Photo supplied by Maureen Freely
Maureen Freely has been translating in one way or another since the age of eight, when she moved with her family from Princeton, New Jersey to Istanbul, Turkey. Fulfilling a promise to his wife that they would see the world, Freely’s father—the physicist and, later, writer John Freely—took a teaching position in Istanbul and moved his family across the Atlantic in 1960 as the Cold War raged on. In the summer months when Freely’s international school was not in session, her family travelled by sea to cities on the shores of the Mediterranean. Each new boat with its maze of passageways posed a new adventure for Freely and her younger sister. The two played a game they called “Get Lost”, in which the girls would wander the hallways with no destination in mind until eventually, and seemingly miraculously, they ended up back where they began. As I read Freely’s novels, journalism and translations in preparation for this interview, I could not help but return again and again to this image of young Freely intentionally adrift—in the open sea, no less. While that would have been a terrifying prospect for almost anyone else, it perfectly encapsulates Freely’s willingness to “get lost” in the stories of others, which stems from a hunger for the unknown.
Ten years after moving to Istanbul, Freely returned to the United States to attend Harvard University. She has since worked and written between the United States, Turkey and England. Freely has delved into many forms of creative writing throughout her career, although first and foremostly she is the author of seven novels. Her childhood spent in Istanbul has had a clear influence on her work. Freely’s second novel The Life of the Party (Jonathan Cape, 1985) is a satire detailing a group of bohemian academics living abroad in Istanbul at the end of the sixties. Most recently, she has published Enlightenment (Overlook Press, 2008) and Sailing Through Byzantium (Linen Press, 2013), the first two books of a trilogy set in Turkey during the Cold War. Freely has also written a number of non-fiction books and essays, including her memoir about translation Angry in Piraeus (Sylph Editions, 2015), which explores her search for a sense of belonging while living and communicating between distinct linguistic, literary and geographic places.
As a journalist, Freely has written for publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books and Granta. Her articles have advocated for women’s rights in Turkey and for freedom of the press for Turkish journalists in a country where at the time of writing 90 percent of the state’s media is under state control. As an activist, she has come under brutal attack in the Turkish media. In the end, though, her intimate knowledge of the importance of freedom of expression and the great personal risks of speaking out against censorship served her well in her role as President of English PEN from 2014–2016, and in the five years following as Chair of Trustees.
Freely is possibly best known as a prolific English translator, specifically for her translations of Orhan Pamuk; these clearly played a central role in cementing Pamuk’s global reputation preceding the announcement of his Nobel Prize, which the Nobel committee awarded in 2006 for “discover[ing] new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures” in the “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city”. Freely has translated five of Pamuk’s novels including Snow (Faber, 2004), Istanbul: Memories and the City (Vintage, 2003) and Museum of Innocence (Alfred Knopf, 2009). In addition to Pamuk, Freely has translated the works of a number of Turkish authors such as human rights lawyer Fethiye Çetin’s memoir My Grandmother (Verso, 2012), which acted as a major catalyst in Turkey’s reckoning with the Armenian Genocide.
In 2012, Freely was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She currently lives in Bath and is a Professor at Warwick University. I had the honour of corresponding with Freely over email to discuss, among many other topics, her childhood growing up between languages, the specific intricacies and challenges of translating Turkish, as well as the two novels she has been working on recently. We also spoke about the ways in which citizens can begin to confront their society’s erased histories by engaging with language and literature.
—Rose Bialer
Growing up in Turkey, you understood from a young age that speaking about certain topics in public was dangerous and possibly deadly. Do you believe that being raised in an environment of self-censorship changed your relationship with language itself?
I imagine that all children everywhere learn that there are things they can say at home that must never be uttered outside. But for an American child in 1960s Istanbul, the stakes were unusually high. We were foreigners, we were guests in this country, and if I said whatever came into my head, as was certainly my habit at the supper table, we’d be out on the next plane. So if I wanted to ask why there were portraits of Ataturk on every official wall, and statues of Ataturk on every patch of green, or why the whole nation came to a standstill at 9:05 am on the 10 November, to mark the exact moment of his death, I was to hold my question until no one could overhear us. This was not to say I could expect a full answer: Turkey was as much of a puzzle to my parents as it was to me. If it’s not quite as much of a puzzle to me now, it’s thanks to those who have shared their secret histories with me on the page or behind closed doors. So yes, my Istanbul childhood did change my relationship with language. There were the public utterances, and there were the trusting whispers. The former, deadly boring, but to be endured. The latter, endlessly fascinating. It was from the whisperers that I learned Turkish and the true value of words.
Though you had already been translating since childhood, your first formal experience was in your mid-twenties when you worked at Amnesty International translating letters of imprisoned Turkish citizens. How did this experience inform your career as a writer?
It changed everything. What I read in these letters was entirely new to me. I’d been living mostly outside Turkey, but even on my return visits, no one talked to me of such things, I suppose because those who did know the truth did not feel they could trust me with it. Or perhaps they assumed that I had read all about it in The New York Times. Hah! All I could find in the Anglophone press when I went hunting was the official line about the need to restore order and save Turkey from Communism. My first book-length translation—an account of a year in a women’s political prison—told a very different story. But even the most politically sympathetic publishers could not see a market for it. What I learned from this was that it was not always necessary to take draconian measures to enforce an official lie. During the Cold War, the so-called free world could depend on most people not caring enough to look beyond it. Every word I’ve ever put on a page—as a novelist, journalist and translator—has tried in some way to illuminate that minefield of silences and blind spots.
I imagine that it must have been a strange adjustment to return to the United States as a young adult and see that many of your peers did not know what was unfolding in Turkey and Greece. What was that like?
I don’t think I ever expected them to know the first thing unless they had grown up abroad like me or come from families with connections to that part of the world. Turkey in particular was invisible in the West. There was next to no tourism in those days. So I could expect jokes about turkeys and questions about how I’d got to and from school—on a camel? Anyone who knew more I could safely assume worked for the State Department or was a spook. My main problem on arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in September 1970 was Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had no television in Turkey back then, and whatever had not been fit to print in Time Magazine and Newsweek was news to me. So just imagine what it was like to join the student revolution in medias res—to be the only one on Cambridge Common who was not wearing jeans, work boots, and a red bandanna. I did assimilate over time—it was at university that I discovered my own America, and the friends I made there became friends for life. But in their eyes, and as much as they indulge me, I’m still a bit puzzling. Not un-American exactly. Just hard to place.
When you grow up straddling two cultures it can be difficult to be fully accepted into either: you live as both an insider and an outsider. How did that present itself growing up in Istanbul? Did going to an American school add a different layer to that experience?
Oh, but there were more than two cultures. And each culture was riven with division. The American community school I attended until age thirteen, for instance. It was connected to the American college where my father taught but most pupils were children of American missionaries, American consular officials, and American business executives, and one thing that was impressed on us at home was that they were most definitely not our sort of American. We were not holy like the missionaries, or blindly patriotic cold warriors like the rest of them. Even amongst us faculty children, there were tensions. Yes, our parents were all liberal, left of centre, critical of American policy, and widely read. But my father came from a Catholic Irish-American working-class family and was the first in his family to attend a (lacklustre) college. Most of his colleagues at Robert College were Ivy League graduates—rockjaw WASPs, as my father tagged them—and that social barrier took some years to erode.
In the meantime, we were seen to be all of a piece. All Americans. All foreigners. At the exceptionally wonderful girls’ lycée I went on to attend, there were, during my time there, just three of us foreigners. The rest were Turkish, but again, so many different kinds of Turkish. It took us foreigners a long time to read those differences. And I have so much more to read and understand. A lifetime wouldn’t be enough.
I would love now to speak about Orhan Pamuk and your relationship with him both as a friend and a collaborator. How did your working relationship first begin?
Orhan’s brother was a friend from my lycée years. Then I went off to Harvard, and he went off to Yale, so we saw a bit of each other in America, too. But as was so often the case in the years before the internet, we soon lost touch. It was a good fifteen years later that I happened on a novel by his kid brother on an Independent on Sunday bookshelf. I asked to review it, out of curiosity more than anything else. To my shock and amazement, it turned out to be one of the best books I’d ever read. Over the years that followed, I reviewed Orhan and also interviewed him many more times, and whenever I visited Istanbul, of course we met up. Then one day he wrote to say that he was having trouble with his translator and would I translate Snow? At first I baulked at the idea, but then, because I loved the book and had some ideas about how I might bring what I loved about it into English—but also because I had a lifetime habit of jumping into the deep end just because it seemed like a good idea—I said yes. We worked together closely from the outset. This was my idea. I wanted him to understand what I was trying to do and veto my more creative solutions if he thought they went too far. And also I wanted him to correct my mistakes. That led to many fascinating arguments about the difference between a mistake and an interpretation.
What is the difference between a mistake and an interpretation?
Language has been subject to sustained political control in Turkey. Add to that the usual and utterly justifiable tensions around foreign intervention, both political and cultural. Enter the translator, who is by definition a jobbing orientalist. At the best of times, Orhan and I could measure the difference between a mistake and an interpretation as fellow writers. At the worst of times, when the glare from his rising star grew too bright, it got more complicated. He had to be seen to be in charge, and with good reason. But I’d prefer to remember the happy times, with a story about the first sentence of Istanbul: Memories and the City. It was a very long sentence, making full and brilliant use of the possibilities that Turkish offers. The gist of it is that Orhan at a very young age imagines he has a double living in another part of the city. The punchline—about the double—arrives at the very end of that very long sentence. In an early effort, I divided the sentence with a semicolon, with the first part of the sentence ending in the young Orhan’s discovery that he was not alone. Orhan told me that this could not work because, as a young child in a busy communal household, he had no understanding of privacy, let alone of being alone. Once again, an education.
Did you know Orhan at all during your lycée years? What was your impression of him?
Orhan and I are exact contemporaries. Yes, he is six weeks older than me, but still. Our sister and brother lycées had dances, but boys our age were considered too immature for us, so at dances and elsewhere we were paired with boys two years older. That’s more or less how I met his brother. Orhan didn’t figure in my teenage universe, but as a foreign girl walking up the same hill each afternoon as all those boys were descending, I was very visible. So in the usual way of things, he saw a lot more of me than I saw of him. But oh, how the tables turned! In later years, this gave us both cause to laugh.
What was it like collaborating with Orhan as his translator? I know you had a close working relationship.
I would send him a finished draft and, after he had gone through it on his own, we would go through it together, line by line. I might almost say we argued our way through it. But these were wonderful arguments, descending more often than not into laughter. During the first four books together, each one was an education.
Translation is already a very immersive and, at times, intense experience. However, on top of that, the subject material you were translating in Pamuk’s novels seemed to mirror reality, often in frightening ways. How did you navigate the merging between your translation work and your lived experience?
It was quite a shock! I’d assumed I’d be invisible, safe in my wing chair in Bath, seeing more of my family and better able to arrange my time. But I was only into the third or fourth chapter of Snow when an ultra-secularist tabloid ran a false story about me. Turkey was on fire about headscarves that year—all women wearing them having been banned from public buildings, including universities—and this tabloid had me shaking my fist at the shameless fathers who forced headscarves on their daughters. Thereafter I was bombarded with hate mail from an ultra-Islamist tabloid. They had questions for me. And they were almost word for word the questions that the Islamist assassin in the chapter I was translating had been asking his victim, just before taking out his gun. That was just the beginning, of course. I was still safe in Bath. In later years, I ended up in quite a few places where I felt and was unsafe. But by then I was angry enough to think it worth the risk.
There is this wonderful scene in your memoir about translation, Angry in Piraeus, where you describe a moment which happened when you were nine years old where your father asked you to translate the phrase “lying-cheating-bastard-son-of-a-bitch” to the taxi driver who tried to overcharge your family on vacation to Piraeus. Instead of relaying the offensive message, you say to the taxi driver, “My father is very angry.” You write about that moment, “I have lost count of the number of times I have felt the same way I did that night, caught between two angry parties and two sets of rules: seeing danger closing in on me and searching for the words to diffuse it.”
It sounds like a terrible life! But I have come to understand that all the most important conversations happen in this liminal space, if you can learn to understand the tensions, transcend the barriers they create. Those of us who have grown up between two cultures or amongst many must master such skills, and though you might say that we end up going back and back to those liminal spaces to replay traumas that still consume us, you could also say we congregate in such places because we know we have something to give. For me, one of those places has been English PEN. During my almost eight years as chair or president, we were again and again caught in the middle of politically charged controversies that we had in no way invited. But as a fellow trustee kept reminding me, this is what we’re here for. This is where we live. Our job is to create a space for reasoned conversation.
With Orhan, I know you two had differences, for example, in how you remembered Istanbul as a child, though it was technically the same Istanbul since you grew up in the same city during the same time. Was it difficult to reconcile the differences in your interpretations of the same city when translating his work?
I would say instead that it is thanks to Orhan that I found my way back to my childhood understanding of our shared city. A foreigner does not belong, and must at some time depart. This I did. But then, of course, I went back and back. It was a very happy time, translating Orhan’s memories of the Istanbul he knew as a boy. In the interstices were so many glimpses of my own. But he was a child of the Kemalist bourgeoisie. I lived amongst Istanbul’s occasionally whispering minorities. Amongst those, I count not just the religious minorities but the writers and artists from all of Turkey’s peoples who became our lifelong friends. In the decade between the 1960 and 1971 coups, we lived a charmed life on the shores of the Bosphorus, which was never black and white for me, as it was so famously for Orhan. I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space. I suppose you could say that my escape from the spell began there. I was already working on a novel set on that campus during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had been refusing to come to life. But now I tried a few tricks I’d learned from Orhan to enact my own counter-spell. And slowly the Istanbul of my childhood memories came back to me, in gorgeous if also terrifying technicolour.
You have moved on from translating Pamuk’s work to translating the novels of Turkish authors who are no longer living. Was that a conscious decision?
In part, it definitely was. My fifth translation for Orhan was not a happy experience. For a time I thought I might be done with translation altogether. But then there were offers I could not bear to turn down. Almost all of these were classics that should have been translated many, many decades ago. A few were by contemporary writers who either did not involve themselves at all or were extraordinarily polite. And at last my wing chair and I had peace!
What made the fifth translation so difficult?
Orhan had lost all privacy by the time he sat down to write The Museum of Innocence. There were hate campaigns raging on account of that one sentence he uttered in the presence of a Swiss journalist, alluding to what he did not call the Armenian genocide. He was put on trial for insulting Turkishness. A year later, he won the Nobel Prize. Few in Turkey knew what to make of that. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone had an interest in the translators who had introduced Orhan’s books to the West. As his English translator, I was of particular interest. What might my true intentions be? After all, I’d grown up on the campus of an American school that had, since its foundation 150 years earlier, been turning its students’ gaze to the West. It was known that Orhan and I worked together closely. In fact, what this meant was that we would go through my draft translation from start to finish, sentence by sentence. But the rumour mill soon had it that he was bringing me his Turkish draft, and taking instruction from me about how to rewrite. The Museum of Innocence was his refuge during those terrible years. He wanted his English translation to be as close as possible to an exact replication. He also wanted it to be known that he was in complete control of the operation. I understand why he felt that way. But in my view, it was an impossible dream.
I have spoken to translators who have translated the work of authors with a completely different background from their own, as well as translators who share much in common with the author, including gender identity, sexuality, and the city they reside in. So I am curious to know what your thoughts are, from your personal experience, on how the relationship with the author’s identity affects your experience translating? Or does it at all?
Everything you know of writing and the world, everything you know of the author and their country and their language and your own, you take into a translation. That’s what makes the work so interesting and so hugely challenging—how to draw from those legacies to navigate the liminal space through which you travel with every new sentence. A translation, in my view, is ephemeral. Unlike the original text, it can be replaced. What is precious is what stays with me; what I’ve learned through the close reading of a text that translation demands; what I’ve seen and heard while inhabiting another’s imagined space. I do think it important that we who translate, and especially we who translate from non-Western and marginalized languages into English, should be doing what we can to support emerging translators who have more to bring to the work than we might. But no matter what we bring, we all have that politically charged liminal space to negotiate. We still have to be true to the art and truth we see in the text. We still have to shepherd it into a language and a culture and a readership that will struggle to understand it. And when we have given it our best, always knowing that we shall in many ways have failed, we need to sit back and share notes, as we are doing here. Yes, it’s important for publishers to be more mindful in their choice of translators. But it’s even more important for us translators to reflect on what we do, and what we might do better.
I am curious about the specific challenges of translating Turkish into English.
Hmmm . . . Let’s see. Turkish is an agglutinative language. A root noun can carry six, seven, eight suffixes, which must come in a set order, with vowels that harmonize with the last vowel in the root noun. There is one word for he, she and it, and a preference for the passive voice. In written Turkish particularly, there is a fondness for verbal nouns, and a stacking up of clauses that begin with verbal nouns that can incorporate both active and passive voices. So not just “the doing of”. Also “the having been done”. A complete sentence can have a subject but does not need it. The verb, which comes at the very end, can often take the sentence in an unexpected direction. The linguistic engineering that began with the Language Revolution almost a hundred years ago and continues to this day has not just shrunk Turkish dictionaries: it has politicized word choice. Use one word for red, and you’re secularist. Use another word, and you’re a reactionary. What no one has been able to touch are the beautiful grammatical structures of Turkish, which allow for long sentences that flow like water in a mountain stream. In English, with its need to know the who, what, why, where, when, and its very different grammatical structures, which do not allow for clauses to hang unmodified in midair, staying too close to the Turkish structures can result in a sentence that calls to mind an avalanche of boulders. So it’s not so much a question of stretching the Turkish language. It’s a question of listening to the Turkish text and hearing it deeply, and trying to figure out what techniques the author used to create that artistic effect, and then working out a way to recreate that same artistic effect in English, in a passage as close as it can possibly be to a literal translation.
Throughout your career, you have alternated between journalism and writing novels. Would you say your fiction and non-fiction writing influence each other? Where does translation fit in?
Everything I do has a way of feeding into everything else. In the years when I made a living as a freelance journalist, I was often told that whatever it was I wanted to do was not a story. Instead of giving up, I turned those stories into books. Sometimes they began as real-life investigations, only to turn into novels. I was halfway through one such book when I first began to translate Orhan. It was inspired by a political murder in Istanbul in the early 1970s in which a number of my contemporaries had been implicated. But I couldn’t get any of my Turkish characters to confide in me. I remember my husband suggesting to me that it could be helpful to spend a year inside a Turkish novel—that it might give me some insights. This it did, and so too did the political intrigues that I either got pulled into or willingly plunged into during the years that followed.
In any event, by the time I returned to my novel I didn’t need my Turkish characters to confide in me. I could work things out on my own.
There is also the question of language and form. I published two novels before plunging into journalism. So I had very different ideas about what made a story a story, and how it could and should be told. But like all those doing my kind of journalism—columns and features and opinion pieces—I developed a voice identifiably mine. I thought of it as the voice you might use if the person sitting next to you in the dentist’s office strikes up a conversation: friendly and lightly confiding, but never too intimate. I was so sick and tired of that voice after a while that I sat down and wrote a gothic novel. Later, I got tired of that and all my other voices. It was a relief to be attempting translations that were not just in someone else’s voice but were also stretching the English language to its limits. I became much more attuned to the power of the word through translation. Not just the meanings, but the music and emotional weight.
So much of your mission as both a writer and a translator has been dedicated to giving a voice to Turkey’s erased histories. I understand that this has led you to confront your own. Can you tell me about this process and how your new novels are working to unearth the implications that might lie in uncomfortable truths?
As a Christian child in Istanbul, I’d heard a great many stories about the 1915 genocide from the Armenians who dared to whisper in our midst. And because my family spent every summer in Greece, I knew about the millions of Anatolian Greeks who’d also been slaughtered, deported or chased into the sea, both before and after the three-year conflict that the Turks call the War of Independence and the Greeks call the Catastrophe. I first became involved in the efforts inside Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian genocide when Orhan was hate-campaigned and then prosecuted for drawing attention to it (without actually using the word) in an interview with a Swiss journalist in 2005. Many of those most actively involved in this campaign were either my old classmates or my sister’s. A few of these were descended from some of the perpetrators. I found that interesting.
What impressed me most were the memoirs, biographies and oral histories about Anatolia’s Islamicized Armenians. Together they presented a powerful challenge to official history. I translated three of them. By the time I was done, I had been reading in and around the subject for about fifteen years, and I had questions. Why so much oral history on the victims of the genocide? Why so little on the beneficiaries? There are in fact some excellent history books on this subject now. But little, if anything, on its continuing legacy. I set about writing a novel tracing the history of a post-Ottoman family that owes its prominence in the Republic to stolen Armenian money.
I have parked this novel for the time being because I still want to live. It was, in any event, while I was doing my research for this novel that I happened on accounts of Near East Relief, the huge humanitarian effort launched by Americans just following the Ottoman defeat in the Great War. Istanbul, or Constantinople as it was then, had served as its launchpad. The American campus on which I had grown up was one of its way stations. And yet I had never once heard Near East Relief mentioned. I wrote a novel to find out why. And now I have new questions, which have taken me back into non-fiction. Watch this space!
That is very fascinating because while the United States government quietly spearheaded this humanitarian effort, it wasn’t until 2019 that congress voted to recognize the Armenian genocide. Why this strange secrecy that lasted a century? If you could tell us just a bit of your theory.
Actually, it wasn’t quiet. It was headline news from start to tragic finish. And although those on the board of Near East Relief were closely allied with President Wilson, it wasn’t taxpayers’ money. It was churchgoers, charity workers, journalists and movie stars who raised the hundred million dollars that went into NER coffers. It was not hard to keep the story in the news, because between 1919 and 1923, these thousand relief workers kept finding themselves in the midst of new wars.
Meanwhile the US High Commissioner back in Constantinople—controlled in those years by the British, the French and the Italians—was playing a double game. Charged with protecting the relief effort, he was also secretly allying himself with Mustafa Kemal’s Nationalists, who were holed up in the new, yet-to-be-recognized capital of Ankara. After the Nationalists pushed the Greek army into the sea in the autumn of 1923, the NER had to pack its bags and move to Greece, Syria and the Lebanon, where many of its relief workers remained for some decades, caring for the millions of Anatolian Christians who were kicked out with them. America became the great champion of the Turkish Republic on the world stage, busily erasing all memory of its failed relief effort. Robert College and the school known as the American College for Girls when I attended it were in a bit of a tight spot, too, as both had served as staging and training posts during the NER years. Their two presidents were genuine in their hopes for the new republic, but they also had cause to make no mention of the Armistice years, as we now call them. Hence the silence.
While I was reading the introduction to your translation of My Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin, I learned about—for the first time, I admit—the Language Revolution in Turkey: a patriotic reform launched in the early years of the Republic that has resulted in a shrinking of Turkey’s “official” vocabulary by sixty percent. How does this obfuscation of language and a country’s written history mirror the Turkish government’s role in releasing their history? How do its citizens combat their disappearing language?
Some old words are seeping back, for a variety of lovely and unlovely reasons. But mostly, citizens who were already speaking Turkish at home were never in combat. Much of the change was effected through the state-allied media and the tightly controlled national curriculum. And its success was most evident in public discourse. Privately and socially, there was a great deal of creative expression—not to defy the state but simply for the joy of expression. Lots of wonderful new figures of speech. If you’re looking for defiance, though, you need to look no further than Turkey’s two Kurdish languages, Zaza and Kurmancî. Schools in Kurdish areas are heavily policed, with classmates being encouraged to inform on each other, to the degree that it is not uncommon to hear of a child who never spoke to their Zaza- or Kurmancî-speaking mother, for fear of being caught. Both languages were banned after the 1980 coup. Some language rights were recently restored, only to be policed, sanctioned and criminalized by other means. In spite of which, yes, the Kurdish languages are still very much alive. We could not say the same for Greek and Armenian and Ladino. The minorities of Istanbul sometimes spoke these languages in public when I was a child, in spite of the motto: "Citizen, Speak Turkish!". But after the various political upheavals of the past half century, most of those remaining save their family languages for home.
I am fascinated now to shift the conversation to some of these citizens who happen to be brilliant contemporary authors and their contributions to Turkish literature. Orhan Pamuk is the only author from Turkey who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature to date, and by default, can be viewed by outsiders as this singular author representing the entire country. I believe this can be dangerous. I’d love to hear what you think. What (and who) else have we been missing?
There’s so much coming out of Turkish into English these days, I am happy to say. It’s never enough, but the bookshelves are filling up. There is, after all, a century of untranslated modern Turkish literature to draw from. Start with the poets? First, the great Nâzım Hikmet and then Orhan Veli, Rıfat Ilgaz, Cemal Süreya, Lale Müldür and Küçük İskender. And take it from there. It is such a rich tradition. There is so much more to savour that is already out there in translation. As for fiction—why not begin with Ferit Edgü, whose extraordinary ode to the Kurds of the Southeast is soon to be published by The New York Review of Books? You might also travel back in time to read some of the twentieth-century greats—Tanpınar, Sabahattin Ali, Sait Faik, Orhan Kemal, Bilge Karasu and Yaşar Kemal—returning to the present for Hasan Ali Toptaş, Sema Kaygusuz, Ece Temelkuran and Aslı Erdoğan. And not to forget the new wave of Turkish or Turkish-heritage authors writing in English. You’ve heard of Elif Shafak, of course. And there is the one and only Elif Batuman and the wonderful Ayşegül Savaş. I spent much of the pandemic translating three works by women who were either partly or entirely erased from the canon and have been brought back into the world by Turkish feminist scholars. The first was Suat Derviş, who wrote gothic social realism in the early decades of the Republic. The last was Tezer Özlü, whose circles in bohemian Istanbul intersected with my own. But the writer who saw me through the worst days of lockdown was Sevgi Soysal, whose memoir of a political prison was the first book I ever translated, and whose novel inspired by her experience of internal exile I first tried to place with a publisher forty-five years ago. It has aged so well. Too well. Its portrait of Turkey’s divisions is as true of today as of the time in which it was set.
Looking now at Turkish women in translation, let me also applaud the networks of feminist scholars who have brought so many erased writers back into circulation. Without them we would not be able to read these writers in Turkish, let alone in translation. Change only happens if it is happening at all points of the journey.
