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A Tribute to Attila Ilhan featuring Sunay Akin
Friday, May 5, 2006
7:00 PM
Tinker Auditorium
The French Institute / Alliance Française
55 East 59th Street
(between Park and Madison Avenues)
New York, NY 10022
This program will be presented in Turkish.
Tickets: $ 10, $ 9 (Moon and Stars Project members)
For tickets please click the BUY button or call (212) 229-1207.
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The Moon and Stars Project is proud to present a tribute to a towering
figure in Turkish literature, Attila
Ilhan, whom we lost on October 10, 2005. Please join us to commemorate
this celebrated poet, writer and intellectual, as seen through the eyes
of another prominent Turkish poet, Sunay
Akin.
Sunay Akin met Ilhan in the early 1980s as a young writer
for Sanat Olayi, an arts magazine published by Ilhan himself.
Together, they shared the challenge and responsibility of being active
intellectuals in Istanbul in the volatile times following the military
coup of 1980. Their friendship, which began in such trying times, would
last for almost 25 years. Now, Akin comes to New York to tell the story
of Attila Ilhan in the ancient meddah tradition of storytelling,
bringing this captivating tradition to a modern audience.
Though always a few steps ahead of his contemporaries,
Ilhan was very much a man of his time; his life story cannot be extracted
from the story of the Turkey he lived in and wrote about. In Sunay Akin’s
words:
| “Attila Ilhan is the captain of a ship
painted blue... Anatolian fire blazing in its stokehold, it steers
its course in the sea of Turkish poetry…
Surely, a film is being shot on deck, seagulls
racing for a spot in the background…
A high school student on the run is hiding in a lifeboat, wanted
for a love letter with lines from a forbidden poet!
A murder has been committed in the dining room, a fruit knife sticking
out of the victim’s back… A writer on exile is making
paper boats out of the pages of his books and throwing them onto
the sea…
Attila Ilhan’s ship is approaching the port of New York, to
take a Mohican back to the streets of Istanbul where he can light
a fire…
You are not “obliged” to board this
ship!” |
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