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Abstract
In this article the Beyoğlu/Pera district, heart of cosmopolitan Istanbul, is conceived as a site of “interculture”, of interaction, involving a nexus of translators and publishers from different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. To explore the making of new culture repertoires replacing those dominant in the early years of the Turkish nation state, the context is set with a brief history of the social/political/cultural change in Istanbul, before and after the 1990s. Here, “interculture” gains urban concreteness, enabling analyses of multiple translating/publishing practices which concern specifically Armenian and Kurdish “minority” cultures and languages of Turkey, as well as Turkish. Discourses are foregrounded to illuminate (a) aspects of the translators'/publishers' habitus regarding current resistance to patterns set by the dominant discourse, and (b) the agents' intentions to work for change in creating new spaces of inter-communication and interaction, opening closed societies and standing against “structured” differences among ethnic and linguistic collectivities that operate in the same area of Istanbul.
Notes on contributors
Şule Demirkol-Ertürk is assistant professor of translation studies at Yeditepe University, Istanbul. Her research interests include translation of urban narratives, translation and the transfer of cultural images, and Turkish literature in translation. She has published articles in English, French and Turkish on the role of literary translation in the creation and circulation of the images of the city of Istanbul. She is also an active translator of literary and scholarly texts from English and French into Turkish.
Saliha Paker is the first professor of translation studies to be appointed in Turkey. In 2008 she retired from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, but still teaches a course in the PhD programme in the same department and continues to serve on PhD dissertation committees. Her research has covered Turkish translation history, with special emphasis on literary-theoretical aspects of translation in the Ottoman period, and the history of Turkish literature in English translation. Her articles have come out in international publications since 1986, and her co-translations of modern Turkish poetry and fiction have appeared in the UK and USA.
Notes
1. In her inspirational study of Kolkata, Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal in Cities in Translation, Sherry Simon (Citation2012) also dwells on the homogenization of Istanbul, in terms of a “duality” brought about by the nationalist pull for a Turkish “monoculture” of the Republic (founded in 1923) away from former Ottoman pluralism and diversity. This, in Simon's view, takes the form of a “dual translation”: of language, from Ottoman (hybridized with Persian and Arabic) into modern Turkish, of a society of multiple ethnic minorities into a nation of dominant Turkish identity (ibid., 156). Thus it “was translated out of its messy imperial multiplicity, away from its past, and given a simpler shape” (ibid.; italics in original). Simon's palimpsest metaphor for Istanbul, Kolkata and Trieste is a powerful one: “translation has been a writing-over, the effacement of the past, the sponging out of competing memories” (ibid.). An aspect that needs to be clarified in the case of Istanbul, is that it defies description as a “dual city” in which “two languages vie for the role of a tutelary language” as in the case of Kolkata, Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal (ibid.). Especially in the case of Istanbul since the nineteenth century, tensions between imperial or republican state policies and diverse ethnic identities/languages may not be easily reduced to the duality of individual ones between Greek and Turkish, Armenian and Turkish or Judeo-Spanish and Turkish.
2. For a full history of Pera, see Millas (Citation2001).
3. The Greeks of Istanbul are called “Rum” in Turkish, “Konstantinoupolites” or simply “Polites” in Greek. İlay Romain Örs refers to them as “Rum Polites”, combining the two terms in Turkish and Greek, and argues that “for the Rum Polites the context of cultural belonging beyond the nation-state is specifically centred on the urban cosmopolitan experience of being from Istanbul” (Örs Citation2006, 81). In our paper, “Greek” refers to the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul and their idiom.
4. Çok Dilli İletişim Merkezi (Multilingual Communication Centre at the School of Journalism, Istanbul University).
5. For a detailed discussion of the Treaty of Lausanne, its interpretation and implementation by Turkey see Oran Citation2007.
6. For example, Armenian newspapers Jamanak/Ժամանակ (1908) and Nor Marmara/Նոր Մարմարա (1941), Greek newspapers Apoyevmatini/Απογευματινή (1925) and Iho/HXΩ (1977), the weekly Jewish newspaper Şalom/שלום(1947), largely in Turkish since 1984, all of which are still running.
7. See “The Greek Turkish Population Exchange”, http://cmes.arizona.edu/sites/cmes.arizona.edu/files/3.%20Case%20study%20-%20Greek%20Turkish%20Population%20Exchange.pdf.
8. This campaign was initiated by the Students' Association of the Law School of the old university known as Darülfünun (today, Istanbul University) at a congress held on 13 January 1928. In a later meeting organized by the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları, founded in 1911 by Ziya Gökalp, the champion of Turkish nationalism), it was decided to put up posters in public spaces and give conferences at schools calling all citizens to speak Turkish in public. Similar campaigns followed not only in Istanbul but also in different regions of the country until the end of the Second World War. Another campaign, started after the military coup of 1960, was quashed soon after (see Bali Citation2006 and Akdoğan Citation2012).
9. See Göktürk, Soysal, and Türeli (Citation2010).
10. The Kurdish languages/dialects, each a separate language divided into sub-dialects according to Ziya Gökalp (Citation1995, 32), are as follows: Goranî, Kirmanckî (Dimilî, Kirdkî, Zazakî), Kurmancî (the one most translated into Turkish), Lorî and Soranî.
11. All translations from Turkish are ours unless otherwise indicated.
12. Diyarbakır is only just beginning to emerge as a centre of Kurdish culture after decades of economic deprivation, sociopolitical and military conflict and emigration to western Turkey, especially to Istanbul.
13. Ottoman Turkish, composed of Turkish, Persian and Arabic lexical and syntactic elements was the language of “Ottoman interculture”, written in the Arabic script. Under the Turkish Republic, the Arabic script was replaced by the Roman alphabet in 1928. The Language Reform which was started in the 1930s, aimed to “purify” Turkish of Persian and Arabic linguistic/literary structures. Contemporary Turkish readers often need intralingual translations in order to understand works originally written in the Ottoman language.