Turkish Robin Hood

MEMED MY HAWK (371 pp.)--Yashar Kemal--Pantheon ($4.95).

Turkish literature, little of which has ever penetrated to the U.S., has always been derivative. For hundreds of years, Turkish poets imitated those of Persia; in the 19th and 20th centuries, the model has been France. This lively first novel skillfully blends both traditions with a strong individualistic note of its own and suggests that U.S. readers may have been missing something. Beautifully translated by Edouard Roditi, the book tells the story of young Memed who grows up in a mud-walled village hut in a remote province of Anatolia. Recklessly brave and a deadly marksman, Memed battles his environment and a succession of superb villains. Chief among them: sly, goat-bearded Abdi Agha, who owns five villages and combines the brutality of Simon Legree with the buffoonery of Captain Hook. Readers will have to remind themselves from time to time that all this is happening in the 20th century.

As a child, Memed runs away from Abdi Agha but is dragged back to serfdom. As a young man, he elopes with the village belle on the eve of her marriage to Abdi's nephew. Tracked down in the forest, Memed loses his girl but kills the nephew and escapes to the crags and hidden valleys of the Taurus mountains, where he joins a band of outlaws and finally becomes a Turkish Robin Hood. After a dozen gunfights, in which bursts of Homeric rhetoric alternate with bursts of grenades and guns, Memed at last avenges himself by murdering his goat-bearded enemy, Abdi Agha. Then, like a proper hero, he rides off into the sunrise and is never seen again.

Fantastic though it seems, Author Yashar Kemal, 39, has lived much of his novel. Village-born, of Kurdish descent, Kemal was five years old when his father was murdered by an enemy while kneeling beside his son in the mosque. The experience left Kemal with a stammer, which he cured by chanting the traditional songs of Turkish troubadours. This folk poetry glows in his description of the bleak Anatolian land where, each spring, it seems as if "a green rain has fallen," and by midsummer, the high plateaus are blue with thistles "rippling like the sea." There is also the settled villagers' nostalgia for a happier nomadic past, and repeated echoes of Nasr-ed-Din, the great comic hero whose wit and clownish wisdom have enlivened Turkish bazaars for 700 years. For the most part the author's philosophy seems to reflect Memed's own mood, benign in the midst of violence: "What good men there are in the world!"

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