Welcome to issue eleven of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator, an artist and a curator of cultural programmes based in Amsterdam.  

Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature. Each issue has a short essay or reflection, a nerdy look at translation, a page from one of my notebooks, a list of things to read, watch or listen to, and a highlight from my archives.

I invite you to support my work via Patreon: http://patreon.com/theattentionspan

Thank you for your presence and attention!

SHOW NOTES

This episode of the podcast version comes with a delay as I was travelling. Below are the links I mention:

LISTENING, WATCHING, READING

Listen: Feeling in Turkish: (un)translatable. A playlist I made years ago with songs in Turkish which are so difficult to translate that the (im)possibility makes my heart ache.

Read: James Baldwin in Turkey. How Istanbul changed his career—and his life, a beautiful portrait of Baldwin in the context of his many years in Turkey, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in The Yale Review.

Watch: The Club/Kulüp on Netflix. I had watched the first season of the series when it came out in 2021. Walking in the neighbourhoods around Beyoğlu today brought me back to the story which takes place in that area and shows you the cosmopolitan and multilingual history of Istanbul in the 1950s.