ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a close reading and retranslation of a Turkish folk classic from the twentieth century. The song’s lyrics draw on the trope of the generous and bountiful earth, seemingly with no end to its resources – a trope generally associated in the West with that of Mother Earth and the patriarchal, capitalist oppression and domination of both nature and women, which is heavily criticized by ecofeminist scholars, among others. The song, however, is also rooted in Anatolian mysticism, which runs counter to the artificial split between nature, God and humans associated with the ‘Western’ tradition. The objective of the contribution is to offer an ecological and feminist translation of this poem through the lens of ecofeminism, and in the process, expand the relevance of this particular theoretical framework geographically and temporally.
