The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

It is impossible to keep pace with David Solway’s inventiveness. In
2000 he published Saracen Island, the supposed translations of poems by
the Greek poet Andreas Karavis, and simultaneously brought out An
Andreas Karavis Companion—about the poet he had himself invented!
Within that Companion a section hints at Karavis’s liaison with a
dissident Turkish poet living in Istanbul, the evidence given in a
letter ascribed to Eric Ormsby, an authentic Canadian poet to whom both
the Companion and the book under review are dedicated. Now we have a
dazzling collection of poems by Nesmine Rifat, the Turkish poet in
question, complete with potted autobiography and scholarly notes.
(Pallikari means “brave man, hero, warrior,” and, by implication,
“lover.”)

Karavis, we hear, loved and then abandoned her, and the book provides,
as the blurb notes, “a record of her anguish.” It contains some of
the most sensual poems ever published in Canada. Solway revels in the
critical challenge (and, one suspects, anti-ideological defiance) of
appropriating a woman’s voice as she presents her side of the
relationship, her “longings of the groin and mind,” as she calls
them. Moreover, because she is a poet, he can demonstrate his technical
dexterity by presenting English-language equivalents of unfamiliar
poetic forms, including sapphics, alcaics, a pantoum, and a ghazal.

The dedication to Ormsby is, I fancy, more than part of the elaborate
poet-inventing plot. There is an exotic—and often erotic—richness
about these poems that suggests Solway’s inspired response to Araby,
Ormsby’s poetic tour de force that appeared in 2001. One finds the
same relish in imagery, language, and cadence that made Araby so
refreshing a poetic event.

But Solway has not, it seems, exhausted the possibilities of his
impersonations. At the close, he reveals that Rifat is now “drafting a
series of poems written from the point of view of a man, in this case
Karavis himself.” Eventually, Solway will doubtless “translate”
these. One certainly hopes so. Canadian poetry has not seen anything so
ambitious, so intriguing, so intellectually and emotionally challenging,
for decades.