Lyrical Touch: Paul Celan and Yunus Emre in the Poetry of Zafer Şenocak

Abstract

This article reads Zafer Şenocak’s German- and Turkish-language poetry as a multifaceted site of relation, within which the themes and concerns of Paul Celan and Yunus Emre’s poetry come to touch. In doing so, it develops the concept of lyrical touch or the sensual experience of connecting with others in and through lyrical language. Celan and Yunus Emre touch in Şenocak’s writing in part through his negotiation of each author’s very different conception of the body. Through this process of negotiation, Şenocak sets into motion an interpretive movement not unlike Celan’s theory of the meridian. Connecting the path of Celan’s poems to Yunus Emre’s physical peregrinations as a wandering dervish, Şenocak counters recurrent accusations of hermeticism in Celan’s more pared-down late poetry, pointing instead to his conception of the addressee as a living, breathing, mortal body that is itself in motion.