On Hope Mirrlees
Clair Wills, 10 September 2020
“... The Turkish language has a tense for gossip. Officially known as the reported past, it’s also the ‘hearsay’ tense, in which it’s possible to say things without its really being you who says them, or even exactly you who knows them. In Turkish, statements such as ‘they were lovers’ or ‘she had the child adopted’ have a ghostly ‘apparently’ or ‘I heard that’ hovering around them, muddying the distinction between the active speech of a subject and the speech of the community ... ”