. You’re not that close, you’re OK with them and you say hi and stuff, but you don’t really talk about the deep stuff.” Though I was pretty sure she was wrong and that she was basically mistaking dost for an acquaintance, her logical elucidation trumped mine and that was that.
Nearly three decades later, however, it occurs to me that maybe she wasn’t far off the mark. In adulthood in 2020, I find myself called upon to be friendly with people I barely know, day after day, liking each other’s posts, being chummy, digital embraces in a rain of emoji affectation. When lines of acquaintanceship are breached, however, most of us are more sharply intolerant than ever. Meanwhile, the kind of close, old friend that denotes dost has come to define the ones with whom I could forget to talk for weeks, months or a year but still be able to call each other at all hours of day and night and carry on like our last meeting was yesterday, and have an indefinite lease on one another’s couches, even now past the crashing-on-couches age. (Is one ever though?) So I’ll give my old neighbour credit that what I then took to be miscomprehension may well have been a bit of keen foresight into our bleak futures.
Naming your child after an appeal
There are men walking around who are one of the youngest in a family of say, twelve, whose parents named them Dursun, literally meaning: “Make it stop”. Sadder still are the self-fulfilling prophecies of families living in poverty, children named “Enough” (Yeter) or “My Suffering” (Çilem). In fact as considerable a bulk of Turkish names are words right out of colloquial speech – meaning, for example, you might be named Silk, Spring, Cute, et al, as well as petitions in form of verb, such as Be Loved or Flourish – as are lifted from Muslim scripture. (Boyfriend’s aforementioned mother and aunts are all named some iteration of love – Sevgi, Sevim, Sevinç, Sevil, et al. – which feels less like cutesy coordination of children’s names than a sinister plot to confuse outsiders to the family.)
I don’t know if it has anything to do with first names being the only names - aside from an array of creative nicknames to distinguish them from one another - that people had until about a century ago when family names were introduced to the new Republic, but it’s a kind of a gimmick in the tug-of-war between highbrow and lowbrow culture, and one that rather gets my goat. Names are supposed to convey information about the background of a person, usually to the detriment of the owner, so much that some names become gimmicks in their own right. For every Dursun, I imagine a Çisil Su somewhere, who is basically Turkish Becky with bleached hair, extensions and acrylics whose granddad is a retired Republican army officer, mouthing off, “why must they have so many children if they can’t feed them? Even they themselves are sick of it, look at what they name their kids. Why must they fuck and breed like rabbits?” while she slurps up her latte at the Starbucks just outside the campus of the private university where I studied (yes, I lived it).*
Bilgisayar
Owing to influences throughout its history, Turkish absorbed a great number of words from Arabic, Farsi, French and most recently English. To be fair, it was not without resistance that it succumbed to the latter most recent onslaught, and the choosing of a word of English origin over a reasonable Turkish counterpart is still generally considered lazy. (My most recent experience with this was my folly in wanting to use the word laconic in a friend’s exhibition press release and deciding to go right ahead and write lakonik which, while not against the law or anything, established me as Ms Hot-Shit-English and I still haven’t heard the end of it from him.) In fact, there was a certain time that TDK, the Turkish Language Commission, painstakingly coined terms for the latest entries in the global dictionary, such as “computer”, resulting in the surprisingly versatile and clever bilgisayar.
It translates to “information counter”, which is literally what computing is! How we got from creativity of this magnitude to the terrible tech translations of the present that do nothing more than accentuate the fact that computers are weird machines that have yet to master human language, I’m not sure.
Hırs
This comes up because it’s more of a demonstration of an interesting point rather than, arguably, an interesting word in and of itself. With around a 6:1 ratio of English words to Turkish words - in elegant symmetry to our currencies at the time of this writing - I usually have trouble finding exact Turkish equivalents to English words, not the other way around. This - rather, decidedly, than hüzün - is one of the rare instances in which a Turkish word defies translation.
To expound: hırs is directly translatable as ambition, but so is azim, which more accurately conveys the feeling of its English counterpart. Hırs feels distinctly negative: an aggressively competitive, grasping kind of ambition that reduces everyone and everything in the world to resources to be exhausted. Even the articulation of the word requires gritting your teeth. A dictionary search brings up greed, anger and avarice as possible choices, but these seem arbited for their undertones of malignancy rather than for accuracy.
Aşık/aşk
You thought there was going to be absolutely no room for twee here, right? Wrong! We are talking about Turkish, after all.
I’m including it even though there’s no escaping the fact that it’s as banal as banalities go, because the untranslatability is also strong with this one. While it really translates to “being in love”, it is used equitably for two situations: being in love with a person (romantically) or with a vocation. The latter context I am deriving from the traveling minstrels that come from a long tradition of poets, musicians, epic writers, and bards - imparters of oral history. The word, derived from Arabic, is apparently related to the Turkish verb for desiring or seeking via Indo-Iranian affiliation.
On a side note, another of our national literary treasures has written a book titled such, which I haven’t read, but I had a vague feeling around the time of its publishing (in particular every time I went to the supermarket, where the cover kept winking at me from the bargain bins) that it was jostling for a niche in the “quaint foreign word for the well-travelled to name their babies” market.**
On that note, I’m going to start wrapping up this hold-my-beer venture. Listen: I understand the appeal of writing a love letter to your city, your depression, or the relation of the latter to the former, whatever. I’m aware that in the guise of criticism, this essay not only inadvertently extends the exercise but also perfectly encapsulates the trap of making words into vehicles for one’s wholesale opinions: see my half-baked thesis above about küsmek. And I had to stop myself from veering off further into soliloquizing about whether hırs illustrates well my culture’s ambivalence around unchecked ambition and stretching it - until it breaks - to the point of asserting that we on this rectangular stretch of land are temperamentally unfit for neoliberalism, or waxing poetic about the viscerality of my native language as demonstrated by the unspooling of aşk’s etymology. But there’s no way ever to verify any of this. So the main point of these ten words, quite off the top of my head, more captivating than hüzün might just come down to that: it might be a cliche because it’s true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t always try to overcome the laziness of our imaginations. You’ll never convince me that that’s not what language is for.
*At the time of this edit, she’s probably graduated to blarting: “ChinA nEEds tO Pay rEpArAti0nS to tHe resT of thE woRLd”!!11 and railing against bat soup because everyone knows you can’t get diseases from eating any other animals.
** I’ve also been alerted to the fact that the book in question was released in two his & her covers. Imagine masculinity so fragile you can’t buy a book with a pink cover, but even better than that; imagine pandering to said masculinity so hard you wouldn’t mind marketing your book like it was a perfume.