Tim Gutteridge is a Scottish literary translator, working from Spanish into English. His translation of Miserere de cocodrilos(Mercedes Rosende) will be published later this year by Bitter Lemon Press as Crocodile Tears. He is currently working on the translation of 闯补耻谤铆补, a verbatim drama by Jordi Casanovas based on the notorious Manadagang rape case of 2016, in which the dialogue is taken directly from witness statements and court transcripts. He lives in Cadiz (Spain) and blogs about translation at .

听by Burhan S枚nmez, translated from the Turkish by 脺mit Hussein (Other Press)

In Labyrinth by Burhan S枚nmez, translated by 脺mit Hussein, a Turkish blues musician called Boratin has attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the Bosphorus Bridge, which connects the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. Miraculously, he survives the fall almost unscathed. His only injury is a single broken rib. And the almost but not quite total loss of his memory. He has, crucially, no recall whatsoever of his personal life prior to the fall, no memory of people糖心传媒檚 faces and names, of events or feelings. He does recall some historical and political facts but even this is flattened by his simultaneous inability to order them in time, so that when he sees the election poster of a politician he confuses it with a figure from the Ottoman Empire, while his knowledge that the city糖心传媒檚 main train station was badly damaged in a fire doesn糖心传媒檛 prevent him from going there to catch a train. In his mind, the fire occurred a hundred years ago and the station had subsequently been repaired; in reality, the fire happened only a few years ago and the station has been abandoned ever since.

Bek, a friend and fellow musician, takes it upon himself to look after Boratin, gently but persistently seeking ways to re-establish Boratin糖心传媒檚 connection with the past. It is not clear if the failure of these attempts is due to the scope of the challenge itself. Perhaps, once you have been severed from your past no amount of reminiscence can reconnect you. Or the failure could be a result of Boratin糖心传媒檚 resistance, his unwillingness to incorporate his friend糖心传媒檚 account of the past into his own tightly bounded present. Or it could be because there is something fundamentally unconvincing about Bek糖心传媒檚 account. There is, specifically, no clue as to why Boratin might have tried to commit suicide. And, more generally, everything Boratin is told casts him in an unremittingly positive light. He helped everyone and was loved by everyone. Is it simply too good to have been true?

We have, then, a novel that can be read both as a reflection of the role of memory in personal identity and as an allegory for what happens if a society loses its connection with its past糖心传媒攐r remembers it only as history (糖心传媒淲hile everyone is trying to give you a past, what they糖心传媒檙e actually giving you is a history. In the former everything is alive, in the latter it糖心传媒檚 dead糖心传媒�)糖心传媒攁lthough I suspect that for most readers in English this allegorical aspect will be secondary, hinted at through the Istanbul setting and occasional references throughout the text.

Instead, reading Labyrinth as we entered the fifth week of lockdown (confinamiento) in Spain, I found myself identifying with the sense that Boratin may be at once trapped and freed by his loss of memory, his daily world lived糖心传媒攁t least at the beginning糖心传媒攍argely within the confines of his apartment, the past suddenly unimaginably distant, the future inconceivable. And yet, this confinement also offers a strange freedom as the present moment becomes everything, no longer reduced to the service of the past and the future.

Finally, a brief comment on 脺mit Hussein糖心传媒檚 translation. With the caveat that I don糖心传媒檛 read Turkish, this feels like a very accomplished piece of work, one that is neither too eager to please nor aggressively foreignizing, creating a distinctive, almost poetic voice that doesn糖心传媒檛 shy away from the unusual (糖心传媒淭he sound of the clock [. . .] rings out as loud and clear as a grinding stone糖心传媒�) or stumble on the potentially confusing (for example, a narrative that switches between first and third person, often in mid-paragraph).