The Time Regulation Institute

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THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE

AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR (1901–62) is considered one of the most significant Turkish novelists of the twentieth century. Also a poet, short-story writer, essayist, literary historian and professor, he created a unique cultural universe in his work, combining a European literary voice with the Ottoman sensibilities of the Near East.

Maureen Freely was born in the United States, grew up in Istanbul, studied at Radcliffe, and now lives in England, where she teaches at the University of Warwick. The author of seven novels, she is the principal translator of the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk.

Alexander Dawe is an American translator of French and Turkish. He lives in Istanbul.

Pankaj Mishra is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose writing appears frequently in The New York Review of Books, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Introduction

Orhan Pamuk has called Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62) the greatest Turkish novelist of the twentieth century. From the evidence of this novel—and Huzur (A Mind at Peace)—Tanpınar may have a strong claim to this distinction.

Born and educated in the old Ottoman Empire, Tanpınar was clearly a major artist and thinker—a strong influence, among other Turkish writers, on Pamuk himself. However, it is difficult for the anglophone reader to verify Pamuk’s judgment. Translations from twentieth-century Turkish literature are scarce. The unique history and culture of modern Turkey is not immediately familiar to readers in English: how, for instance, in the 1920s the Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire was radically and forcibly reorganized into a secular republic by Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk), and everything in its culture, from the alphabet to headwear and religion, hastily abandoned in an attempt to emulate European-style modernity.

There is another, even steeper, hurdle to understanding Atatürk’s drastic cultural revolution: this is the basic assumption, shared by many Western readers, that societies must modernize and become more secular and rational, relegating their premodern past to museums or, in the case of religion, to private life. This idea—that modernization makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness—has its origins in the astonishing political, economic, and military successes of Western Europe in the nineteenth century. It was subsequently adopted in traditionminded societies by powerful men ranging from autocrats such as Atatürk and Mao Tse-tung to the more democratic-minded, if paternalistic, Jawaharlal Nehru.

They felt oppressed and humiliated by the power of the industrialized West and urgently sought to match it. It did not matter that their countries lacked the human material—self-motivated and rationally self-interested individuals—apparently necessary for the pursuit of national wealth and power. A robust bureaucratic state and a suitably enlightened ruling elite could quickly forge citizens out of a scattered mass of peasants and merchants, and endow them with a sense of national identity.

But there was a tragic mismatch between the intentions of these hasty modernizers and the long historical experience of the societies they wanted to remake in the image of the modern West. No major Asian or African tradition had accommodated the notion that human beings could shape a meaningful narrative of evolution, or that the social order, too, contained the general laws discovered by modern science in the natural world, which, once identified, could be used to bring about ever-greater improvements—the potent and peculiarly European prejudice that gave conviction to such words as “progress’ and “history” (as much ideological buzzwords of the nineteenth century as “democracy” and “globalization” are of the present moment). Time, in fact, was rarely conceptualized as a linear progression in Asian and African cultures. Nevertheless, scientific and technological innovations, as well as the great triumphs of Western imperialism, persuaded many Asians that they too could rationally manipulate their natural and social environment to their advantage.

As evident in Iran under Reza Pahlavi, as well as in Mao Tse-tung’s China, these single-minded authoritarian figures, who saw themselves as bending history to their will, ended up inflicting immense violence and suffering on their societies. The outcome was always ambiguous (as is now clear in Turkey’s own turn to a moderate Islamism after decades of a secular dictatorship and the recent embrace by Chinese Communists of a worldview they previously scorned: Confucianism). For as Dostoyevsky warned, “No nation on earth, no society with a certain measure of stability, has been developed to order, on the lines of a program imported from abroad.”

Dostoyevsky was speaking from the experience of nineteenth-century Russia, the first society to be coerced by its insecure rulers into imitating the West: the result was uprooted and “superfluous” men, such as those he and his compatriots wrote about, bloody revolution, and a legacy of authoritarian rule that persists to this day. Japan had then followed Russia—and preceded Turkey—in trying to do in a few decades what it took the West centuries to accomplish. Japanese writers in the last century—from Natsume Sōseki to Haruki Murakami—have attested to the profound psychic distortions and widespread intellectual confusion caused by the Japanese attempt at Westernization that peaked with the rise of Japanese militarism and, after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, turned Japan into an American client state. Novelists as varied as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima sought a return to an earlier “wholeness.” Tanizaki tried to recreate an indigenous aesthetic by pointing to the importance of “shadows”—a whole world of subtle distinctions banished from Japanese life by the modern invention of the lightbulb. Mishima invoked, more dramatically, Japan’s lost culture of the samurai. Both were fueled by rage and regret that, as Tanizaki wrote in In Praise of Shadows, “we have met a superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years.”

In recent times, Orhan Pamuk’s fiction has, as he writes in his novel The White Castle, eloquently attested to the alienation wrought by “the transformation of people and beliefs without their knowledge” and the pathos of “witnessing the superiority of others and then trying to mimic them.” But what Tanpınar identified as a peculiar “fatality of Turkish history” was not particular to his or Turkey’s experience. Both China’s Lu Hsün and India’s Rabindranath Tagore confronted what Tanpınar described as “the awful thing we call belatedness”; that is, the experience of arriving late in the modern world, as naive pupils, to find one’s future foreclosed and already defined by other people’s past and present. There is much literary, historical, and sociological evidence attesting to the spiritual and psychological as well as political damage of top-down modernization. Still, most commentators in the West continue to insist that non-Western societies, especially Islamic ones, ought to quickly become modern: in other words, be more like the West. These reflexive and unexamined prejudices emerge, understandably, from the exceptional experience of Western Europe and America. But at least some of them have to be overcome before we can understand the nature and extent of Tanpınar’s achievement—his sense of foreboding and loss, and his evocation, in particular, of the melancholy, or hüzün, of those doomed to arrive late, and spiritually destitute, in history. It requires sympathy with the trauma of writers who witnessed the devastation of their familiar landmarks, for whom the new world conjured into being by their great leaders remained agonizingly meaningless, denuded of the consolations of tradition and heaving with the tawdry illusions of modernity. It requires understanding that though Tanpınar knew his European literature—his Baudelaire, Gide, and Valéry—the anguish, as Pamuk writes, “that sustains all of his work arises from the disappearance of traditional artistry and lifestyles.”

The anguish—and the resentment of being in permanent tutelage to Europe—was all the more keen for Tanpınar, who had grown up in the Ottoman Empire and knew something of the old ways before they were violently suppressed by Atatürk. He grew up, for instance, with the Ottoman music and poetry that Atatürk’s cultural engineering made inaccessible to later generations. His teacher was Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, a muchloved Turkish writer, who authored nostalgic epics relying on traditional Persian aruz rhythm instead of the newly invented Turkish one. Tanpınar seems to have recognized that Atatürk’s new republic could not be a tabula rasa, no matter how hard the state tried to eradicate the fez, Muslim calendar, and Arabic numerals and measures, and replace them with the European clock, calendar, numerals, and weights and measures.

But Tanpınar did not respond to this feckless program of Westernization with a conservative or backward-looking project like Dostoyevsky’s pan-Slavism. Tanpınar hoped for a synthesis of past and present that went beyond secularist slogans and state programs for modernization. In opposition to a parochial nationalism, Tanpınar invoked the cosmopolitanism of Istanbul—something that has become a tourist-brochure cliché in our own time but wasn’t so obvious in the 1930s, when the city was disdained by secular Kemalists for its centrality to the superseded Ottoman Empire. The old city brought the traditional together with the modern, the foreign with domestic, and the “beautiful with ugly”—an intermingling originally forged by “the institutions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire.” And it was important to emphasize this because, Tanpınar wrote, echoing many writers in Japan and other parts of Asia, it was of no use to keep thinking of the East and West as separate; they had to be seen as “an invitation to create a vast and comprehensive synthesis [terkip], a life meant for us and particular to us.”

Tanpınar’s brooding and intricate novel A Mind at Peace (1939) attempts such a synthesis—one reason why it became popular in the 1980s as Turkey began to emerge from decades of soulless Kemalism. Its most cherished character is Istanbul itself—the city’s poor neighborhoods, dramatic sunsets, and long Ramadan evenings—celebrated with no less lyrical intensity than Baudelaire had showered on his Paris. It is against the backdrop of the city in the 1930s that Mümtaz, a young writer, pursues a nearly mystical romance with a musically gifted woman named Nuran, while staving off the intellectual and romantic challenge of Suad, a Nietzschean dandy. His cousin, the cultivated İhsan, introduces the conventionally Westernized Mümtaz to the works of Ottoman poets and composers. As though fulfilling Proust’s maxim that what we love in others is the particular world we think they represent, Nuran embodies, in the rapturous eyes of Mümtaz, the superseded Ottoman-Turkish culture.

The symbolism is rendered in a dense, opaque prose and unchronological sequences that speak of a very deliberate attempt to appropriate the techniques of modernism—the artistic movement that set itself against the great rational ideologies and epistemologies of the nineteenth century. The Kemalists had tried to enlist Turkish writers into the national task of creating new role models and educating a loyal and intelligent citizenry. But Tanpınar, with his poetics of the indolent flaneur, rejects the social-realist tradition that was dominant in Turkey (and indeed in all new national societies in the twentieth century). He seems to have taken to heart Baudelaire’s dictum that the modern artist is “the painter of both the passing moment and everything in that moment that smacks of eternity.” He lingers defiantly on classic Istanbul scenes: ferries with melancholy foghorns and broken marble fountains.

This literary archeology seeks to excavate different histories and memories buried within the old city. But Tanpınar’s selfchosen project of synthesis in A Mind at Peace doesn’t survive his scrupulous attention to the tormented inner lives of his characters. Failure dogs the romantic and professional life of Mümtaz, a writer entrusted with the task of developing a suitable intellectual history (biographies of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Turkish figures) for modern Turkey. Most characters seem paralyzed by their inability to transcend their divided selves. Mümtaz’s mentor, İhsan, talks—channeling Tanpınar—about the “necessity of constructing a new life unique to us and compatible to our conditions without closing ourselves to the West and by preserving our ties with the past.”

But everywhere there are signs of the Turkish “intellectual indigestion.” Once discarded, Tanpınar implies, tradition cannot always be retrieved and used to re-enchant the world—a warning to those who today rummage through Istanbul’s cosmopolitan past for clues to their identity.

As Mümtaz looked at this shop, involuntarily, he recalled Mallarme’s line: “It’s ended up here through some nameless catastrophe.” Here, in this dusty shop, in this place on whose walls handmade tricot stockings hung … In neighboring shops with wooden shutters, simple benches, and old prayer rugs rested the same luxurious and, when seen from afar, occult insights of tradition, in an order eternally alien to the various accepted ideas of classification, on shelves, over bookrests or chairs, and on the floor, piled one atop another as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where they lay buried. The Orient, however, couldn’t be authentic anywhere, even in its grave. Next to these books, in laid-out hawker cases, were lapfuls of testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to adapt, and our search for ourselves in a new context and climate: pulp novels with illustrated covers, school textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if all the detritus of the mind of mankind had to be hastily exposed in this market …

The suicide of Suad, the Nietzschean radical, who hangs himself while listening to Beethoven, further hints at the impossibility of synthesis. The Orient is doomed to inauthenticity, to be forever seeking fragments it can shore against its ruins.

The Time Regulation Institute, published in 1962, confirms this despairing vision. The continuity between past and present dreamed of by Tanpınar seems no longer possible. The onward-and-upward narrative of progress, dictated by the state and embraced by a gullible people, has contaminated everything. The spiritual resources of modernism seem meager compared to the great and irreversible material changes—industrialization, mechanization, demographic shifts, middle-class consumerism, and rapid communications—introduced by Turkey’s Kemalist elite.

The novel’s narrator, Hayri İrdal, is one of those superfluous semimodern men familiar to us from Russian literature: more acted upon than active, simmering with inarticulate resentments and regrets, a cross between Oblomov and the protagonist of Notes from the Underground. Confusion marks almost everything he does:

I was fording a deep-sea cavern lined by the remains of knowledge and by all the ideas I had ever failed to grasp. As they swirled around my feet I moved forward, and with every step I felt the coil of unfounded beliefs, ungrounded frustrations, and unending despair tightening around my chest and arms.

By the early 1960s, Tanpınar had worked in a ministry and even been a member of parliament; his narrator has a keen appreciation of the absurdities of the self-perpetuating and self-justifying bureaucratic state, which, rather than self-aware individuals, embodies progress and enlightenment in Turkey. The modern age, his benefactor, Halit Ayarcı, claims, has been

given many names, but first and foremost it is the age of bureaucracy. All the philosophers, from Spengler to Kieserling, are writing about bureaucracy. I would go as far as to say that it is an age in which bureaucracy has reached its zenith, an age of real freedom. Any man who understands is a valuable figure. I am in the process of establishing an absolute institution—a mechanism that defines its own function. What could be closer to perfection than that?

This mechanism that defines its own function turns out to be the Time Regulation Institute. Tanpınar’s satirical intentions in this novel are clarified by the fact that in 1926 Atatürk had formally adopted Western time by passing the Gregorian Calendar Act. Most people in Turkey, as in nineteenth-century Asia, had not needed to know the time with the precision offered by watches. The muezzin’s call to prayers or the sun’s journey sufficed. But Atatürk decreed that clock towers be erected across the country. They were to be part of the new architecture and urban environment in which Turkish citizens could pretend to be modern, and anyone still adhering to Islamic time, or timekeeper’s houses, was severely punished.

Atatürk was clearly influenced by Western notions of maximizing the efficiency of individual citizens. His clock towers not only cheaply propagandized the virtues of regularity, constancy, punctuality, and precision; the Western-style workday, which divided life into compartments—time carefully allocated for work, study, recreation, and the rest—promised greater economic productivity and endowed time itself with monetary value.

İrdal, however, has savored another kind of life, one in which idleness, or wasting time, is a source of happiness. As in A Mind at Peace, Tanpınar again evokes the modernism of the everyday—one opposed to the alienated linear time of top-down modernity. But the setting is pastoral rather than urban, and the mood is nostalgic as İrdal contrasts the easy luxuries and fulfillments of his childhood with the individual liberations promised by the modern state.

The freedom I knew as a child was of a different kind. First, and I think most significantly, it was not something I was given. It was something I discovered on my own one day—a lump of gold concealed in my innermost depths, a bird trilling in a tree, sunlight playing on water.

İrdal dates his fall from this Eden to the time he is given a watch: “My life’s rhythms were disrupted, it would seem, by the watch my uncle gave me on the occasion of my circumcision.” From then on, he is a citizen of modern Turkey, expected to do his bit as an individual producer and consumer to boost its collective power. Asked by Halit Ayarcı to wear a bureaucrat’s drab uniform, İrdal can sense

a dramatic shift in my entire being. New horizons and perspectives suddenly unfurled before me. Like Halit Ayarcı, I began to perceive life as a single entity. I began to use terms like “modification,” “coordination,” “work structure,” “mind-set shift,” “metathought,” and “scientific mentality”; I took to associating such terms as “ineluctability” or “impossibility” with my lack of will. I even made imprudent comparisons between East and the West, and passed judgments whose gravity left me terrified. Like him, I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, “Now, what use could he be to us?” and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands. In a word, it seemed as if his courage and powers of invention had been transferred to me, as if it were not a suit at all but a magic cloak.

But, as Tanpınar shows, sometimes relentlessly, İrdal drifts further away, as he grows older, from any ideal of serenity and contentment. Though “born into a family fallen on hard times” he has had quite a happy childhood. “So long,” İrdal writes, “as we are in harmony with those around us—assuming, of course, the right balance—poverty is never as terrifying or intolerable as we might think.” In Istanbul, he knows the desperate loneliness and petty jealousies of people in relatively affluent but atomized societies. His professional career turns out to be a procession of empty and futile postures. His private life is marred by multiple broken friendships and unhappy marriages. He is hounded by a series of absurd people, among them a wealthy aunt who hilariously rises from the dead to torment him.

Tanpınar uses İrdal to take aim at many aspects of Kemalist Turkey: counterfeit tradition, for instance, as exemplified by İrdal’s projected history of a seventeenth-century clock maker called Ahmet Zamanı Efendi, which tries to provide a respectable pedigree to the Kemalist state’s tinkering with the old temporal order, and heals its ruptures with the past. As part of Atatürk’s invention of tradition, the freshly minted Turkish Historical Association had indeed introduced a new history of Turkey, in which Turks became a primarily ethnic rather than religious community. Unlike Mümtaz in A Mind at Peace, who cannot get on with his account of an eighteenth-century Ottoman poet, İrdal manages to finish his book. There is, however, a problem: this account of a traditional herald of Turkish modernity, renamed Ahmet the Timely, is mostly bogus, depicting him, among other impostures, at the Ottoman siege of Vienna.

As İrdal writes, “Unfortunately a handful of armchair academics tried to spoil the fun, being so impertinent as to suggest that such a figure had never actually existed and dismissing the book as a complete fabrication.” But his boss, Ayarcı, assures him that

as important as creating a movement is maintaining its momentum. In extending our movement to the past, you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition you have shown that our forbears were both revolutionary and modern. … Is history material only for critical thought? Can we not stumble upon someone from the past whom we love and enjoy? Oh, you’ll see how pleased everyone will be with our work!

The Ottoman past that Tanpınar once wished to retrieve for his project of synthesis appears in The Time Regulation Institute as a plaything of frauds and charlatans. Unlike Nuran in A Mind at Peace, who knows her musical tradition and can sing, İrdal’s sister-in-law can only screech grotesquely and mutilate old songs. “Our life is a tale without a plot or a hero,” Osip Mandelstam wrote about another spiritually marooned people, “made up out of desolation and glass, out of the feverish babble of constant digressions.” Tanpınar’s novel, too, has the anarchic, bleak, and almost uncontrollable energy of the “modernism of underdevelopment,” which, as Marshall Berman pointed out,

is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts. In order to be true to the life from which it springs, it is forced to be shrill, uncouth and inchoate. It turns in on itself and tortures itself for its inability to singlehandedly make history—or else throws itself into extravagant attempts to take on itself the whole burden of history.

That peculiar torment is very palpable in The Time Regulation Institute. And so is its attempted resolution. Like Tagore and Tanizaki before him, Tanpınar upheld the felt experience—the small joys and sorrows—of ordinary life against the dehumanizing abstractions and empty promises of modern ideologies. No longer seeking, as he did in A Mind at Peace, an immutable cultural identity in Istanbul’s past, he places himself on the side of the fragmentary and the gratuitous against the imperatives of history and progress.

Tanpınar returns often to the question of human freedom—a theme that clearly preoccupied him a great deal and gave metaphysical ballast to his critique of secular modernity:

The privilege I most treasured as a child was that of freedom … Today we use the word only in its political sense, and how unfortunate for us. For I fear that those who see freedom solely as a political concept will never fully grasp its meaning. The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale—or rather it opens the door to countless curtailments.

The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale. The Time Regulation Institute is to be savored, among other things, for the brilliance of such insights. Tanpınar presciently feared that to embrace the Western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalized knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.

İrdal’s career as the Kemalist state’s functionary achieves its apotheosis when he becomes an architectural designer for the Time Regulation Institute and is praised for his “unusual staircases and the two unnecessary bridges connecting them to the main building.” But the makeover cannot but remain tragically incomplete. For İrdal, ushered late into the modern world, feels that

naturally all this didn’t develop as smoothly as it would have for Halit Ayarcı. Every so often my soft, complacent, compassionate nature—made softer over time by poverty and despair—would step in to interrupt and alter my course. In effect I became a man whose thoughts, decisions, and speech patterns were all in a jumble.

How eloquently this describes the fate of many human beings, or “things,” forced into alien ways and lifestyles—the hundreds of millions of white-shirted workers with shakily grasped European languages and irretrievably impaired mother tongues. These are the people encountered in passing, if at all, in the works of Western travel writers, marked off from their suave Westernized compatriots by their broken English, seemingly childish naïveté, and residence in a netherworld of perception and awareness.

Max Weber, the tragic prophet of modernity, saw the bureaucratic and technological state as an “iron cage” in which we live as “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” Even worse, Weber feared, “this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” The Time Regulation Institute explodes that presumption by showing us, in our postmodern cages, glimpses of another kind of civilization. It also mourns, more eloquently and sensitively than any novel I know, the obscure sufferings of people in less “developed” societies—those who, uprooted from their old ways of being, must languish eternally in the waiting room of history.

PANKAJ MISHRA

A Note on the Translation

As a young man, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar witnessed the transformation, almost overnight, of the ornate, opaque language we now know as Ottoman into an idiom thought to be more fitting for a modern, westernizing republic. First came the Alphabet Revolution, in 1928. Atatürk gave his new nation just three months to say good-bye to Arabic script and to master the new Latin(ate) orthography. In 1932 he launched the Language Revolution, with the aim of ridding modern Turkish of all words of Arabic or Persian origin. The Turkish Language Society, to which he entrusted this great task, did not, in the end, manage to do away with all such words, nor did it succeed in winning support for the thousands of neologisms it invented to replace them. But it did succeed in reducing the vocabulary by 60 percent. The distance between Ottoman and modern Turkish has grown with every decade, so much so that Atatürk’s own orations, which still inform what Turkish schoolchildren learn about their history, have been translated twice.

Writers were intimately involved in this story from the beginning. Some allied themselves with the state; many others ended up in prison. But support for “pure Turkish” remained strong on both sides of the political divide. Tanpınar was the great exception. He revelled in Ottoman’s rich blend of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. He believed that the way forward was not to sever all links with tradition but to find graceful and harmonious ways to blend Eastern and Western influences. He refused to change his language to suit the bureaucrats. For this he was heavily criticized, dismissed in literary circles as old-fashioned and irrelevant. The Time Regulation Institute, first published in book form in the year of his death, was his last (and most lasting) revenge.

Its hero, Hayri İrdal, speaks a language that, however much it strains to keep pace with modern times, keeps collapsing into its old ways. As much as he tries to embrace new words and ideas, his old ones come back to claim him. This losing battle is evident in Hayri’s every reminiscence. Guilelessly he climbs from clause to clause, as we count the seconds before the edifice starts to teeter.

That’s how it is, at least, for those of us who have had the privilege of reading The Time Regulation Institute in the original. For those of us familiar with Turkey’s traditions of oral storytelling, there is also the pleasure of watching Hayri walk way out on a limb, and then the limb of the limb, as we begin to ask ourselves if he and his author have perhaps lost the thread, the plot, the point, or even their minds. And then, just as our own minds begin to wander, there’s a slap on the table, bringing the story, the chapter, the novel to a sudden and startling end, and all those random details fall neatly, and perfectly, into place.

How to capture these sublime feats in a language that has never suffered political interference of this order? How to convey the changes of register that are the source of so much of the comedy? For us the answer was to go beyond the usual (and in this novel, often insoluble) problems of diction and meaning, to listen instead to the music of the narration. For Tanpınar was one of the great stylists of his age. He was famed for his poetry as well as for his prose. Language was his instrument, and he brought to it all he knew of music, both Eastern and Western. Whatever games he played on the printed page, he played them first with sound.

We did things in the opposite order when shaping his sentences in English. First we put the words on the page. Then we listened for the voice, arranging, rearranging, and changing the words and clauses until we heard something of the Turkish music coming through.

Here we should point out that we are not alone in this: No one can translate Turkish into English without a great deal of arranging and rearranging. Turkish is an agglutinative language. It routinely appends strings of eight, nine, or more suffixes to its root nouns. It has a single word for he, she, and it. It offers no independently standing definite or indefinite articles. It has a much more refined understanding of time than we do. Not only can it distinguish between hearsay and that which we have seen with our own eyes, but it can also change a verb from active to passive with the addition of a two-letter, midword syllable that is all too easily missed by Anglophone eyes. It takes an easygoing approach (in our eyes, at least) to singulars and plurals. It likes cascading clauses beginning with verbal nouns that are as likely as not to be in the passive voice—as in “the doing unto of,” or even “the having been done unto of.” It puts the verb at the end of the sentence, and when this sentence comes from a master stylist who feels unjustly constrained by the politics of language, finding solace in a grammar too flexible for bureaucrats to contain, that verb will often turn the entire sentence on its head.

All this leaves much room, and perhaps too much room, for interpretation. So much the better, then, that there were two of us. It was easier to take a risk knowing that someone was watching to catch us if we fell—or skipped a line, perhaps to escape yet another logic-defying sentence. It was fun having company, on the bad days and the good. Our most difficult day came right at the end, when we were trying to work out the shape and dimensions of the Institute itself. The solution came to Alex in a dream. And, oh, how we laughed when we worked through it the next day, and saw how perfectly this preposterous structure reflected the author’s ideas about modernization-from-above. It was a thrill to bring this metaphor, and this book, into English. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

MAUREEN FREELY AND ALEXANDER DAWE

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BEGINNING

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar