In Search of Yunus Emre

or why I've been talking to myself in Turkish

As I walk the trail, I practice my Turkish by imagining conversations and acting out the parts. This time I'm on the flight to Istanbul, and my neighbor, a kindly old Turkish man, asks me, “Türkiye'ye neden gidiyorsun?”: what takes you to Turkey? “Çünkü... Yunus Emre'ye aşık oldum”, I answer: because I fell in love with Yunus Emre. My imaginary neighbor nods and smiles, as if this is only to be expected. But I guess you'll want more explanation than that. You see, Yunus Emre was a Sufi poet, born in 1238 in Anatolia. It's told that he once met Rumi, and when Rumi asked him what he thought of his Mathnawi, his magnum opus, Yunus replied that it was a very good book, but that he himself would have said it differently. When Rumi asked how, he replied, “I came from the eternal, clothed myself in flesh, took the name Yunus.” Such simplicity and directness says a great deal, and other than what we can infer from his poems and a few other writings, I don’t think we know a whole lot more than that about his biography. But I guess you'll want more explanation than that.

For me, it started with some friends talking about a TV show. “We're binge-watching Yunus Emre for the sixth time,” they said. Who does that? I thought to myself, and it's true that these friends are somewhat unusual people. But when they said they were watching it for the seventh time, and some other friends were now watching it for a second time, I started to think maybe it was the show that was unusually good. So the next time I had a reliable internet connection, just after Thanksgiving, I downloaded all the episodes from YouTube so I could watch them off the grid. Once I started on it, I had to stop myself from watching too fast. Either the show is unusually good, or I too am a somewhat unusual person, most likely both. Now at first, it feels a bit off to a mind conditioned by Netflix. The pacing is very slow, and some touches seem old-fashioned or naive, like the frequent flashbacks or the long shots of a character's face locked in some inner struggle. Any sight of a wound or blood is blurred out, I assume to satisfy the rules of some television market somewhere. But gradually I came to appreciate how this is all consistent with the spirit of the show. How different our programming is, with the vast majority of material centering around war, crime, sex, war crimes, sex crimes, the war between the sexes. It's so fast-paced, so perfectly designed to stir up our most primitive instincts, to provoke anxiety and fascination. Here in America, we just wouldn't make a 44-episode series about a poet, not unless there was some juicy scandal involved. I would say the closest poet we have to Yunus Emre is Walt Whitman: both were among the first to compose in their own vernacular, the voice of the common people. But despite Whitman's beautiful work and fascinating life story, we haven't even managed to make one biopic; the darn Canadians had to do it for us. To be fair, we are still young as a people, and the Turks were once bloodthirsty empire builders, so maybe this is a phase we'll grow out of. Maybe in 700 years we'll have produced an excellent story about Whitman in some futuristic media format, if only we can last that long.

Yunus Emre (right) walking with an old man he meets on the road

But in the meantime, we’ll have to rely on imports, and this slow-moving show about one man's spiritual journey from prideful self-importance to God-inspired passion captivated me from the start. I’ll try and give you a flavor without any real spoilers. In the first episode, Yunus and his horse are on a long journey and both are very thirsty when they meet an old man. Yunus asks if there's any water nearby, and the old man says it's about to rain like crazy. Yunus gets angry because the day is hot and clear, and he thinks he's being made fun of. Later, as they sit in a cave to get out of the rain, they have the following conversation (my translation):

Y: Where did you get the idea it was going to rain?

OM: From my knees, son. Whenever it's going to rain, my knees hurt.

Y: I thought you were showing me a miracle.

OM: Can there be a greater miracle than this?

Y: Where is the miracle? Did you make it rain?

OM: Far from it. I didn't, but the rain made my knees hurt when it fell.

Y: You believe in this superstition?

OM: Superstition no, I believe in God, son. In this realm, everything that exists comes from God. Apart from God, nothing exists. That rock, those trees, birds, wolves, every being is provided with a form. Humans, too, take a human form. When you have a headache, doesn't your mind feel that pain? If your foot steps on a thorn, do you know it in your foot, or do you know it from your brain, your mind? In this way a human is just one part of this realm. You see... we are all pollen from the same flower. That's the reason the rain makes my knees hurt. Well, now then, if that's not a real miracle, what is, son?

Pollen from the same flower. There you have it, a lucid and poetic sermon about the unity of existence, and every episode has something at least as deep as that. Note that the root word I've translated as “God” is not “Allah”, but “Hak” which is being used here as a name of God but which can also mean “truth”, “justice”, “right” (in the sense of a human right), and “reality”. It's impossible to pack all that into one word in English, but hopefully the surrounding context still carries the message.

Another thing I like about the show is that it’s got a lot of walking journeys, because it's about dervishes, and dervishes traveled on foot because they didn't want to subjugate another being by riding a horse. So there are some wonderful thoughts on walking. After their conversation in the cave, the rain stops and Yunus leaves the old man, who's saying his prayers. But later on in the episode, Yunus has lost his horse and the two meet again:

Y: We meet again.

OM: Ah... it's the only way. Starting out you think you'll never arrive, step off the path and you certainly won't.

...

Y: So... aren't you going to ask me how I got into this state, what happened to my horse, why I'm walking?

OM: Does anyone need a reason to walk?

...

Y (hobbling): I'm not used to walking so far like you, old man.

OM: Does the path know who's taking the lead on it, on horseback or on foot?

Maybe you're starting to get an idea why I love this show so much. When I was about halfway through the second season, staying at a hostel in Guadalajara, a feeling suddenly washed over me that I needed to learn Turkish and travel to Turkey. I'd never felt such a powerful calling before, so I paid attention. I didn't understand the reason for it at first, but after a few days of reflection I think I caught a glimmer of it. There's something in the spirit of the people who made that show, and I need to learn it from them, and the only way to learn it is to speak their language, be in their presence, and listen carefully. My imaginary neighbor on the plane, the kindly old Turkish man, understood all this and more in just a few words, but of course he is me, and I am him.

P.S. I want to paint a little word-selfie of me, walking through a golf course in North Myrtle Beach, wearing a gray woolen poncho and a camo baseball cap, probably with a glazed look in my eyes, repeatedly asking the way to Sultanahmet Square in Turkish. If anyone could have understood me, they might have said, “you idiot, it’s in Istanbul, 5500 miles away!” I thought of those anti-drug PSAs from my youth: “see kids, this is what happens when you give in to peer pressure…” What can I say, sometimes when you’re in some place without much local color, you just have to be the local color.

P.P.S. And what about Yunus Emre's poetry? I purposefully only brought along a Turkish-language edition of selections from his Diwan on this trip, so that I would be forced to study if I wanted to read it. A lot of the vocabulary is regional or antiquated, as you might expect after some 700 years, but there's a glossary in the back (translating into modern Turkish of course), and I'm very slowly working my way through a few of the poems. It’s worth the effort. To give you a flavor, I've translated one of them, titled in my book as Dağlar İle, Taşlar İle if you want to look up the original. I’m sure I’ve fallen far short of the translation it deserves, but you can get an idea of how beautiful the original Turkish sounds from hearing it recited in the show. Note that the link is to season 2, episode 22, so there may be some minor spoilers in the form of other characters shown during the poem. Anyhow, here's my rendition of it:

With the mountains, with the stones,
    let me call thy name my Lord
With the birds at dusk and dawn,
    let me call thy name my Lord
With the fish in waters deep,
    with the wilderness's deer
With the pilgrim praying "dear
    God", let me call thy name my Lord
With the radiant face of Christ,
    with Moses climbing Mount Sinai
With staff in hand beneath the sky,
    let me call thy name my Lord
With the burdened sighs of Job,
    with the crying eyes of Jacob
With Muhammad the beloved
    let me call thy name my Lord
With praise for all that You provide,
    with grace to bear what You decide
With ceaseless prayer to burn my pride,
    let me call thy name my Lord
I have known the world's ways,
    I've left behind what rumors say
Clear head, bare feet to feel the way,
    let me call thy name my Lord
Yunus listens to the tales
    of mourning doves and nightingales
Truth is seeking servants still,
    let me call thy name my Lord

—Yunus Emre (1238-1320)