Co-sponsored by the Center for German & European Studies, the Department of German, Nordic & Slavic+, the Kemal Karpat Center for Turkish Studies, and the Center for European Studies.
Join us for a bilingual poetry reading in Turkish and English by Zafer Şenocak and translator Kristin Dickinson from Şenocak’s most recent bilingual poetry book First Light (2024).
In this bilingual collection (Turkish and English), Zafer Şenocak returns to the language of his childhood even as he writes from Germany, his home since he was a child. Readers will find explorations of migration, exile, memory, identity, and the fine line between reason and belief — themes that have appeared throughout his career as a leading Turkish-German intellectual, but which gain new shades of meaning as he articulates them in his first language. Some poems reference mystical Islam — exploring both hidden and evident aspects of the world, the real and the dream-like — as well as Turkish poetic traditions. These poems movingly give voice to what his translator Kristin Dickinson calls “moments of cross-cultural contact and entanglement.”
More information about the book can be found here.
Zafer Şenocak is a prolific Turkish-German poet, novelist, essayist and public intellectual. Born in Turkey, Şenocak moved to Germany as a child, and has lived in Berlin as a freelance writer since 1989. He has written widely on issues of diversity in Germany, migration and exile, the Turkish diaspora, and the small distances and great fears of a globalizing Europe. Historical questions of mixed and broken identities are key to his novels, which utilize nonlinear modes of storytelling to emphasize the fragmented nature of memory. Şenocak has been a writer in residence at UC Berkeley, M.I.T., Oberlin College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Arizona. He is currently in residence at the University of Michigan during the Fall 2024 term. Most recently, his Turkish-language poetry has been translated into English by UM Professor Kristin Dickinson, which appeared in a bilingual edition with Zephyr Press in 2024 under the title, First Light.