The Translator

ISSN: 1355-6509 (Print) 1757-0409 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrn20

ehnaz Tahir Gralar, Saliha Paker and John

Milton, Tradition, tension and translation in Turkey
Senem ner
To cite this article: Senem ner (2016) ehnaz Tahir Gralar, Saliha Paker and John
Milton, Tradition, tension and translation in Turkey, The Translator, 22:3, 382-386, DOI:
10.1080/13556509.2016.1183181
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2016.1183181

Published online: 23 Jun 2016.

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douard Glissant (as quoted in Sandra Bermanns essay): not knowing the totality is not a
weakness [but] not wanting to know most certainly is (78).

References
Deleuze, G. 1986. Foucault. Paris: Edition de Minuit.
Glissant, . 1990. Potique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard.
Glissant, . 1993. Tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard.
Segalen, V. 2002. Essay on Exoticism. Translated and edited by Yal Rachel Schlick. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Venuti, L. 1995/2008. The Translators Invisibility: A history of translation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Venuti, L. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an ethics of dierence. London: Routledge.

Inger Hesjevoll Schmidt-Melbye

Norwegian University of Science and Technology
inger.hesjevoll.schmidt-melbye@ntnu.no
2016 Inger Hesjevoll Schmidt-Melbye
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2016.1181246

Tradition, tension and translation in Turkey, edited by ehnaz Tahir Gralar,

Saliha Paker and John Milton, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2015,
95.00 (hardback), ISBN 9789027258595, (e-book) ISBN 9789027268471
Tradition, Tension and Translation in Turkey presents an unprecedentedly comprehensive and
substantial analysis of the translational practices and concepts in Ottoman times and modern
Turkey. The volume includes an introduction by the editors which oers a brief outline of the
key stages of Turkish translation history and a detailed account of the current scholarship on
translation in Turkey. The introduction is followed by 14 articles chronologically and thematically organised into three sections: Ottoman Conceptions and Practices of Translation,
Transition and Transformation and The Republican Revolutionary Turn: Ideology and
Politics. As a whole, the book vividly illustrates how, in the Ottoman/Turkish context,
translation has historically and simultaneously been the means, the cause and the result of
continuous change and (trans/re)formation, generating tensions in various aspects of the
literary, cultural and social realms.
One such tension is scrutinised by Saliha Paker in the opening essay of the volume.
Problematising the prevailing scholarly discourse on the imitativeness and uninventiveness
of Ottoman poetry, Paker proposes that a new framework be established for a theory of
Ottoman literary translation in which the Islamic conception of Quran as the Original, the
inimitable poetic text (40) would lie at the heart of the analysis (3132). What renders
Pakers contribution extremely signicant and innovative is her call to recognise the longignored distinction between the Islamic conception of the Quranic Original (as the immutable Word of God) and European conceptions of the original, and thus to rethink the labels
imitative and uninventive associated with Ottoman poetics in order to recognise practices
of creative/inventive mediation as expressed with the notion of telif (creative mediation). This
distinction also underlies her argument that the condemnation of Ottoman poetry as
imitative and uninventive by the pioneers of modern Turkish poetics and New Literature
was made conceptually possible by the new poetics based on the European idea of the
individual genius and original (47), which were defended by the pioneers as they rushed
to cut ties with tradition in an era noted for major attempts at westernisation/modernisation.

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The tension engendered by the Islamic conception of the Original echoes in another
article by Arzu Akbatur, which is an original contribution to the metaphorics of translation.
Taking up tercman (translator), a culture-bound concept in Islamic mysticism, from a
translation studies perspective, Akbatur demonstrates that in Islamic mysticism tercman
stands for both prayer and a person, a saint or dervish, who is a kind of mediator between
God and humans (57), who has the role of a transmitter/mediator between the physical
world and the metaphysical world, between the esoteric and the exoteric and between the
unknown and the known. As a very interesting usage of the concept, Akbatur analyses the
preface of the book titled Fusus al-Hikam by the famous Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi (11651240)
who refers to himself as the mtercim (translator) not the mtehakkim (author) of his own
book, saying that it was given to him by the Prophet Muhammad in a dream (61). Bringing a
fresh dimension to the contemporary discussion on the metaphorics of translation from a
thirteenth-century case, this example illustrates the peculiar conceptualisation of tercman as
the chosen transmitter of divine knowledge, which comes to the translator through revelation. It is also noteworthy that such a culture-bound conceptualisation simultaneously
implies both the empowerment of the translator and his/her nullity as an author against
the power of the divine Original.
As the last contribution in the section on the Ottoman translation history, the article by
Zehra Toska presents a case of imperial patronage and censorship, which is a major tensionproducing factor in the realm of translation. Drawing on an intriguing case of retranslation
commissioned and later banned by Sultan Abdlhamit II, Hulsa-i Hmyunnme (Summary
of the Book for the Emperor), the article displays how the distinction between translation and
non-translation is blurred in a translational practice carried out by Ahmet Midhat, the
powerful/popular author-translator of the period, who, as Toskas analysis shows, boldly
intervened to comment on the political debates of the time and to refer to new value
judgements, concepts, social and political visions originating from the West (84) in his critical
remarks. Ahmet Midhats practices were previously studied by In Bengi ner in her doctoral
thesis (Bengi ner 1990), which is the rst descriptive study on his works carried out within
translation studies. Through the critical analysis of the paratextual elements surrounding the
literary translations of Ahmet Midhat, Bengi ner reconstructed the translational norms in his
translation and re-evaluated translation equivalence by reconceptualising and redening
various practices of translation in the Ottoman context (1988, 1990), drawing attention to
Midhats role as an eloquent mediator between West and East. The eventual ban of Ahmet
Midhats retranslation by Sultan Abdlhamit II is, thus, telling within the broader historical
context of Ottoman westernisation, a painful transition period which gave rise to a wide array
of tensions directly and/or indirectly reected in translational practices in Turkey. Such
tensions pertinent to the transition period and the republican era concern the articles in
the remaining two sections of the volume.
The second section, Transition and Transformation, explores the heavy involvement in
translation of the Turkish Republic as a newly founded nation-state. The article titled German
Academic Culture in Turkish Exile by Azade Seyhan examines the role translation played as a
means of communication as well as a force of intervention (111) within the frame of the
modernisation and westernisation initiatives of the Turkish state. The author argues that, via
the educational activities of the migr professors, Enlightenments fractured critical legacy
(113) was transported to the Turkish system where the act of interpreting enabled a
civilizational survival (113).
The function of translation in the early years of the Turkish republican era is dened by
Seyhan as follows: During these years of momentous transition and transformation, literally
from one civilization to another, translation both in a literal and gurative sense, became a
key pillar of the architecture of modernization (110). In addition to being an insightful grasp

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of translations role in the Turkish case, the above statement also underlines the civilisational
tension inherent in the history of translation in Turkey. This brings to mind a critical approach
previously voiced by Aye Banu Karada regarding the absence of the term/concept civilisation as an explanatory tool in the historical/theoretical research on the relationship between
translation and Turkish modernisation. For Karada, the reason for the ignorance of this
specic concept might be the emphasis on the term/concept culture in the existing studies
that take Itamar Even-Zohars approach as a basis (Karada 2008, 103104), a premise which
attests to another tension in the Turkish context caused by translated theories of translation.
The Turkish nation-states direct involvement in the eld of translation is scrutinised in the
article by ehnaz Tahir Gralar, who focuses on the ve national publishing congresses
held between the years 1939 and 2009 and reveals that the political and cultural roles
translation was given diered historically in accordance with the changes in the Turkish
states culture planning agenda. The rst two congresses that took place in the early
republican era instrumentalised translation as a means of cultural modernization (130)
and the importation of western intellectual culture. This conceptualisation/perception of
translation is perhaps quite similar to the conceptualisation undertaken by the German
Romantics as examined by Antoine Berman (1992). In a completely opposite (though not
surprising) vein, later publishing congresses emphasised the promotion and reinforcement
of Turkish culture (134). They also made a call to translate Turkish cultural products into
foreign languages and thus reversed the desired direction of translation ow, which Tahir
Gralar interprets as Turkeys growing cultural self-condence (125). Her essay is particularly notable as an original account where one can trace how the absence and existence of a
nations self-condence is historically reected in its relationship with translation, a relationship that marks the limit between the domestic and the foreign, the self and the other, and
particularly the east and the west in the present cases under scrutiny.
The tension aroused from the association of the east with the old and the west with the
new, which was reected in the nationalist culture planning endeavours of the Turkish
nation-state, is highlighted in the contribution by zlem Berk Albachten. The article focuses
on the practice of intralingual translations carried out after the Turkish Language Reform and
the change of alphabet from Arabic to Latin script in 1928. The author denes the prevailing
approach for intralingual translations as the replacement of certain words thought to be
old or unacceptable by the current republican ideology by their pure Turkish equivalents
(178). It is noteworthy that in this specic case of intralingual translation, old referred to the
words of Arabic and Persian origin. Such reference illustrates an ideological framework where
Arabic and Persian two epistemes that, together with the Turkish episteme, constituted the
Ottoman interculture as argued by Saliha Paker (49) became foreign and something to be
suddenly puried in parallel with the modern, secular nation-states radical attempts at
erasing the linguistic elements pertaining to and reminiscent of the Ottoman past.
However, as the contribution by Esra Birkan Baydan (Islamic Retranslations of the Western
Classics) demonstrates, what was desired to be erased in the early years of the Republic
struck back in the cultural and ideological environment that emerged (in later years) when a
political party associated with Islamism and political Islam came to power (243), giving rise to
a heated debate on the role/visibility of ideology in translation. Indeed, this ideological
polarisation is foreshadowed in the critical contribution by Yasemin Alptekin. She scrutinises
the clash between the ocial republican ideology and the opposition, focusing on how the
term progressive was rendered or not rendered in the translations of John Deweys 1924
report on Turkish education.
The states approach to translation is discussed in another contribution by rem stnsz,
who provides a comparative look at the translation-related phenomena in the early republican era and the later historical periods through an analysis of the censorship of obscene

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literary translations. Interestingly, stnsz claims that thanks to the transformative role
attributed to translation in culture planning project of the late 1930s and 1940s (229) and
hence to the high status attributed to translation as a tool of cultural progress, the publisher
of the Turkish translation of Pierre Lous Aphrodite: moeurs antiques was deemed not guilty
on a charge of obscenity in the 1930s. In contrast, the publisher of the Turkish translation of
Henry Millers Tropic of Capricorn was found guilty on the same charge in the 1980s, a time
when emphasis was placed on economic liberalism rather than cultural progress (229).
A very interesting study on the complicated relationships among translation, gender and
nationalism and on the role of translation in the construction of gender roles and the history
of sexuality is authored by Mge Iklar Koak. The author examines how the practice of
pseudotranslation was used to produce the then lacking sexual discourse within the Turkish
cultural repertoire. She shows how, through the transgressive practices of the pseudotranslators of the period, womens sexuality was rendered visible in the public sphere where it
had been hidden due to the desexualisation of women during the Turkish nation-building
process, which dened them as the mothers of the nation (214).
As an example from the eld of law, the use of translation for the adoption of western
legal frameworks in the republican era is examined in the article by the late Elif Daldeniz
Baysan, whose contributions to translation studies in Turkey will always be remembered and
treasured. The study surveys the history of patent translation in Turkey with a focus on the
challenges and problems pertaining to the process of the transfer of the patent system into
Turkey. Indeed, translation of western laws was a traditional translational practice that started
in the second half of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, continued into the Turkish
republican era and has been termed lawmaking through translation in a recent study (ner
and Karada 2016).
One of the historical surveys included in the volume is the essay by Ebru Diriker, who
surveys the status of the interpreting profession in imperial and national spatio-temporal
contexts. The authors detailed account demonstrates the intricate link between the multiethnic and multi-lingual structure of the Ottoman Empire, which reigned over three continents for more than 600 years, and the high status of the interpreting profession, the
emergence of new interpreting areas and their professionalisation under the shaping force of
diverse historical, socio-political and even economic developments in the Turkish nationstate. Another survey is authored by Selim Temo Ergl, who examines the translations from
Kurdish literature into Turkish and traces the characteristics pertaining to the processes of
text selection, target language usage and the political repercussions inherent in it. The
author also explores the relationship of the translators to Turkish and Kurdish as two
languages between which an asymmetrical power relation has historically existed and
continues to exist.
The volume closes with the contribution by Arzu Eker Roditakis, who provides a fresh
criticism of Frederic Jamesons concept of national allegory on the grounds that it ignores
translation, showing the strong critical potential of translation studies in terms of deconstructing the well-established notions and concepts used in other elds of social sciences.
The author conducts a comparative analysis of the recontextualisation, reception and asymmetrical representation of two Turkish authors, Orhan Pamuk and Bilge Karasu, and their
works in English. Consequent to the analysis, she contends that the reason underlying Orhan
Pamuks popularity/success is the reception of his works in connection with a broader,
dominant discourse on Turkish cultural identity, which revolves around whether Turkey
belongs to the East or the West, or to both (275) while, strikingly and ironically, the works
of Bilge Karasu lack such popularity/success due to the universality almost all reviewers
see (282) in his works.

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As an invaluable collection for researchers not only from translation studies but also from
the elds of cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, history, law and politics, Tradition,
Tension and Translation in Turkey covers a vast array of translational phenomena dispersed
over a time period of seven centuries and clearly shows that in the Ottoman/Turkish context,
translation has been a realm of ideological polarisation and a battleeld for the clash of the
conservative and the progressive, the secular and the religious, the old and the new and the
east and the west. In general terms, such a situation makes history of translation in Turkey a
history of tension between tradition and change. Capturing a great deal of these tensions as
they are reected in translation, the essays collected in the volume shed light on the
specicities of the translation cases under scrutiny and represent the Turkish translation
tradition in all its richness.
The volume is also strong evidence that translation studies in Turkey is well integrated
into international translation studies research as the scholars in the volume make a very
sound use of the descriptive, target-oriented, functional and systemic method (Snell-Hornby
2006, 49) and other contemporary approaches to translation while integrating their critical/
innovative ideas into the main research methods and frameworks. Last but not least, the
volume reasserts the centrality of translation and the contributive potential of translation
studies to humanities.

References
Bengi ner, I. 1988. The Eloquent Mediator: Ahmed Midhat Efendi. In Vol 5 of Proceedings of the XIIth Congress
of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by R. Bauer, D. Fokkema, and M. De Graat,
388393. Munich: Ludicium Verlag.
Bengi ner, I. 1990. A Re-Evaluation of the Concept of Equivalence in the Literary Translations of Ahmed
Midhat Efendi: A Linguistic Perspective. PhD diss., Hacettepe University.
Berman, A. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by
Stefan Heyvaert. New York, NY: SUNY.
Karada, A. B. 2008. evirinin Tanklnda Medeniyetin Dnm. [Transformation of Civilization in the
Witness of Translation]. stanbul: Diye.
ner, S., and A. Banu Karada. 2016. Lawmaking through Translation: Translating Crimes and Punishments.
Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 24: 319338. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2015.1105829.
Snell-Hornby, M. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Senem ner
stanbul Arel University, stanbul
senemoner@arel.edu.tr
2016 Senem ner
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2016.1183181

Multiple translation communities in contemporary Japan, edited by Beverley

Curran, Nana Sato-Rossberg, and Kikuno Tanabe, New York/Abingdon, Routledge,
2015, 224 pp., 95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-83170-44
One of the curiosities of translation studies most often observed by scholars focusing on
Japanese contexts is just how great the current dearth of international scholarship on
Japanese translation is. This dearth is caused partly by a resistance to the use of theory
within Japan, and is observable across time periods and genres. However, it is often
contemporary contexts where the old, exotic stereotypes are less applicable, that the paucity
of translation research is most easily discernible. Aiming more for volume than scholarly