Abstract
Hüzün is, indeed, a Turkish word deriving from Arabic, a noun which usually glosses as ‘sadness’ or ‘melancholy’, and sometimes ‘sorrow’ and ‘grief’.1 It may also suggest an element of bitterness.2 The adjective is hüzünlü: sad, gloomy, melancholic. The verb forms are hüzünlenmek: to feel, or to become sad; hüzünlendirmek: to make (someone) sad; and hüzün vermek: to sadden.
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Notes
In Turkish, kara means black and sevda, love. In Serbian, however, sevda relates to melancholic love; the theory is that the word derives from both Turkish sevda and Arabic saudá (blackness’ — see endnote no. 4, p. 187). In the Balkans, sevdalinka is a popular folk music genre, often characterised by mournful love songs. See: Marko Živković (2011) Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 56–7;
Risto Pekka Pennanen (2010) ‘Melancholic Airs of the Orient — Bosnian Sevdalinka Music as an Orientalist and National Symbol’, in Pennanen (ed.), Music and Emotions. Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 9 (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies), 76–90.
‘Hüzün’ entry in Mehmet Zeki Pakalin (1993) Osmanli Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlügü, vol. 1 (İstanbul: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınlar).
See, for example, Ash Çrrakman (2002) From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York: Peter Lang Publishing).
Pamuk (2007) Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities, trans. M. Freely (London: Faber & Faber), 9, 180.
Geert Mak (2008) The Bridge: A Journey Between Orient and Occident, trans. S. Parker (London: Vintage).
Engin F. Işin (2010) ‘The Soul of a City: Hüzün, Keyif, Longing’, in Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, İpek Türeli (eds), Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (London: Routledge), 35–47.
Richard Francis Burton (1893) Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (London: Tylston & Edwards), quoted in I§ın, ‘The Soul of a City’, 43.
Paul Salem (2001) Turkey’s Image in the Arab World (Istanbul: TESEV [Turkish Economic & Social Studies Foundation] Foreign Policy Programme), http://www.boell-meo.org/downloads/20110606_Paul_Salem_study.pdf.
Some political Islamists have also found benefits in jumping on the Eurosceptic bandwagon. Hakan Yılmaz (2011) ‘Euroscepticism in Turkey: Parties, Elites, and Public Opinion’, South European Society and Politics, vol. 16 (1), 189.
Yael Navaro-Yasin (1999) ‘The Historical Construction of Local Culture: Gender and Identity in the Politics of Secularism in Islam’, in Keyder, Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local, 60–1.
On authenticity and modernity from a Marxist perspective, see Marshall Berman (2009) The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (London: Verso) [1970].
Ziya Gökalp (1968) The Principles of Turkism, trans. R. Devereaux (Leiden: E. J. Brill) [1920], 33.
Ibid., 39. Gökalp was not alone is these thoughts. Abdullah Cevdet, a contemporary, commented in 1913 that ‘Civilization means European civilization, and it must be imported with its roses and thorns’. Quoted in Talat S. Halman (2006) The Turkish Muse: Views and Reviews 1960s–1990s, (New York: Syracuse University Press), 6 (no further citation located).
In 1920, 75% of words in the vocabulary derived from Arabic, Persian and French; by 1970, this proportion was down to 20%. (Halman, The Turkish Muse, 19–20.) See also Geoffrey Lewis (1999) The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Soner Çağaptay (2006) Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? (London: Routledge), chap. 1, 4–10.
Figures given for Muslims in Turkey vary, but all exceed 95%. United States Library of Congress (2008) Country Profile: Turkey, August 2008, 10, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Turkey.pdf.
Carel Bertram (2008) Imagining the Turkish House: Collective Visions of Home (Austin: University of Texas Press), 242–3.
Ayşe Öncü (1999) ‘Istanbulites and Others: The Cultural Cosmology of Being Middle Class in the Era of Globalism’, in Keyder, Istanbul Between the Global and the Local, 95.
On the relationship between language and identity in Turkey, see, for example: Yılmaz Bingöl (2009) ‘Language, Identity and Politics in Turkey: Nationalist Discourse on Creating a Common Turkic Language’, Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations, Vol. 8 (2), 40–52.
Ziya Gökalp ‘National Language’, in Gökalp (1959) Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp, trans. & ed. Niyazi Berkes (New York: Columbia University Press), 83. Originally published as ‘Lisan’, in Türk Yurdu, vol. 3 (36), Istanbul, 1913.
See, for example, Caroline Finkel (2006) Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923, which emphasises change in the Empire over decline. (New York: Basic Books).
Cemil Aydin (2007) The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press), 16.
Edhem Eldem (1999) ‘Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital’, in Eldem, Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 198.
Erik J. Zürcher (2004) Turkey: A Modern History, 3rd ed. (London and New York: I. B. Tauris), 51–6. For a discussion of the internal as well as external factors behind the reforms, see Eldem, ‘Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital’, 196–205.
Maxime Rodinson (2002) Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans. R. Veinus (London: I. B. Tauris), 59.
Erol Köroglu (2007) Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey During World War I (New York: I. B. Tauris), 57.
Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, ‘Introduction to Bozdoğan and Kasaba’ (eds) (1997) Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press), 3–4. This position was exemplified by Bernard Lewis (The Emergence of Modern Turkey) and Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society).
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© 2014 Kyra Giorgi
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Giorgi, K. (2014). Defining Memories. In: Emotions, Language and Identity on the Margins of Europe. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403483_7
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