Book Review:
Metric Conversions: Poetry of Our Time (Edited, compiled, and translated into Crimean Tatar by Taner Murat, with illustrations by Sagida Siraziy). Iasi, Sos: Editura StudIS, 2013. Pages 299. ISBN 9786066244497.
Taner Murat is on a mission: to revive and popularize his mother tongue through poetry. He sees the compilation and edition of the anthology as an exercise in intercultural exchange, “a stimulus for cultural contact and exchange, and an invitation to recognize otherness as originally planned and created by God,” as he confesses to me. Although Metric Conversions – Metreli kaytarmalar – seeks to “build a modest bridge between the Crimean Tatars and distant nations, religions, races and cultures of the world”, it seems to me that Taner Murat has achieved much more. His vision of unconditional love and the unity of all creation motivates him to interpret to the Crimean Tatar community their present and also to reinterpret their past so that they can experience a new era of creation different from past eras and characteristically contemporary with them in his vision and motive. His cultural search – to collect, edit and translate – is his silent action in the face of so much violence and negativities from abroad. It works more calmly, revealing the inner space and adding a variety of subtleties to thoughts and ideas.
With his sense of the soul and his awareness of the ‘inmost truth’, Murat makes us think, as do the contributing poets he chooses for the anthology to enrich his search with his perception of life and living. They not only reframe and recontextualize real life, but also situate themselves within broader cultural trends. In fact, they broaden and sharpen our contact with existence; everyone is driven by their inner urge to live more fully and deeply with greater awareness, to know the experience of others, and to know their own experience better.
With his heightened vision of rhythmic and creative self-expression and visionary thinking, Nazar Look’s internationally renowned editor-in-chief combines new insights and revelations, new ideals and values, new powers to revive but no longer limited or obscurantist. Taner Murat’s talent for the harmony of Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and Spirit is evident in his design to revive what was cast aside or ignored and now deserves a fresh look. The exercise of it, a fusion of vision that transfigures the old rhythms and creates new characteristic harmonies, thus becomes, effectively, a search for the Spirit that is larger than life.
Non-academic but well aware of online developments and exciting paradigm shifts in both poetry and the arts, the multifaceted poet-editor strengthens his work through novelty visual art, which he uses to prefix the introduction and the poems of each poet. In fact, the dual muse, poetry and painting, not only invigorates Crimean Tatar art and language, but also enlightens the international community about its rich tradition and new possibilities. As he explains, it is “innovative and exciting to enrich the creative conception of the anthology by bringing a collection of Tatar visual art closer to English poetry. I think this can help our work to form a sketchy perception in the minds of English readers.” of our identity and culture. I have to confess that the visual artwork was not created especially for the illustration in this book. Instead, I went to the artist’s portfolio and just picked the paintings with eloquent themes. The Tatars have many artists. But I prefer Sagida for the expression of her work and for her gel pen technique, which like etching helps preserve most of the consistency of paintings when printed in black and white.”
He is right and justified. The confluence of visual art and literary art raises awareness to a new level as well as communicating solidarity internationally. Illustrations by Sagida Siraziy (Sirazieva), a Tatar artist from Kazan, Tatarstan (Russia), add to the poets’ shared optimism and Taner Murat’s own journey to “have new eyes”, both for Tatar communities abroad as well as for the English-speaking audience (in North America, Western Europe, Western Asia, the Middle East, South Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere) who would like to learn about the emerging artistic aspects of the Crimean Tatar people. His drawings complement the poems of 38 poets (28 men and 10 women) trusted by Murat for their sensitivity and soul experience from the US (22), UK (2), Turkey (1), Philippines (1), Canada (2), South Africa (2), India (5), Israel (1) and Palestine (1).
Highly evolved, symbolic and interpretive, and rooted in native folk tradition and creation myths, Sagida’s art is a celebration of the spirit within. She draws on a mystical veil and longs for union with the Supreme Creator. She seeks the unity and totality of our being and Nature and the world and God to make the actuality of our life more real and rich. She stirs the innermost psyche or the subtlest corners of the soul with her East-meets-West dynamic.
Carefully selected drawings of the Murat artist’s work provide an insight into contemporary Tatar art with the human quest at its center. Sagida’s soft and elegant illustrations are the speech of the Spirit, sometimes with elements of mystical rhetoric. One can read the images of him in greater depth. The drawings are spiritually uplifting because they present a harmonious blend of man and nature, tradition and modernity. These are predominantly Prakriti or Nature oriented, or guided by the Yin, or feminine principle, with the touch of God, which helps to harmonize the opposites.
The artist is intuitive, extending the tradition of the human spirit’s striving toward God, or life itself, as anticipated by the recognition of the divine presence in both the creation and reception of her art. With an awareness of new dimensions and new meanings, both Sagida and Murat seem intuitively traditional, universal and timeless in her visual poetics.
Yet it is the revival effort of Murat, who appreciates the unity of poets and artists with internationality, that an endangered Crimean Tatar language and art become relevant to people raised in the aesthetics of digital culture. of the 21st century. His preference for short poems is in tune with the essentially lyrical, rhythmic, and visual mindset of his community. He therefore anthologizes poems with themes and passions that reflect Tatar experiences of love, life and reality, and social consciousness, anguish, separation, deprivation, death, migration, urban discontent, inner restlessness, as well as spiritual aspirations or Sufi quest. . , and awareness of unity with the divine and with everyone, and inner struggle for moral and spiritual values in the midst of the ironic impotence of our time.
For example, the imagination of poets such as Christopher Leibow, Larry Lefkowitz, Phillip Lorren, Paul Killam, Christopher Hivner, Steven Jacobson, Shawn Aveningo, Gary Beck, Kevin Marshall Chopson, Alan D. Harris, and Ron Koppelberger has a spiritual edge. As they try to explore the unexplored, they connect their anguish, hope and dream with reality and establish their life purpose. His deeply felt spiritual tensions are closest to the Tatar mind.
Shawn Aveningo, in his search for the “core,” thinks with a sense of eternity and expresses essential unity: “It is indeed that I stand before you” and “I am whole;/We are one.” Gary Beck discovers inner wisdom as he explores the chaotic world and the self, and experiences reality. Mike Berger raises crucial questions, questions of life and death, on behalf of the world and his own, and appears skeptical as he searches for the lost. Les Bernstein is also mystified by the “curious operations of fate” and the transience of life and human ties: “it’s just life/and then it’s over.”
Fern GZ Carr, aware of the internal evolutionary curve, struggles with “cosmic chaos” and discovers “throwing matter into infinity and/scattering stars into oblivion”. He sounds Upanishadic in his apprehension of silence as something divine whose reality lies in an awareness of joy. He perhaps he understands that the light of the soul shines in the inner stillness, “an intimate solitude that is not shared / with those who sleep.” He tries to see with the ‘eye of the Spirit’.
Similarly, Ute Carson writes with a spiritual sense: Her search is internal per se, initiated and resolved within, “at my core,” as she puts it. She seeks to move away “from the bandage/ towards possibility and hope”. Jude Conlee is almost meditative as she declares, “I speak without words.”
Don Drakes, wryly nostalgic for the male-female relationship in Zululand, seems disenchanted with post-apartheid cultural changes that see “maidens stay at home and young men spill/their seed/on the dry ground.” Like him, Dr. Mig is nostalgic for the brevity of love and the irresistible desire for sensual pleasure. But he also reconciles.
Along the same lines, aware of the changes taking place in the “desert” of development, Alan Haider wryly realizes: “cheap desire trumps sensibility.” Science and technology seem to isolate, to reduce man to a cogwheel: “I am a cogwheel/ The screw turns/ Souls are drawn upwards like water/… And the erg is swept away.” Yet he is hopeful: “I think things will move again / Even if it’s just to die / The ice will break / And the sun will rise.”
Poets therefore share their inner drive and action to make a difference for all, not withdrawing from life, mind, or body, but trying to conquer or transform them by the power of spirit. To quote John Patrick Hill: “…Our lives are/ A Balance from within this Light/ And this Dark./ A Peaceful Balance, established between/ Star and Earth Temples./ A Positive-Positive Universal Balance ./ We are the Dance between,/obsidian and diamonds”. Everyone seeks harmony and balance in our Age of Dissemination (Christopher Hivner) as Steven Jacobson says: “life is fruitful and full of wonder, / and just as the sun shines on our faces, / so God wants His glory shine in all/our hearts”.
In short, my reflections on random poets do not mean that Taner Murat’s anthology lacks variety or that there is no other possible perspective for what poets write. Whatever their aesthetic tenor, they follow their own intuition or dictates in articulating their ‘I’ and their ‘identity’ against the realities of life. As they turn inwards or inside out, they demonstrate postmodernist concerns, sound tongue-in-cheek and apolitical, and look for ways that would make the neighborhood a better and wealthier place to live. They all think broadly and write confidently, trying to negotiate what it is to be human. They explore the world through themselves and make aesthetic choices that expose their deepest drives and wits.
Conscious of the way he is, Taner Murat personally prefers “structured and disciplined verse”. But he does not differentiate between poets who favor experimental modes of free verse and traditional metrical artifice, as long as they appeal to Tatar taste. He knows that today’s poetry is a living and constantly changing entity, and for this reason, “the lost rhyme is preferable to the lost poets.”
I appreciate his landmark achievement and hope that the global audience will also wholeheartedly support his sensitively developed anthology of contemporary international poetry.
–Ram Krishna Singh
