| In 2015 I was invited by Saliha Paker to take part in that year's “Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature.” Each year a certain poet was chosen and various translators were invited to work on translating their poetry on the island of Cunda in the Aegean. I was thrilled when I was informed that we would be working on the poetry of Behçet Necatigil as he was one of the major Turkish poets I had shied away from translating up to that point. I had always been fascinated by his work but found it dense, mysterious and difficult to render into English. In the months before the workshop, I read as much of his work as I could in order to hear and feel what I call “Necatigilce/Necatigilese” and to begin to work out ways I could recreate this in English. This involved condensing as much as possible and shuffling the word order around to recreate the startling effects of the originals. This then became a process of translating and retranslating until the translation took on a certain Necatigil aura, one that managed to make English seem strange and yet somehow fresh again. | 
