Welcome to issue sixteen of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist 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.

You can support my work via Patreon.

EPISODE 16 SHOW NOTES

Those of us in the Netherlands have witnessed worrying election results two weeks ago. Part of me is shocked, another part of me is not surprised at all. We have seen populist discourses being normalized in many countries we thought were safely guarded behind democratic doors. Instead of penning an essay about my disappointment in the current politics, I have decided to share diary entries written and published in French in 2019 when I was in residency in the Bassin Minier, the former mining area in Northern France. The city where I was based has been governed by the far right since 2014. I felt the necessity to go back there, where I managed to find space for culture, literature, and translation among a group of resilient people. This is an edited version from the notebook entries from 2018-2019 which I have translated myself from French.

A collection of Nurdan Gürbilek’s work has been published in English in 2011 as The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window in Victoria Holbrook’s translation.

Ses etme (video clip) by Athena.