Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

In the harsh light of many years spent criticizing poets of obscure verse, in thrall to the myths of modernism, there are but one or two excuses for Ka’s extensive self-commentary. A careful reading reveals that Ka did not believe himself to be the true author of any of the poems that came to him in Kars. Rather, he believed himself to be but the medium, the amanuensis, in a manner well exampled by predecessors of his modernist bêtes noires. But as he wrote in several places, having produced the poems, he was now determined to throw off his passivity, and it was by coming to understand them—by revealing their hidden symmetry—that he hoped to achieve this purpose. But there was a more practical urgency as well: Without understanding what his Kars poems meant, he could have no hope of filling in the blanks, of completing the half-finished lines—or of recovering his lost poem, “The Place Where God Does Not Exist”—and thus no hope of completing the book.