Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

acknowledged in the narrative, is one of mediating between
two cultural contexts. Pamuk, as author, uses the Ottoman
past to achieve his triangulating perspective, to take a
critical look at the present. By so doing, he is naturally
playing with Orientalist expectations and redirecting them
toward national themes; yet, what is ultimately revealed
in the novel is not an exotic world but a lesson in how to
“read/translate” and understand the other, the “old Turk.”
The other is embedded in the miniature, which on fi rst
glance seems “off” because it lacks a familiar perspective.
Master Osmanʼs lament at the end of the novel, the anxiety
and lament of obscurity, is what Pamuk is writing against:
Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our
world through the illustrations weʼve made wonʼt
understand anything. Desiring to take a closer
look, yet lacking the patience, they might feel the
embarrassment, the joy, the deep pain and pleasure of
observation I now feel as I examine pictures in this
freezing Treasury – but theyʼll never truly know. 24
The melancholy of remaining unknowable permeates the
narrative. The dilemmas experienced by the characters,
issues of style, ideological affront (whether to Islam or
the nation), breaking with aesthetic tradition, money and
fame, family, love, authority, belonging, jealousy, rage,
all relate to present-day Turkey, and specifi cally, Orhan
Pamukʼs world of the Turkish author. The author creates
narrative, the translator recreates and proliferates narrative,
allowing for additional, third dimensional perspectives
or interpretations. In their aesthetic relation to each other,
author and translator transmit knowledge of another
worldview. As for Pamukʼs aesthetic, more than love story,
detective story, philosophy of art, or historical fi ction, itʼs
a narrative of transnational postmodernism that liberates
the author/translator from constraints of modern-day time,
geography, history, and ideology. This allows him to do
what he does best, that is, pen elegies about separation,
lament the loss of golden ages, interrogate identity, valorize
Istanbul as the cosmopolitan site of narrative production
– above all emphasizing internationality. For at the end of
every Pamuk novel we come face to face with the authoras-translator
himself, who seems to reaffi rm the fact that
the work of narrative transmission is cooperative and ongoing,
vital and never fi nished.
Notes
1 Nietzsche, F. (1982/1954). “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-
Moral Sense.” The Portable Nietzsche. New York, Vintage.
2 Biguenet, J. and R. Schulte, Eds. (1989). The Craft of
Translation. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, p. 1.
3 See Lacan, J. (1977). “The Mirror State,” Ecrits: A
Selection. New York, W.W. Norton & Co.
4 Apparently, it is New York Times Book Review protocol to
include one adjective or modifi er to describe a translation
under review. Richard Eder used “fl uid grace” to describe
the English of MNR. See Eder, R. (Sept. 2, 2001). “My
Name is Red: Heresies of the Paintbrush.” The New York
Times Book Review. New York.
5 A typical Pamuk sentence in its original syntax (hyphens
indicate suffi xes): “Book of Kings poet Firdusi, Ghazni-to
came Shah Mahmud-ʼs palace-of the poets-by a provincial
as belittled-being-after its fi rst three lines very diffi cult a
rhyme-with fi nished-that a quatrain no one complete-couldthat
its last line uttered-just-when-he I there, Firdusi-ʼs
caftan on-was-I.” (And in its fi nal version: “I appeared in
Ghazni when Book of Kings poet Firdusi completed the
fi nal line of a quatrain with the most intricate of rhymes,
besting the court poets of Shah Mahmud, who ridiculed
him as being nothing but a peasant.”)
6 For one perspective on this aspect of the Cultural
Revolution, see Lewis, G. (1999). The Turkish Language
Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
7 Updike, J. (Sept. 3, 2001). “Murder in Miniature: A
Sixteenth-Century Detective Story Explores the Soul of
Turkey.” The New Yorker, p. 95.
8 Pamuk, O. (2001), trans. E. Göknar. My Name is Red.
New York, Knopf, p. 97, 101.
9 Toward the end of the novel the murderer is decapitated,
though his head continues to narrate, describing what it
sees.
10 Pamuk, O. (2001), trans. E. Göknar. My Name is Red.
New York, Knopf, p. 43.
11 I have taught My Name is Red three times in seminars on
Ottoman Identity and Cultural History at Duke University.
The novel is both a great challenge and full of provocative
resonances with new scholarship on the Ottoman Empire.
12 I use this term “meta-historical” in allusion to the
theorization of Hayden White, who analyzes the function
of linguistic structures in historical narratives to uncover
Translation Review 59