Nomadologies
Nomadologies is a complex and brilliant evocation of the fractured and hyphenated mindset of the contemporary Turkish writer and thinker. Erdag Göknar takes us on a dazzling virtual world tour encompassing history, aesthetics, and politics, from Bosnia to Chechnya to the Silk Road to Union Square and back to the place that was once the center of the civilized world, Istanbul/Constantinople. Turkophiles like myself have been waiting for years for Göknar to publish his findings from the multilayered world he inhabits, and here it is. This is a book I shall be returning to often.
—Richard Tillinghast, author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul and cotranslator of Dirty August by Edip Cansever
The poems in Nomadologies connect moments of separation and union in a life lived between Turkey and America. Taking its organizing principle from the grammar of nomadic life, Nomadologies reveals that mobility is the most efficient strategy for sustaining contradictory existences. Here, we learn that poetry is a landscape of inhabitation, and perpetual exile is one's home.
Erdag Göknar is a scholar, writer, and translator. He is best known for his award-winning translation of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red. He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches, teaches, and writes on Turkish Studies.
Erdag Göknar is best known for his award-winning translation of Orhan Pamuk's historical novel MY NAME IS RED, which marked Pamuk's emergence as an author of world literature and opened the way to his selection as Nobel laureate in 2006. The best selling novel was reissued in 2010 as part of the Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics series. Göknar is also the translator of A.H. Tanpinar's iconic novel of Istanbul, A MIND AT PEACE, and Atiq Rahimi's anti-war novella set in Afghanistan, EARTH AND ASHES. He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches, teaches, and writes on Turkish cultural studies. His translations have earned him the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and two NEA Translation fellowship grants. His critical literary study, ORHAN PAMUK, SECULARISM, AND BLASPHEMY: THE POLITICS OF THE TURKISH NOVEL (Routledge 2013), argues that conflicting tropes of Turkish Islam and state secularism give Pamuk's work currency as world literature. Göknar's poetry collection, NOMADOLOGIES (Turtle Point, 2017), establishes a first poetics of Turkish-American diaspora.
