Sleeping in the Forest: Stories and Poems

By Sait Faik Abasıyanık

Sait Faik may well be named "the Turkish Chekhov." In Turkey, critics and readers regard him as their finest short story writer. Since his death in 1954 at the age of forty-eight, his stature has grown on the strength of his narrative art, which is both realistic and whimsical with a poetic touch. S ha Oguzertem, a premier authority on Turkish fiction, writes in his introduction to Sleeping in the Forest that "As an anti-bourgeois writer and fierce democrat, Sait Faik has always sided with the underdog" and that no characters remain " 'common' or 'ordinary' once they enter Sait Faik's stories; his piercing gaze and thoughtful vision transform them lovingly into unique beings."

Sait Faik's fiction ranges from the realistic to the surrealistic, from the romantic to the modern, from the cynical to the compassionate. With virtuosic skill, he captures the spirit and the spleen of the city of Istanbul and its environs. In evoking the mystery of that great metropolis through such ordinary characters as Armenian fishermen, Greek Orthodox priests, and the disillusioned and disfranchised, he creates for us a marvelous microcosm of tragicomedy. Few writers, in Turkey or elsewhere, command Sait Faik's mastery of the ironic.

Sleeping in the Forest features twenty-two stories, an excerpt from a novella, and fifteen poems rendered into English by some of the best-known translators of Turkish literature. Sait Faik's chiaroscuro world is brought into focus by an introductory essay on utopian poetics and lyrical stylistics of this great Turkish writer. The book is a stimulating exploration into Turkish mood and milieu.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815608047
• ISBN13: 9780815608042
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Realistic stories about hard-scrabble poor people in early 20th Century Turkey

Sait Faik (1906-1954) wrote realistic short stories about poor Turkish, Greek, and Armenian villagers, fisherman, and Istanbul city folk. These stories are literary, and worth reading, because Faik unrelentingly seeks and tells the truth --as he sees it-- about his characters. Professor Talat Halman describes Faik, in the scholarly introduction, as a lyrical writer with a deep sympathy for his subjects. But I find little lyricism, though it's possible lyricism would emerge from a better and more consistent translation. (In contrast, Orhan Pamuk benefits from a translator with a consistently clear and elegantly simple style.) If Faik has any sympathy for his characters he reveals it by making the effort to understand them and to preserve their memory, rather than by expressing sentiment. Instead of sentiment, Faik gives us hard observation of his characters, the sad facts. We see his beggars, barbers, and thieves pictured without any element of charm, spirituality, heroism, or hope. If a Faik story starts with the capture of a pair of pathetic thieves, you can bet they'll be worse off at the end. Many of these stories could be journalism, transformed into fiction by a few changes in names. These stories are sometimes hard to read because they end so unhappily, there is much pain. Faik must have lived in pain, for he died of alcoholism at age 48. Several of the stories are not `factual' fiction but are structured instead like shifting, disoriented dreams. I can't think of a good comparison, perhaps Kafka, if he had written about impoverished Greek fisherman. Faik's interest in Greeks and Armenians is unusual for a writer in a nationalistic period in Turkey. My understanding is that most Greeks left with the exchange of population in 1923, when Faik would have been 17. Perhaps there is a subtle humanistic message here: Greeks and Armenians and Turks are the same after all.