Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

In Pursuit of a Poem: Refl ections on Translating Ottoman Turkish Poetry
Walter G. Andrews
That translation is a task replete with problems is no news
to anyone. I suspect that, like me, many who translate
bear the secret (and usually stringently repressed) fear
that translation just might be an impossible task. The
gaps between languages, between ages, peoples, cultures,
societies, religions, tastes, and sensibilities sometimes
seem too vast to be bridged in any meaningful way. I have
occasionally spent 50 minutes clarifying one couplet of
Ottoman poetry to a class. And when I presume to translate,
what of all this information do I think I can convey in
two lines? A few vaguely similar words? The ghost of
a thought? Impossible … and yet like many impossible
things, and Zeno notwithstanding, the arrow reaches its
target, the hare passes the tortoise, Achilles catches Hector,
and successful translation happens … all the time.
Before going on to show how translation from
Ottoman poetry can happen, let us linger for a moment on
the problems. But fi rst a brief defi nition: for purposes of
these remarks, we will understand Ottoman poetry to be
the primary literary art of the elite culture of the last and
perhaps greatest of the early modern empires, the Ottoman
Empire, which at one time or another ruled much of the
Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe from the
early 14th century to the early decades of the 20th. Many
of the problem areas for translation from this literature are
obvious. For example:
• The Ottomans were Muslims and saw themselves
as heirs and continuators of a religious, cultural,
and literary tradition that expressed itself in three
languages: Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, all of which
Ottoman poets generally knew to some degree.
Only an infi nitesimal fragment of this long and
voluminous tradition is known even to quite wellread
English-speaking westerners. Thus, the very
words of Ottoman Turkish are embedded in a matrix
of religious ideas, social customs, and linguistic
expectations that are entirely unfamiliar to Englishspeakers.
• The technical features of Ottoman poetry are vastly
different from those of English poetry and modern
poetry in general. The rhythms are different; the
rhymes are different; the genres are different. The
poetry is fi lled with clever and language-specifi c
rhetorical tricks, puns, anagrams, and intentional
ambiguities.
• The sensibility of Ottoman poetry is premodern (or
early modern). That is, much of Ottoman literary
culture is separated from us by large chunks of time
and drastic changes in literary taste and general
patterns of thought.
Other problems of translating Ottoman poetry are far
less obvious, even to people with considerable expertise. Let
me just mention two that seem especially pertinent to me.
• Very little attention has been paid to the contexts
in which Ottoman poems lived. These poems are
usually passed down in the form of “divans,” which
are collections by single authors arranged according
to genre and the alphabetical order of their rhymes.
Except for some occasional poems, we seldom have
any indication of the original context of any poem,
and it is customary to treat them as if they were
written solely as exercises in poetic composition
and theosophical speculation. For example, much of
Ottoman poetry is about love, yet there has been very
little interest in understanding how the Ottoman elites
actually loved, not to mention who, where, when, and
why. 1 In my opinion, the detachment and coolness of
the scholarly gaze has attached itself to the poetry and
made it seem far more inauthentic, far more detached,
and far less playful than it really is.
• There is an argument in translation circles these
days about whether and to what extent a translation
should preserve the “differentness/otherness” of
the original text. Should the translation attempt to
preserve the familiarity experienced by the textʼs
primary audiences? Or should the text be allowed to
retain its difference, the fundamental aspects of its
character that make it foreign to the audiences of the
translation?
For many reasons, some political and some related
to the above-mentioned problems, English translation
from Ottoman Turkish poetry has been meager relative
to other signifi cant poetic traditions. The orientalist E.
J. W. Gibbʼs six-volume History of Ottoman Poetry has
been the sole major monument of English translation for
a century — minimally an indication of a general lack of
interest in updating our translation styles. 2 The fi rst volume
of Gibbʼs work appeared in 1900, and just a year later, in
1901, the year of his death, there appeared a collection
of translations by Gibb in an anthology entitled Ottoman
Literature, published by M. Walter Dunne as part of the
Translation Review 23