Thanks to her translator, Defne Suman is now almost a Malayali writer. At least, that’s what one might assume, given the number of times she was stopped by a reader when she and I walked across the grounds at the Kerala Literature Festival in Calicut. The fact that she’s good-looking helps, of course, but that’s not why Suman has been regularly translated into fourteen languages, including Malayalam and English. Her storytelling, perpetually universal, touches on the themes Malayali readers are accustomed to encountering in the translations they read: magical realism and multi-generational family sagas, both with a smidge of social and political commentary.
Suman, who exclaimed, “I feel like a celebrity here!”, launched her latest Malayalam translation of The Last Apartment in Istanbul at this year’s festival. Written from four unmistakably dissimilar perspectives, her novel At The Breakfast Table is a disorientating read, but the premise demands it. On artist Sirin Saka’s 100th birthday, her family gathers to celebrate her long career, and it’s a protracted supper because family histories never seem to run out of secrets (or people who want to probe into them).
Suman spoke to Scroll about her email-only relationship with her translator, Betsy Göksel, her approach to historical research, and why one should write from memory rather than nostalgia.
Your writing has a languorous pace, lingering in moments rather than rushing through them. Is it a deliberate choice, or does it emerge organically from the story itself?
That’s something I hadn’t considered, but I think I’m always worried about cutting scenes too short. It’s different when you write versus when you read. I’ll write a scene, then read it back, and often it feels too fast. For me, the beginning of a scene is about two things: atmosphere – the space and feeling – and rhythm. I feel the rhythm of a story, chapter, or even paragraph, almost in my heart. So, I write, then read, and often the rhythm isn’t what I’d hoped for. Sometimes I’ll speed things up, but most often, I need to add more atmospheric details to fully immerse the reader in that place.
With that, or maybe that anxiety, in mind, I tend to write longer. It varies from book to book, though. The Silence of Sheherazade, for instance, has very long scenes because it’s structured like a Sheherazade tale – starting, going off tangent, circling back – so it takes a while to complete a circle. At the Breakfast Table is more contemporary, so it’s faster-paced but still has plenty of atmosphere. And now I’m writing a murder mystery, where things move quickly. So, the rhythm is really dictated by the initial feeling of the book.
Betsy Göksel translates all your books into English. I’m curious to hear about your relationship with her.
Oh, it’s an amazing relationship. Betsy lives on a small Turkish island between Greece and Turkey. She’s American, but she came to teach at an American high school for girls there in the 1960s. She fell in love with Turkey, married a Turkish man, and stayed. Now, after seventy years, she speaks perfect Turkish. She’s a literature lover, and most importantly, she feels the rhythm in my writing, which is really important to me, as I mentioned earlier. We’ve never actually met. We’ve only ever emailed since I found her around 2019, just before Covid. She lives on that small island, I never go there, and she never comes to Istanbul. So, we’ve never seen each other, but our communication is amazing. It’s such a close connection; it’s hard to believe we haven’t met!
Do you ever connect through video calls?
Absolutely not. She’s not at all into technology; email is her only way of communicating. I’ve never even heard her voice, just emails. That’s it. No WhatsApp or anything. She’s translated all my books, all eight, including novels and short stories. Not all have been published in English or been accepted in the UK market. But all have been translated.
How does the translation process work between you and Betsy? Do you exchange drafts and discuss them, or is there a more fluid, intuitive back-and-forth?
She translates by hand, so I send her the physical book – she doesn’t want PDFs or Word documents. She receives the book, translates it by hand, and then types it into the computer. She’s very old school, in her eighties. She sends me each chapter. I give feedback. She’s learned quickly how to read comments and track changes – I taught her that. So, I send my comments, she revises, or she explains why she doesn’t want to change something, and then we move on to the next chapter. That’s how we finish each book together.
Your fiction is intertwined with history, yet it resists the confines of what we might call historical fiction, though many would classify it as such. Could you walk us through your research process? How do you balance fidelity to historical fact with the freedom to invent or reimagine?
Well, my research process is always driven by need. For example, if I’m writing a chapter set in 1905 where a boat is arriving at the harbour of Smyrna, I’ll need to find the boat's name. So, I research all the boats arriving and their routes. Thanks to the internet, you can find so much now. Then I write, write, write, and another question will come up. Maybe, how did women dress in that year? So I research and develop a description of their outfits, and so on. I like history, I enjoy writing about it, and I love bringing atmospheric elements of certain times into the text – whether it’s the 20th century, 19th century, or even 30 years ago. I look for the details that will add to my atmosphere: what they wear, what they eat, what’s no longer there. So, space is very important to me, what existed in a specific place and what’s missing now. That’s how my research begins.
Does your research primarily rely on the internet, or do you ever go to libraries and archives?
Libraries are definitely part of my process. There’s so much you can’t find online, so I read physical books, order them, and when I can, I access letters and diaries from the periods I’m researching. I also often visit newspaper archives. The most fascinating part for me is when I do interviews, speaking with older people who lived in the era I’m writing about or their descendants. For example, I was writing about a wealthy family in Izmir and learned that they had found a Greek statue under their house in the early 20th century, which caused a scandal because they didn’t want to turn it over to the museum. I put that in my book; the family that I’m writing about finds the statue. Whenever I find details like that – funny, quirky, interesting – I use them in my book, either in my fictional family’s life, or as something that happened to their neighbours.
At the Breakfast Table has so many characters and POVs that, as a reader, I'd sometimes think, “Oh my god, who is this now?” It’s a lot to take in, but it definitely becomes easier to keep track after a while.
Yes, in the English version, I was asked to add the names of the characters whose point of view the chapter is at the top of each chapter.
So, in Turkish, you don’t have that at all?
No! You have to figure out who is talking. I love crowded casts and characters. The characters come to me; I tap into a space when I’m writing, and I hear their voices. And if you’re not hearing the narrator’s voice in your head, the story isn’t flowing properly. That’s a problem I had with my current book – I couldn’t find the narrator’s voice for a long time. She refused to speak to me. But with At The Breakfast Table, everyone spoke very clearly. Celine had her own distinct vocabulary. Sadik was very easy to write; he was whispering in my ear the whole time. I could even hear the tone of their voices. If you ask me how Sadik speaks, I would say he murmurs. Celine is loud. Nur is cynical, maybe with a voice like mine, and Burak is soft-spoken. I can really hear their voices in my head.
Now, going back to what you just mentioned, the names aren’t at the top of the chapters in the Turkish version. I thought that was standard practice.
No, I never thought it would be a problem. When I read a book with different points of view, I consider it part of the game to figure out who’s talking. After a paragraph or two, it’s clear – “Oh, this is Celine, this is Nur.” Plus, in At the Breakfast Table, the characters appear in a consistent order; there’s no confusion. It’s always Burak, Celine, Sadik, Nur, and then it repeats. So, it never occurred to me it could be a problem. But the English editors always worried about readers being confused. They have a point because English readers have so much to navigate – the foreign setting, the unfamiliar history, the names, and all the cultural references. So, I agreed to put the names at the beginning of the chapters.
But what’s interesting to me is that even though this is such a small detail, it seems like our society has become obsessed with immediate comprehension.
Exactly! What’s up with that?
There seems to be a prevailing notion that literature should be easily accessible, that it shouldn’t challenge the reader too much.
That’s the claim of editors and publishers. Even my Turkish publisher has asked, “Can you write something easy?” They said, “You wrote these books so quickly, one after the other.” I replied, “No, I actually looked for a publisher for the first one for many years. While I was searching, I was able to write two more books. Then, when I finally found a publisher, I could release them one year apart because they were already done.” The Silence of Sheherazade, my first book, was the one I had trouble finding a publisher for. The publisher said, “We’ll publish this, but it’s very confusing, you have to make it simpler. The plot is too confusing.” So there’s this constant anxiety about making sure the reader understands.
But why? We read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things with a complex plot, but we managed it; we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a great pleasure when we did. It’s even more of a pleasure the second time you read it, when you say, “Now that I know the story, and now I can truly enjoy the design.” So, yes, you’re right, and for me, the clarity of the plot and understanding it in the first read is overrated. If they don’t understand, they should come back after they’ve finished reading it the first time. The purpose of literature isn’t entertainment, a message, or a mission. It’s about giving the reader a feeling, an opening in the heart perhaps, a deeper level of understanding, a grasp of something. If you get that while you’re reading, then it's doing its job.
Istanbul is a consistent presence in your work, but you now live in Athens. How has that distance changed the way you write about Istanbul?
Well, I write without really being in that space. My imagination… I wrote my best books when I was in America, and they were about Istanbul, Izmir, and Turkey. They were ultra-realist novels, with details so realistic that you’d think I was out on the streets taking notes, photos, and videos. But I was in America. Writing is a journey you take inside your head, and sometimes the outside world is actually an obstacle. You don’t want to see all the details because it’s an alternative world you’re creating, very similar to the real one, but slightly off, like a dream – almost, but not quite. To stay in that dreamy, imaginative space, it’s better not to see the real thing. For example, if I’m going to write about this experience of you and I talking, it’s better to write it from memory than watching a movie of us, because we’re not making a documentary; it’s creative work. It’s about how you perceive the past, how you perceive the space, and how you’re going to express that perception. So, being away really helps me to write about Istanbul or any space.
Taking a distance is good instead of getting carried away by the politics and dramas of your own country. There’s so much drama, suffering, and all of that. But similar things happen everywhere. When you’re in your country, you think, “Oh, it’s unique to us.” It’s like, “Geography is destiny.” Yes, it is destiny, but would you have different stories if you were in India, South Africa, or Peru? We’re all dealing with the same types of stories. So, being away helps me avoid getting caught up in my country’s dramas. Whereas, when you’re far away and something terrible happens there, you can create a distance. That helps me as a writer.
I think the flip side of that is when you’re away from your country, you can get overly nostalgic, and that can also seep into your work, which can be a problem too.
Yes, that’s true. Nostalgia is actually a disease – that’s how it was initially described. I try to stay away from sentimental writing as much as possible, and nostalgia feeds into sentimentality. But, there are things that I wish I had been present for when they happened, like seeing the beautiful days of Istanbul when the buildings were well-preserved, when the art in buildings was respected and cared for, when people put more effort into crafting things, instead of just building condominiums, boom, boom, boom. You know, those are wishful moments – I wish I’d lived in the old Istanbul and walked its streets. So that’s not really nostalgia, but it’s like a dream, and I use that. It’s not about my own sentimentality; I don’t have any. I have a very good memory, very sharp. I remember my childhood and high school years, not clouded by nostalgia. I remember the good and the bad.
You’ve been writing for many years, with a steady, thoughtful pace rather than rushing to publish annually. How do you feel your approach to writing has evolved over time? Has the way you think about your craft changed, or the way you engage with your stories?
I can’t write as easily anymore. I’ve definitely changed. When I was younger, I didn’t know as much, and I had so much to write because the stories came from inside me. I had all these stories to tell. So, I was writing quickly until I wrote The Last Apartment in Istanbul, which was my last novel. Then, suddenly, I didn’t have any more stories. All that life accumulation had stopped. Now, I either have to repeat the same story, which I don’t want to do – it’s like repeating yourself – or I have to live again and come up with new stories. So, it’s become much harder. Like I said, the book I’m working on now, took me a year to find her voice. Where was her voice?
What do you mean by “live again”? What does it mean for a writer to live?
I believe if you cut yourself off from human connection – friends, family, cultural events – if you become disconnected and live in isolation, many young mothers who want to write suffer from that. Society tells them, “You can write, it’s okay, but just take care of your children first and write during nap times.” You want to believe it, but it’s not enough. You have to be an active and engaged member of society in order to be fed; you need to be inspired by the outside world. Without that, there is no valuable by-product from your work.
