Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

he is easily placed in the Cold War context that divided
Turkish society and gave rise to civil unrest between right
and left. Again, he held a strong international appeal. Since
the 1980s, in the neo-liberal context that emerged after
the last major military coup, it has been Orhan Pamuk
who represents an international aspect emerging out of the
Turkish national tradition. His work refl ects a (some would
argue, “politically disengaged”) postmodernism that is yet
grounded in national culture. As stated above, his brilliant
innovations in narrative are combined with an interrogative
gaze back into national or Ottoman history. Pamuk is quick
on his feet and able to switch genres and structure, and
introduce constant originalities in style. He belongs to the
post-1980 “Third Republic,” characterized by transnational
integration into global networks.
All of these writers, whose internationality is readily
translatable, are also concerned with the relationship
between state and identity. They all, in their own ways,
espouse critiques of the state and advocate for its
accountability to society. But, as should be apparent,
Turkish literature in English has little to do with literature
in Turkey. The reduction of a literary heritage onto one
major writer per generation is an unfortunate refl ection of
corporate publishing in the U.S. As emphasized in the New
York Times after Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz won the
Nobel prize, the American taste for literature-in-translation
is very limited. As New Yorker fi ction editor Deborah
Treisman stated in that article, “the publishing industry has
an ingrained fear of translations.” 16 This has at times led to
tokenism: the one-writer/one-nation principle of corporate
publishing. Lawrence Venuti suggests why in his book The
Scandals of Translation:
Perhaps the most important factor in the current
marginality of translation is its offense against the
prevailing concept of authorship. Whereas authorship
is generally defi ned as originality, self-expression
in a unique text, translation is derivative, neither
self-expression nor unique: it imitates another text.
Given the reigning concept of authorship, translation
provokes the fear of inauthenticity, distortion,
contamination…. Translation may also provoke
the fear that the foreign author is not original, but
derivative, fundamentally dependent on pre-existing
materials. 17
Of course, many other Turkish authors have been
translated, but often their work does not take hold in
foreign contexts.
Between Author and Translator
It was Satan who fi rst said ʻIʼ! It was Satan who
adopted a style!
It was Satan who separated East from West! 18
Orhan Pamuk plays with the notion of translation-asauthority
in The White Castle, a novel that emerges out of
dispirited Faruk Darvınoğluʼs act of translating an Ottoman
manuscript he has found in the archive of Gebze. His
methods are telling: “after reading a couple of sentences
from the manuscript I kept on one table, Iʼd go to another
table in the other room where I kept my papers and try
to narrate in todayʼs idiom the sense of what remained in
my mind.” 19 The image of having to shuttle between two
desks in two separate rooms and record in the Turkish Latin
alphabet only what is retained of the Ottoman, is an apt
metaphor to describe translation as a mediating body inbetween.
But what kind of translation is this with which to
frame a novel?
Darvinoğluʼs act of translation connotes the horizon of
nationalism as manifested in the alphabet reform of 1928/9
and the state-controlled language reforms of the twentieth
century. The novel is one of identifi cation; the “gap”
between “texts” is the cultural revolution. The subtext is
the messy, uncatalogued archive or the seventeenth century
Ottoman Empire, a kind of wildly signifying unconscious
(which, returning to Lacan, is “structured like a language”).
In the wake of the 1980 coup, Darvınoğlu (“son of
Darwin”) is trapped, it is the third coup of his adult life,
heʼs been removed from his position at the university and
has taken to drinking. In this state of dejection, through
his access to the Gebze archive, Darvınoğlu performs his
Houdini-like escape through a translation of Ottoman
history. It is, seemingly, the only transgression left to him.
The narrative of The White Castle removes us from the
confi nements brought on by the 1980 military coup. Pamuk,
as stated, experienced three coups before he was thirty.
His character, Darvinoğlu, reminds us that the geographies
that are crossed through translation are not just linguistic,
but political and social, historical and psychological. They
involve navigating and trying to escape incarcerating
discourses of Orientalism and nationalism; even using the
former to subvert the latter (the narrative trick he makes use
of in My Name is Red). In other words, the neo-imperial/
national grip on 1980s Turkey, in the fi nal decade of the
Cold War, might be counterbalanced by another imperial
discourse: that of the Ottoman, which in order to be
understood, needs to be translated as well.
The two main characters in The White Castle are above
all, translators. The Venetian slave translates his culture to
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