Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

oth for contemporary Turkish society and its observers
from outside: a secularist coup, religious fundamentalists,
Kurds, terrorists, and “headscarf girls” caught in an
epidemic of suicide. Such “issues” are woven into a
narrative of farce and tragedy, which only a master fi ction
writer can orchestrate. One also senses that Pamuk as a
novelist has responded to a certain call or desire that seems
to emanate from such sociopolitical “problems” in order
to be interpreted. In the Turkish of Snow, the abundant use
of the adjective “westernized,” for instance, is intriguing.
It seems to operate much like a word “stolen” from the
“other” to translate in unequivocal terms perhaps the most
questioned aspect of the hybrid nature of modern Turkish
society — to translate for those who regard themselves
as the “other,” be they Westerners or secularists or
fundamentalists.
To conclude, in surveying the recent major literary
contributions to the corpus of translations into English,
it has been possible also to refl ect on their reception in
reviews and the implications regarding perceptions of
modern Turkish identity. In the light of such reception,
it has also been possible to read some of the Turkish
works themselves as cultural translations of the complex
“who-ness” of Turks and Turkey. In the context of this
essay on translations, the complexity seems to inhabit the
in-between and the self-translating, a life practice that
certainly harbors tensions but resists reductive readings in
terms of a simple East-West divide or an affl icted psyche.
Notes
1 Turkish Literature, comprising Fables, Belles-Lettres and
Sacred Traditions, Translated into English for the First
Time, New York, 1901.
2 Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology, University of Texas,
Austin, 1997.
3 Radikal Book supplement 23rd July 2004 no.175
4 The New York Times, August 15, 2004.
5 For the full bibliography see Saliha Paker, “Turkish” in
The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, (ed)
Peter France, Oxford University Press, 2000, 619-624.
6 Harvill, UK, 1997, 2001.
7 Marion Boyars, London/New York, 2004. In Turkish Bit
Palas (literally, “Lice Palace”), Metis, Istanbul, 2002.
8 Preface by John Berger, Introduction by Saliha Paker,
Marion Boyars, London/New York, 1991, 1993.
9 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, October 2004. The book has
also been published in Turkey in Aslı Biçenʼs translation
under the title Araf, Metis, Istanbul, 2004.
10 In his recent review (The New Yorker, August 30, 2004)
of Orhan Pamukʼs Snow, John Updike interestingly gives
a long list of the names of the Turkish characters, which,
he points out, “have, to an American reader, a fairy-tale
strangeness.”
11 Edited and with Introduction by Murat Nemet-Nejat,
Preface by Talat Sait Halman, Talisman House, New Jersey.
The volume includes a very useful appendix on the Turkish
titles and sources of the translations.
12 On the poetry of the Second New, see also Orhan Koçakʼs
“ʻOur Master, the Noviceʼ: On the Catastrophic Births of
Modern Turkish Poetry” and Necmi Zekaʼs “A Prisoner of
Language: The Strange Case of Modern Turkish Poetry”
in Relocating the Fault Lines: Turkey Beyond the East-
West Divide, (special issue eds) Sibel Irzık and Güven
Güzeldere, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102:2/3, Spring/
Summer, Duke University Press, 2003.
13 Orhan Veliʼs poetry has previously appeared in Murat
Nemet-Nejatʼs translation, I, Orhan Veli. Poems by Orhan
Veli, Hanging Loose Press, New York, 1989, 2001, and in
Talat S. Halmanʼs translation, I am Listening to Istanbul:
Selected Poems of Orhan Veli Kanık, New York, 1971.
14 İlhan Berk, one of the oldest and most productive of
living Turkish poets but long neglected by translators, has
also been published recently in an individual collection,
Selected Poems by İlhan Berk (ed.) Önder Otcu, translations
by Önder Otçu and Murat Nemet-Nejat, Talisman House,
New Jersey, 2004. Extensively represented in Murat
Nemet-Nejatʼs anthology, Berk may be said to have fi nally
got the attention he deserved in English.
15 Ece Ayhanʼs poetry has also appeared in an individual
selection, A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, translated,
with an afterword, by Murat Nemet-Nejat, Sun & Moon
Press, Los Angeles, 1997.
16 A selection of Lale Müldürʼs poetry has been published
in English translation by Tony Curtis et al. in Water Music,
Poetry Ireland, Dublin, 1998.
17 See Murat Nemet-Nejatʼs article “Questions of Accent” in
Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-
1998, (eds) Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, Black
Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa, California, 1999, 105-119.
18 e.g. An Anthology of Turkish Literature, ed. Kemal Sılay,
Bloomington, Indiana, 1996.
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