Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

his Ottoman master and vice versa. As an indication of the
process of being articulated into language and then again
translated for one another across cultural boundaries, the
two main characters mirror-gaze: “ ʻCome, let us look
in the mirror together.ʼ I looked, and under the raw light
of the lamp saw once more how much we resembled
one another….The two of us were one person! This now
seemed to me an obvious truth.” 20 In fact, they are so
adept, that they translate themselves out of fi xed sites of
identity. This process, the movement from division to
unity and back, fundamentally questions distinct notions
of “target” and “source,” “self” and “other,” or “author”
and “translator.” Master and slave engage in sessions
of communal writing, and fi nally they begin to pass for
each other such that we donʼt know which is which. The
point is not whether they indeed do switch (on which
count many reviews are misleading), but rather that they
are indistinguishable. This mysterious process describes
translation.
Three novels later comes MNR, set in the sixteenth
century, yet still informed by a multivalent gesture that
questions the hegemonic site of present-day Turkey.
In its multiplicity of narrators and its aesthetic selfconsciousness,
the novel becomes Pamukʼs “large canvas.”
Here, the translations are multifold, occurring furiously
and incessantly between image and text, life and death,
God and man, man and woman, color and speech, object
and consciousness, miniature and portrait, second and third
dimension, etc. The redeeming unity in MNR, however, is
an aesthetic one of style-in-narration. The failed creation of
the illuminated manuscript in the plot is redeemed by the
authorʼs creation of a text that is ʻbeyond depictionʼ: the
novel he has written. Narrative redemption is the moral of
Pamukʼs world (and integral to it is translation). Many of
his works contain the leitmotif a failed or “missing” book
or manuscript, whether a source of inscrutable inspiration
(The New Life, Snow), failed or incomplete (My Name is
Red, The Silent House), or translated/rewritten (The White
Castle); this absent text is of course coupled with the
doppelganger of the Pamuk “bestseller” itself.
Pamukʼs authority emerges from nothing other than his
act of setting up an aesthetic relation between narratives:
The Ottoman manuscript/The White Castle, a mysterious
book/The New Life, the Sultanʼs secret book/My Name
is Red, a book of poems/Snow, a draft/its revision, an
encoding/a re-encoding, the original/its translation, etc.
Like Darvınoğlu, Pamuk translates post-1980s Turkish
dilemmas through the medium of an Ottoman context. The
next translation, or interpretation, succeeds through the
ticklish tension between itself and the previous version.
The author is the fi rst translator, the translator reauthorizes
in the ritual act of renaming the entire text. These authortwins
are in one sense imitating each other. This recalls
Pamukʼs adaptation in The Black Book of the Rumi parable
of the mural contest wherein the artist who erected a mirror
to refl ect his opponentʼs masterpiece emerges the winner
(“Naturally the prize went to the artist whoʼd installed the
mirror”). 21 Translation is putting up that mirror.
This brings up an important theme in MNR: the tension
between a two-dimensional surface (the painting, the
mirror, the page), and three-dimensional self-refl exivity
(looking at the self/object from the outside perspective).
The third dimension is hermeneutical. It is often a metahistorical
or meta-fi ctional interpretation provided by
the reader or perhaps the narrator. Allow me to illustrate
this point: Ottoman historian Cemal Kafadar describes
the sixteenth century diary of a dervish as being part of a
tradition of Ottoman arts and letters that did not develop a
third-dimensional, self-refl exive perspective, but rather was
“characterized by a miniaturistʼs fl at depiction of neatly
contoured fi gures that are not quite distinguishable from
each other except in their social functions.” 22 Elsewhere,
referring to the third dimension of interpretation, he states:
“There is no third dimension in any of these narratives,
no obvious distance between the narrator and the narrated
self.” 23 The horizon of identifi cation implied in Kafadarʼs
analysis is a group, social, or corporate identifi cation. If
individuality emerges at all, it is only a partial, half-born
emergence. Pamuk emulates this tradition. By structuring
his novel with this aesthetic guide, Pamuk is coming back
to the overarching problematic of what it means to translate
(convey?) the individual or artist out of society or nation,
out of the restrictions of guild or religious sect. This act
is necessary to manuscript/novel production (doesnʼt the
“author” always emerge at the end of a Pamuk novel?).
Translation intensifi es and multiplies these very
themes, and the process inherently changes the meanings
of texts by placing them in other contexts. Like a trope
whose meaning changes depending on how it is emplotted,
the novel “turns out” new meanings in new Englishlanguage
contexts. The novel teaches us how to read the
illuminated-manuscript-in-words by tempting the reader
with various “third-dimension” or triangulating pointsof-view
and through juxtapositions of fragmented fi rstperson
vignettes, which are open to the readerʼs power of
interpretation. The characters are repeatedly described as
having an awareness of two worlds: they at once look at the
sixteenth century world that they inhabit as well as have
their eye on the “reader,” a marker for current time. The
text has consciousness of the reader. The act of reading, as
58 Translation Review