Found in Translation Maureen Freely on the Trials and Tribulations Of
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MONTAGE born in noise. In two recent works—“Bound to the Bow,” her Pulit- zer finalist composi- tion for orchestra and electronics, and the septet “Something To Hunt”—listeners are asked to challenge hardwired listening habits. “I think,” Fure JEAN-MICHEL ALBERT said, “I am looking to believe that’s possible. for—and trying to offer—a type of empa- MARINA LEVITSKAYA/PEAK PERFORMANCES MONTCLAIR AT STATE I have to believe that the thetic engagement with material that most Above: Percussionist Ross Karre of the International better I get at what I do— people in the audience, particularly those Contemporary Ensemble “plays” an aircraft cable stretched the more specific, and dis- who think Stravinsky is challenging, don’t across two styrofoam hemispheres in The Force of Things. At right: A still from Tripwire (2011), Fure’s multimedia tilled, and exacting I can spend much time trying to engage with.” installation project, in which motorized elastic strings be—the greater chance With a few months to go before the opera’s oscillate in response to onlookers’ movements there is my work might opening, Fure was still trying to find out what speak beyond the bound- sorts of new sounds the performance space parents, noting her interest in music, set her aries it’s born into.” allowed for, how close she could get to what up with piano lessons. Music soon became Concurrently, Fure began working with she was hearing in her mind. Midway through her ticket to new experiences. Feeling held the microphones in the campus electronics one rehearsal, Karre, the percussionist, was back at her high school, she won admission studio. “This is what’s difficult about the testing the sound a rope made when placed to the composition department at Interloch- concert hall for me: I want people to feel the inside a subwoofer (a loudspeaker that pro- en Arts Academy, and then to Oberlin. But sound right here,” she explained. “I want duces low bass frequencies). As he repeatedly Fure assumed she would one day choose a to whisper it into their ear. But instead I lifted the speaker and set it down, the rope, field more explicitly entwined with politi- have to play it on a stage that’s 80 feet away, which was suspended from the ceiling, began cal action—education, perhaps, or conflict which always loses that crisp, intense, in- to twirl. It stuttered, then twirled again with resolution. Guilt about her work’s utility timacy of proximate sound.” Being able to renewed vigor, like a forgetful dancer. trailed her to Harvard, where she enrolled hold microphones right next to the sounds “It’s life!” someone gasped, noting its resem- as a composition doctoral student directly she was working with—like a glass tile that blance to a double helix. “Look at the insane after college. There, in a class on modernism, she placed, on a whim, inside a piano and sound it’s making,” Fure murmured, gazing she discovered Virginia Woolf, whose writ- then rotated, to earsplitting satisfaction— at the string with something like admiration. ing eased Fure’s fraught relationship with allowed her to create music exactly as she She seemed to have found what she was lis- her own work. “Woolf was the first person heard it. tening for: an agile whirring, slight yet tena- who taught me that you can go down to get The wish for closeness is present across cious, like a mind as it begins to spin. out. She goes so deeply inside of her char- Fure’s oeuvre: the desire to bring audiences acters that she hits the universal through close to netherworldly sounds they wouldn’t the extremely specific,” Fure said. “I have otherwise encounter, and to offer a catharsis Found in Translation Maureen Freely on the trials and tribulations of Turkish-to-English translation by oset babür urkey has seen no shortage of personal diary. An outspoken leftist who political upheaval and cultural mysteriously died at the Bulgarian border shifts in the 70 years since Saba- while trying to flee Turkey in 1948, Ali has T hattin Ali first publishedMadonna proved to be an enduring symbol of anti- in a Fur Coat, a story of doomed love in 1930s government resistence, and after dancing in Berlin, reflected through the protagonist’s and out of Turkey’s bestseller lists over the AVANESSIAN ANDRE Maureen Freely ANDRE AVANESSIAN ANDRE Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE years, Madonna is now considered something Bringing a text into another language is of a cult classic. In the wake of the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and the attempted coup in gradual but also somewhat frenetic. 2016, international readers who’ve turned to Turkey’s Anglophone voices to better un- of English and comparative literature at the years can be seen as part of some imperialist derstand the nation’s current evolution have University of Warwick. Born in New Jer- project,” she says. “I don’t see it that way, but reawakened interest not only in contempo- sey and now based in England, she grew up people have written papers about how I am rary voices like Elif Safak, but also in authors in Istanbul, where her late father, physicist an ‘orientalist.’ These tensions between the from Turkey’s past, including Ali, Sait Faik, John Freely, taught at Robert College (now political and literary cultures are real.” and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpi.nar. Bogazici University). In conversation, she is Freely’s first foray into translation, in her Maureen Freely ’74 is widely regarded as frank about how her position as a Westerner twenties, was with Turkish writer Sevgi the foremost translator of Turkish literature has influenced some readers’ perceptions of Soysal’s account of being a political prisoner. into English; Madonna is her fourteenth work. her abilities: they are hesitant to believe she Directly thereafter, she began what she jok- She’s also written seven novels and is at work will overcome her cultural biases. “Inevita- ingly refers to as her many years of “appren- on her eighth, while serving as the president bly, somebody bringing in the daughter of an ticeship” with Orhan Pamuk, who would win of English PEN and head of the department American professor who taught Turks for 50 the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. Between (and, more to the point, curator in lustrating why it is impossible to imagine a herpetology) accessibly explains world without literature. Off the Shelf evolution as an experimental science, Recent books with Harvard connections helping lay readers understand what 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, is determined and what contingent by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Fletcher Univer- in life’s procession. (Read about his sity Professor (Pantheon, $40). Riffing on Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian , recent work on lizards’ swift adapta- the 1957 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro by Richard Aldous (W.W. Norton, $29.95). tion to climate change at harvardmag. with Complete Proof by the Pittsburgh Cou- If current events have you yearning for ad- com/anoles-17.) In Darwin’s Backyard rier’s Joel A. Rogers, and columns from The ministrations past, this biography of Ar- (W.W. Norton, $27.95), James T. Costa, Root, Gates explores Malcolm X at Oxford, thur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38, JF ’43—histo- RF ’05, travels back in time to the domestic the emperor of Mali, Homer Plessy of the rian, faculty member, and author, in many experiments and puttering that under- eponymous litigation, and more. senses, of the Camelot version of the Ken- scored the development of the world- nedy presidency—may fit the bill. Aldous, changing theories. A Century of Wealth in America, by himself an historian at Bard, is well suited Edward N. Wolff ’68 (Belknap/ Harvard, to take stock of the historian/popularizer/ Gorbachev: His Life and Times , by $39.95). A New York University economist public figure, “always ready to write.” William Taubman ’62 (W.W. Norton, provides a definitive examination of the “re- $39.95). A sweeping life of the “hard to markable growth in household wealth” dur- The Lost Founding Father: John understand” leader (in his own words) who ing the twentieth century, and the equally Quincy Adams and the Transforma- drained the Soviet swamp—and perhaps remarkable “sharp increase in wealth in- tion of American Politics , by William J. set in motion the events that led to the equality” during the past four decades— Cooper (Liveright, $35). Looking even perils of Putin-era Russia. The author, an along with the status of those who did not deeper into the country’s past, to a still- Amherst political scientist emeritus, won benefit from that great skewing. Scholarly, earlier Harvardian president (A.B., A.M., a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Khrush- but with wide application to public discourse. LL.D.), Cooper, an emeritus historian at chev. Nonspecialists will be grateful for the Louisiana State, exhumes a world-traveled 11-page “cast of characters,” like those ac- Saamaka Dreaming, by Richard Price ’63, leader who “occupies a camouflaged posi- companying a vast Russian novel, given the P.D. ’70, and Sally Price ’65 (Duke, $26.95 tion in U.S. history.” Adding to the Crim- similar scope. paper). How can you not like people who son resonances, the author took up work begin a memoir about doing anthropology begun by his academic mentor, David Her- The Written World: The Power of in Suriname this way: “Despite physical dis- bert Donald (later Harvard’s Warren pro- Stories to Shape People, History, comforts, periods of boredom, ailments fessor of American history), but left unfin- Civilization , by Martin Puchner, Wien ranging from funguses…to hepatitis, and ished at his death.