Giannis Marinos Hall, The Friends of Music Society, Athens 5th September 2023 

Fragko Karaoglan 

If you were to ask me what I would prefer, listening to the soundtracks of the films, listening to the songs, reading the books or translating Livanelli, I would say: I would prefer to sit with him and have him tell me stories, stories about the last seventy years of the socio-political situation in Turkey, stories about the people he met… He has an amazing memory, almost photographic! 

But you didn’t want to ask that. So, let me take the high road, tell you the little I know about Livanelli. In his last book, “The Fisherman and His Son”, he tells us how, as a poor student, he would hide under the covers with a flashlight and read, read, read…and how his father forbade him from reading extracurricular books… But he doesn’t mention that around the same time, he was enrolled in high school – in fact, in the only English college in Ankara in the mid-1950s. A few months later, his father gave him a saz as a gift one evening and explained that he thought of giving him this gift so that he wouldn’t forget the culture and customs of his homeland. Rumor had it, you see, that the children who went to this college converted to Catholicism. 

He was 15 years old when he queued up in front of the bookstore in Ankara, which would have the first book by Nazım Hikmet printed in Turkey. He bought three copies to share with his friends. Until then, the few poems of Nazim they had read were polygraph copies. 

He was just a little over 20 when the coup of March 12, 1971, took place and he started going in and out of prisons. And he was a little older than the three students hanged by that junta, disguised as a government under Demirel, in May 1972 for “attempting to overthrow the constitutional state”. Months later, in early 1973, his first musical work was released: the album “Turkish Revolutionary Songs”, dedicated to the three executed students. Exactly 40 years later, in 2013, he had many songs to sing at the concert in Gezi Park, during the protests. 

In 1975 he wrote his first music for cinema, for the film “The Bus”. Soon after, he “The Herd” collaborated with Yilmaz Gunei, composing music for the iconic films “The Road” and … In the meantime, he left Turkey, and went to Paris with Yaşar Kemal, a friend of forty-four years, with not a day going by without them speaking on the phone. Let’s not forget the film “Iron Earth, Copper Sky” based on the novel by the great Kurd. He has composed music for approximately 40 films. 

He spent over 10 years in Sweden, where he taught music and, among other things, attended philosophy courses at the university. In 1984, he returned to Turkey with his wife, Ulker, to whom he has been married since 1964. Their daughter, Aylin, is also involved in music. 

In the years that followed and up to the present day, Livanelli has continued to create compositions, set poems to music, write songs, perform in concerts, write screenplays, receive awards… He has collaborated and given concerts with renowned artists such as Mikis Theodorakis, Maria Farantouri, and Joan Baez. His work “New Age Rhapsody” has been performed by major symphony orchestras. 

I don’t know exactly when he started writing, I believe it was in the early 90s; but I sometimes think: how else his books could have been, if not, let’s say, “musical”? | don’t think he has written a single book that is not imbued with social and political reflection, that isn’t inhabited by a world of characters and passions… Certainly, all his works have a musical quality-a chord, a second, a counterpoint, a contralto, a melody, but above all, I believe, rhythm. In my case, as a translator, capturing that rhythm is the real challenge.