Impossible optimisms? Translating Turkish modernities into the Meta-terranean

Abstract

This essay explores the potential for both transcultural thinking and methodological diversity in translation studies through a discussion of three twentieth-century Turkish cultural figures: national leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, revolutionary poet Nâzım Hikmet and openly gay-identified filmmaker Ferzan Özpetek. In drawing out and reexamining the possible textual points of communication that link them, as well as the divergent models of modernity, masculinity, linguistic invention and creativity that set them apart, the discussion thus reengages with the ever-present possibility for a decentered, multiple and migrant “Meta-terranean” translational culture: one that complicates present understandings of fixed territorial divisions, gender identities, and linguistic zones and renews the potential for alternative conduits for communication across space, time and cultural difference.

Keywords:

• Mediterranean studies
• Turkish modernities in translation
• Meta-terranean
• Kemal Atatürk
• Nâzım Hikmet
• Ferzan Özpetek

Notes

1. Other scholars have already pointed out how this reflection on Heraclitus is also in part a self-reflection, present in Hikmet's work since his student days in Moscow, where he wrote “Moskova'da Heraklit'i Düsünüs” [“Thinking of Heraclitus in Moscow”] (in Göksu and Timms 1999, 68). This translation is by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, whose importance in popularizing Hikmet's work both in the US and internationally has been huge, despite recent criticism that the poems they selected for inclusion may have served to depoliticize his work (Ergil 2008).

2. Hikmet's own thoughts on the making of a good translation are outlined, if briefly, in Tahir Gürçağlar's recent book on translation in Turkey: “critical of the principle of fluency in translations […] he pointed out that he did not wish to read a translated novel as if it were originally written in Turkish, but rather wanted to feel the period and the nationality the author belonged to through the translation […] furthermore, he defended literalism in the translation of foreign phrases” (2008, 136). This literalism is what can be said to characterize Lussu's translation of Hikmet's poetry: a poetic style that retains both the meaning and colloquial free-verse flow of the original, yet is still punctuated by words from other languages and cultures. For to what one territorial configuration can Hikmet's work be said to belong at the end of his international and extensively translated poetic career? Turkey proper, or the Soviet Union, with or without its Cold War satellites? The “international working class” and its ostensibly “universally translatable” ideological message of revolution, or “the whole world”, complete with the underlying presumption that a literary message can somehow affix itself to the entire surface of the planet, to say nothing of its late twentieth-century cosmonautical excursions into outer space? How might we reconcile ourselves to the fact that Hikmet's favorite translation was quite possibly in a language he did not know, made by a self-styled translator who admittedly did not know his language either? Or that Lussu's translations continue to be among the most widely published, quoted and appreciated to this day? Bearing in mind the impossibility of territorial definitions, will objections to the criteria of disciplinary methodology ultimately be accommodated in the ever-narrowing discussion initiated by Holmes on the “name and nature of translation studies”, or will they be rejected out of hand? And if so, by whom, and perhaps even more importantly, for whose political and academic benefit?

3. “Non conosco una parola di turco e non so quasi niente della letteratura turca. Ma posso affermare, onestamente, di conoscere a fondo Hikmet, tutta la sua produzione poetica, il suo mondo ideologico, etico, estetico e psicologico, le esperienze che l'hanno formato, gli autori che lo interessavano, la sua città, la sua famiglia, i suoi amici e nemici. Sono stata pi[ugrave] volte in Turchia, e qualsiasi turista colto mi direbbe che ne so pochissimo. Ma io ho veduto altre cose, che un turista non vedrebbe, seguendo gli itinerari non ufficiali di questo poeta rivoluzionario che preferiva definirsi prima rivoluzionario e poi poeta.”

4. “[Münevver e Mehmet] erano ufficialmente dichiarato ostaggi. Una cosa ben strana, per un popolo che invocava le leggi civili. D'altra parte, se oggi abbiamo sindaci che tolgono le panchine dai parchi pubblici perché ci si siedono gli extracomunitari, o mettono una taglia sugli albanesi che non hanno i documenti in regola, dobbiamo dirlo anche noi che abbiamo delle leggi un po' arretrate, no?”

5. “So sind also die deutsch-türkischen Enkel Hikmets zu völlig neuen Ufern aufgebrochen. Ihr Ansatz ist losgelöst von ideologisierend-internationalen oder mystifizierend-nationalen Elementen. Stattdessen sind sie unbefangen und kreativ und schaffen mit ihren Werken ein neues Genre, das in seiner Originalität aus der grauen Masse der sogenannten Migrationsliteratur heraussticht.”

6. The translators for this volume are listed as: Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, “Biographie” (30–89); Hasan Gureh, “Un tournant dans la poésie turque” (196–7); Jacques Lacarrière, “Autour de cinq poèmes” (212–21); Mehmet H. Dogan, “Le poète de son époque” (222–9); Charles Dobzynski, “Une poétique de la limpidité” (230–3); Güzin Dino, “Une poétique politique” (234–9).