The Wounded Age begins with a conversation between an unnamed couple, referred to as the Man and the Woman: "I´m leaving soon, he says. / Where, she asks. / East. The mountains." We are given no names, barely any punctuation, just the barest trail of dialogue set as verse: this is the spare style and austere language of the canonical Turkish author Ferit Edgü, a master of distillation. In the two books paired here and translated into English for the first time, Edgü represents complex social and political realities with startling lyricism and economy. The Wounded Age features a newspaper reporter, assigned to write about ethno-national violence in the mountainous region of eastern Turkey.