Notes from the Long Coast
On the work of carrying a voice across
Every translation here was undertaken with the knowledge and blessing of the speaker, or of the family holding the papers. Where a voice asked to remain unnamed, I have honored that. Where a letter was too private to publish in full, I have used an excerpt or a paraphrase, clearly marked. This is slow work, and I would not trade it for any other kind.
Letters · From the Turkish
Correspondence between a former small-boat captain, now living inland, and his niece at university. Written over the course of a single autumn. Subjects include: the weather of his childhood, the difficulty of being useful in retirement, the particular loneliness of a boat left in dry dock through summer, and a long paragraph on the proper way to drink tea on a boat that is being tossed.
Oral history · Two afternoons
Halide tended a small navigation lamp on a headland for thirty-one years. She is ninety-one now. We spoke across two afternoons in her daughter's garden. The published excerpt covers her first winter at the lamp, the ship that did not come back, and a long, surprising digression on the birds that arrived with the wind each February.
Logbook · From a family archive
A ferry pilot's personal logbook, not the official one — kept for fifteen years in a series of school notebooks. He recorded the weather, the unusual passengers, and, toward the end, the names of regulars who had stopped appearing. I worked on this with his son over the course of a year. What appears here is a small selection.
Interview · From the Turkish
A conversation, in two sittings, with a boat builder whose family has shaped the same six hulls for four generations. On wood, on the economics of stubbornness, and on the decision — finally taken, not without grief — to teach the trade to an apprentice from outside the family.
Folk almanac · In progress
A long-term project: translating, annotating, and cross-referencing a small bound volume of weather sayings collected in the 1950s by a schoolteacher who spent his holidays on the coast. Many of the sayings have fallen out of use; a few are still heard every morning on the quay. I expect this to take several more years.
"Translation is, among other things, the practice of believing that a stranger's sentence deserves the same patience as one's own."