Anna Akhmatova’s “Tale of the Black Ring” begins, in Jane Kenyon’s translation, “Presents were rare things/coming from my grandmother, a Tartar [sic];/and she was bitterly angry/when I was baptized.” This, and the Yalta of Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog,” comprised my experience of Crimea in literature until last week. The publication of Crimean Fig, the first anthology of contemporary fiction and poetry translated into English from the Crimean Tatar language, offers an introduction to the history and culture of a people exiled from their homeland by Stalin, returned after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and invaded again by Russia in the beginning of what would become a war for all of Ukraine.
The anthology evolved from Alim Aliev’s Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar project “Crimean Fig,” dedicated to the promotion of Crimean Tatar literature and culture. Co-editor Anastasia Levkova devised the principles for the “Crimean Fig” literary contest for writers and translators in 2018, and most of the anthology’s contributors are contest winners and finalists. Co-editor Askold Melnyczuk writes in his Foreward, “Our dearest wish is that other translators and publishers engage with this trove of undiscovered literature from that ancient yet enduring culture forged over centuries by the Crimean Tatars.” Crimean Fig gives a taste of what a reader is likely to find there.
The stories and poems in the collection are not translated, but adapted, in a scrupulous nod to the difficulty of bringing across an entire culture in works of, at most, a dozen or so pages. Still, the language in stories like Mustafa Amet’s “The Black Walls of the Zindan” expose the horrors of life under occupation. A zindan is an underground prison––something familiar enough to have its own noun. “Berzah,” the term for “an intermediate state or place between death and resurrection” is also left as an untranslated metaphor for the narrator’s torment––a place parallel to the Tibetan Buddhist bardo, but here, excruciating. Amet’s idyllic flashbacks of childhood and life before imprisonment include hiding with friends to watch a mermaid emerge from the river, an action resonant with myth and folk tale: “If the Mermaid came ashore, we’d steal her golden combs and run away. I didn’t know for sure if she appeared, but as soon as we heard the reeds rustle, our hearts filled with terror and we fled.” More terror, we learn, will follow.
I especially enjoyed Zekiye Ismailova’s “My Blue-Eyed Adile,” a tale of friendship, courtship, female bravery, and the shadow of war that falls between Adile and Khalil, the boy who teases and adores her. Separated, married to another, but unforgotten, Adile discovers the young stranger beside her on a train is Khalil’s granddaughter, named for her; the grandson who meets Adile is called Khalil. The young namesakes are introduced, implying a continuity that no interloper can destroy.
Among the poets, I’m particularly struck by Zubiya Sattarova’s “Perdalez. Meeting” The poem’s first stanzas praise the allure of spring––“…a pretty good season/when people fall in love with a warm climate”––and then winter, with its “snowflakes soft and clean,/like wintry flowers flying around.” But each stanza ends, “Oh, what a deceptive world/which is so well-made!” Aliye Kendzhe-Ali writes her love for “Cold Crimea,” its “dying flowers on your trees––like your enemy’s bent thoughts.” Her “My Beloved” is a litany for an absent lover: “my vast sea,/my unopened book,/my unwritten line./…my bird flying far away,/my warm nest/on the cliff which cuts my hands.” Disruption unsettles all the verse, as it has the lives of the poets.
In “The Day Lady Died,” Frank O’Hara buys a copy of “NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets/in Ghana are doing these days.” I urge readers to the pages of Crimean Fig in the same spirit. Thanks to M.P. Carver, David Earl, John Fulton, Ha Jin, Hanna Leliv, Diane Mehta, William Pierce, Shuchi Saraswat, Leyla Seytkhalilova, Lara Stecewycz and Shubha Sunder for their English renditions of the originals, and to Askold Melnyczuk for co-editing and adding Crimean Fig to the list at Arrowsmith Press.