Smaranda Șchiopu
Earlier this year, a bookstragam I follow announced the English translation of a book that immediately caught my attention, for several reasons. First, it was translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, the translator of Georgi Gospodinov. Together, the pair won the International Booker Prize in 2023 and thus cemented their popularity in the English-writing world. Angela Rodel has mentioned several times that her interest in Bulgarian literature was occasioned by first being acquainted with Bulgarian folklore music, which for me makes her a sensitive translator, incorporating all their senses into their work, so any book translated by her would be a great recommendation. Second, the topic of the book, outstretched over more than 500 pages, focuses on a struggle for power that brings to the fore the old age opposition between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe.
The book was published in early March by Sandorf Passage, (a US-based publishing house with their eyes cast over writers from Eastern European) and had its official launch at the London Book Fair on March 12th, 2024, the first time Bulgaria took part in the fair. That same evening, the Bulgarian Cultural Institute organised a talk with guests Angela Rodel and Hannah Georgiou Hutchinson, and it turned out to be a passionate discussion about the book, the writer, and the working life of a translator.
Vera Mutafchieva was a Bulgarian historian turned fiction writer at a time when fiction writing could carry more truth, albeit disguised in fiction. Her own family experienced exile during communist Bulgaria, both her brother and her husband had escaped to Western Europe. As a single mother with this kind of family background, she was a target for the regime and there were certain collaborations between her and the secret police. When brought up in the audience during the Q&A of the talk, the public seemed forgiving, choosing to elevate the work of the artist over choices she didn’t have, suggesting an understanding of the compromises that had to be made, rooted in experience and recollection of what it entailed.
Setting the scene with the sudden death of Mehmed the Conqueror, after he had subdued Constantinople, the heart of Eastern Christianity, the story quickly lifts off with a family power struggle between the sultan’s sons: his first born, Bayezid and his favourite, Cem. The transfer of power following the Sultan’s death favoured his first born as legitimate heir, not without leaving the door open to contestations. Cem opened this door and let himself be misguided into believing that part of the army would support him. After one small victory which further deluded him into his quest for power, he was ultimately betrayed and chose self-exile (still harbouring illusions of a come-back) in the phoney hospitality of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St. John, an exile that would take him to Rhodes, France and finally Rome.
But who exactly was Cem? Cem was the sultan’s third son with one of his concubines with unclear origins, prompting the author to speculate that she might have been a Serb, to justify his appearance as half-European, slav, half-Ottoman, thus further discrediting his ability to gain the Empire’s throne. Cem surrounded himself with poets, art and music while also being the governor of Karaman and he was much loved by his entourage, particularly by the Persian poet, Saadi, his closest advisor, who throughout the book, will render Cem’s most intimate thoughts. In Saadi’s optics, Cem’s power relies not in his military prowess but in his intellectual abilities:
“I was convinced Cem was fated to embody the dreams of generations of thinkers and poets; Cem’s victory would be the victory of wisdom over brute force; Cem’s rule would free from prejudice, dogma, and vulgar idiocy the primordial law of beauty that had never been destroyed but which had never yet reigned.”
As Cem’s reign did not come to pass, neither did the “victory of wisdom over brute force”, Vera Mutafchieva seems to imply. Yet his exile made him famous, particularly with the French troubadours of the Middle Ages, inspiring songs and mystery stories about the Ottomans, the East, romanticising for Western Europe a poorly known geographical area, a never encountered people. While his worldly power never ensued, Cem, Zizim as he was known in France, dominated the story telling of the day, a tragic hero from a world unknown.
Structured as a court hearing, with the reader as the testimony gatherer as well as the ultimate judge of the characters of history’s heroes and villains, the book emphasises the themes of migration, isolation, and a certain degree of powerlessness when history’s cards are stacked against one, even when that one is a member of the elite. The architects of Cem’s exile, Bayezid sultan himself and Pierre d’Aubusson, the Master of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St. John, found themselves embroiled in an ever-shifting network of alliances and broken communications, spread over the continent from Rome to Constantinople. Their understanding that keeping Cem confined by the Order of the Hospitalier was to their mutual benefit was an uneasy one, since neither would accept it as a truce or reason not to go to war against each other. That Cem’s life was valuable enough to require a large annual payment from the sultan to the order did not imply it was also a prize worth peace.
In our testimony gathering, we’ll hear from a motley crew of medieval characters, but we’ll never hear from Cem directly. He remains silent throughout, his ghost left without a voice, just as his person was left without a choice. Cem had been silent long before he died, Saadi suggests. The exile broke him, and it broke Saadi as well.
Mutafchieva is not subtle about the implications of leaving one’s home forced by circumstances, a first renunciation of freedoms and privileges. The demarcation of home from non-home, the border, may be invisible for those of us who belong to those parts of the world where freedom of movement is taken for granted. It was not such in Mutafchieva’s time and place and it was not so for Cem either (just like it is not such for still a lot of people today):
“Saadi”, he went on, “do you really understand what the border is? We will cross not only the boundary between two countries. It is much more…Until this night I have been at home, upon the land of my father and my grandfather. Until today, I have had rights, albeit contested. By crossing the border, I will give them up of my own accord and I will step beyond the law. As of tomorrow, I will be an exile, Saadi…The word ‘exile’ scares me, Saadi.”
As their freedom is gradually chipped away at, they each retreat into feelings of regret and bitterness, their horizon diminishing, their world enclosed in four walls. After a few failed attempts to escape from his exile, Cem renounced his delusions of occupying the Ottoman throne, and along with it, his engagement with the world around him was also relinquished. Saadi too renounces a dear part of himself, namely the ability to see the world as a place worthy of exploration, making him sound like a truly reactionary figure:
“A song about homeland and exile, that’s what I want to write – I who thought I did not have a homeland and that my home was the world; I who thought exile was simply a journey, a change in place. For the price of thirteen years, I have paid for one piece of wisdom, which I would like to leave to my people. I want to tell them – and to warn them. The world is not only large, I shall sing, it is also hostile. Hide away from it in a single homeland, a single city, a single home; fence off a small part of that big world so you can master it and warm it; find yourself one trade, one sipahi commander, one line of work; have your own children. Cling to something amidst the boundless current of time, amidst the boundlessness of the universe. Choose one truth as your own.”
It is not without a hint of irony that we listen to what Saadi would like to sing of, knowing that he does so when Western Europe was already embarked on its journey of discovering new worlds. The large world was about to become larger and more interconnected, resulting in more hostility and conflict. Saadi’s tragic song underscores the experience of a traumatic exile which sees one, after they lost everything and gained nothing, wanting to retreat into a more parochial context looking after his own truth.
A problem with historical novels is their seductive ability to trap you into one of two worlds: one where you either affirm your belonging, confirm your biases, and avoid a clash of civilisations, or, on the contrary, one where your mythology is shaken, your heroes deposed, and the truth, the real truth exposed. Mutafchieva’s narrator hides behind veils of testimonies to weave this seductive power into her novel, and not once have I found myself highlighting characters’ quotes that chip away at the myths my history classes taught me of the Middle Ages and the Western civilisation, all the while being dead silent about Byzantium:
“Five centuries have passed and some truths can now be spoken aloud. We were hindered by the free thinking of the European East, where a king allowed himself to take a Jew or an actress for a wife, where the sovereigns themselves were often heretics, where all sorts of reborn pagan movements spread and society lived free from religious, class and national prejudices; we were hindered by the fact that in the East the Church was subordinate to secular power and in this way set a bad example for our Western lord; we were hindered, at long last and perhaps most of all, by the fact that Byzantium and her satellites had a flair for producing and trading like never before. (Pierre D’Aubusson, pg. 178)
I cannot ask Vera Mutafchieva if the often-disparaging tone her characters deploy when talking about the Western civilisation of the Middle Ages, of the way history is muddled with their scheming, betrayals and greed for power and money is a veil to protect herself from censorship and there is suspicion that perhaps yes. A regime that vilified the West in practice was happy to release a book that vilified its long history of lies and deceits. It would be more surprising then that the same regime did not object to what it is implied: that the Eastern civilisation of the 20th century is assimilated/likened to the eastern civilisation of the Middle Ages, which was dominated by the Ottomans conquering of the Balkans, including then and present-day Bulgaria. That censors would allow even a hint of embellishment of the Ottomans’ Middle Ages over the Western one is a historical peculiarity that I would have loved to hear Vera Mutafchieva talk about.
Photo: The cover of the book (source: Janet 45 Publishing House)
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