In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means

MAUREEN FREELY

The Museum of Innocence is (among many other things) an ode to a particular form of Turkishness. Its characters belong to their time and place and no other; every significant object is meticulously named and catalogued. The hero, who is also the curator of the museum, is aware that foreigners and future generations might not “read” the objects (or indeed the story that connects them) as he does, so he pauses from time to time to offer naïve anthropological descriptions of strange and puzzling customs. Contemporary Turkish readers will have no trouble reading between the lines of these sweet but troubled asides, for they play on long-standing national anxieties about “how the world sees us,” offering an elegant and understated riposte to the distorting Western gaze. They will also be well versed in the tradition that sits at the heart of the book: the transmission of meaning through gesture, expression, and the artful arrangement of symbolic objects. They will enjoy the way Pamuk evokes this silent code, even as he breaks its golden rule by putting it into words.

Most importantly, Turkish readers will understand in the most visceral way how and why the novel refuses the marginalizing labels accorded to their history and culture by most of the rest of the world, and most particularly in the West. The Museum of Innocence refuses to see itself through Western eyes. It claims its place at the center of its world: it aspires to permanence in a real space beyond the words and the story. It is a house full of objects that carry the past inside them. The objects are there not just to illustrate one man’s story, but to invite reader-visitors to immerse themselves so deeply into his world that they dream the same dreams. As our naïve hero tells his respectful chronicler, the novelist Orhan Pamuk, he hopes that visitors to his museum will find their dreams “merging with ours.” He takes issue with what the young boy says about foreign readers at the end of Snow—that they cannot “understand us from afar.” This, Kemal, the curator, innocently suggests, is a problem you can solve by cutting out the distance. “Visitors to our museum and people who read our book will understand us,” he says. It is never clear if his chronicler agrees with him or simply wishes it were so.

How many of these subtly layered meanings will fall by the wayside when the novel goes out into the world, to be translated into more than sixty languages? Should its translators ignore the competing meanings that Turkish and foreign readers will impose on it? Do they have a duty, once the book has been published, to provide some sort of context—or should they bow out graciously, reminding themselves that no translator and indeed no writer can control for meaning, let alone context?

My aim here is to cast some light on the political dilemmas of translation as Turkish letters enter the global age, and to describe how I have tried to address them since beginning to translate Orhan Pamuk eight years and five books ago. But let me first pause to explain that I am not a translator by profession. Before trying my hand at translation, I had worked for twenty-five years as a novelist, journalist, and university lecturer. However, I have a lifelong interest in Turkey, where I spent my childhood and where my family still lives. I have known Orhan Pamuk since the late 1960s, when he and I attended brother and sister lycées, though my friend in those days was his elder brother. Orhan and I rediscovered each other in the early 1990s, when his first books were published in English translation. When he wrote to me in 2002 to ask if I would consider translating Snow, my first response was terror. I could not help but remember how often I had lost the thread while navigating his longer sentences when reading the novel in Turkish, and how, each time, I had spared a kind thought for the poor soul who would have to translate it. But when I agreed, it was because I had an idea as to how I might negotiate the long and Escher-like landscape between Turkish and English.

Turkish is an agglutinative language with a great deal more flexibility than English: root nouns in ordinary sentences can carry strings of eight or more suffixes. There is, even in the colloquial, a pleasing sense of compression that we in English expect to find only in poetry. Turkish is more precise in its tenses—offering, for example, a distinction between eyewitness reports and hearsay—though its fondness for the passive voice means that it is often difficult to know who did what when. It has no need for a verb “to have” and no verb “to be,” and its single word for “he,” “she,” and “it” is expendable. It is fond of long clauses beginning with verbal nouns, while the verb that decides how these clauses will be linked comes at the end of the sentence, which is often so long that the English translator, lacking the sentence’s governing idea, can feel like she’s carrying a week’s worth of groceries without the benefit of a bag.

Another layer of difficulty comes from the extreme degree of political oversight and interference in the public use of the Turkish language. This dates back to the early 1930s, when the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, launched the so-called Language Revolution, creating new words to reflect the spirit of the new republic, and replacing old words that threatened to tie it to the past. Over two generations, this program of state intervention in the Turkish language has resulted in the loss of 60 percent of its vocabulary. Most of the lost words are of Arabic or Persian origin. Even today it is controversial to draw upon the language’s lost words: novelists and translators of my acquaintance who have dared to do so have been accused of “political inconsistency” and even “betraying the revolution.” Meanwhile, even highly educated Turks have difficulty reading a newspaper from the 1930s. As for Ataturk’s own Oration, which forms the basis of Turkey’s official history—it has been “translated” into “new Turkish” twice since it was first published in 1933.

It is, perhaps, because grammatical structures remained untouched and uncontroversial during the language revolution that today novelists, poets, and playwrights take such pride and pleasure in them. When playing with their possibilities, writers can practice their art, and develop an aesthetic, without interference. And yet these structures are difficult and sometimes impossible to translate into English. A series of verbal nouns can turn a fluid and cascading sentence into an avalanche of pebbles. The reliance on the passive voice can, if replicated in the English, give an air of obfuscation to a sentence that was once light and clear. And because words are repeated more often in today’s ethnically cleansed Turkish than we expect to see in literary English, translators will often have to guess whether or not the author meant mind or intellect; happiness, bliss, or mirth.

I knew all this when I agreed to translate Snow, just as I knew that Orhan might be inclined to judge a translation a dismal failure unless it replicated the Turkish grammatical structures. But I believed he would be better served by a translation that delved underneath the visible structures, capturing the thought at the heart of each Turkish sentence, reforming each into an English sentence that was true to the original but also fluid—and if not as compressed as the Turkish, then at least echoing its music.

Though I knew my decision not to replicate the grammar at any cost would cause shock and concern among some established translators, I did still think that any controversy would be a paper war, centering on questions of language. I even thought I had found a peaceful alternative to freelance journalism: now I would be able to work from home, and even see my family. All I needed to do was to find the right words and arrange them into sentences that evoked the same powerful narrative trance as Orhan had in Turkish. I did have a jolt several weeks into the translation, when a nationalist paper misquoted me on the subject of headscarves following an online interview to which I naïvely agreed; in the weeks that followed, I was harassed by an Islamist newspaper whose agents used almost the same words as the Islamist assassin I’d been translating in Snow. But I was still safe in my chair, immersed in Orhan’s words and mine.

Orhan and I had agreed that we would go over my finished working draft together. I knew that I was taking liberties, and I thought it important to know (and respond to) his views. I had seen several poets collaborate in this manner, and felt that the discussions between drafts had enriched their translations enormously. I thought the same approach might work for us—because we were friends and both novelists, because English was his second language, and because we both knew that the English translation would form the basis for most translations into other languages (almost forty in number then, and now more than sixty). When I finished my working draft, I sent it off to him. He spent several weeks reviewing it with his often impatient and exasperated pen (Maureen! Your energies are bad today! And how could you make such a mistake?). When he had finished, we met for a week at his summer home on the Princes Islands outside Istanbul to argue our way through the draft, sentence by sentence. There were many days when I approached Orhan’s desk with trepidation, wondering what was in store for me. But I now look back on those intense and volatile exchanges with great affection. Through the text on the desk, we would enter into a fictive world that I had been living inside for more than a year, and for a time, we would live there together.

Then we’d bump into the next sentence that didn’t work. Our original agreement was that we would change whatever he took issue with. In practice, there were matters we never managed to settle. For example, I wanted to use the Turkish term for anything that an English speaker in Turkey (and there are a lot of us) would not think to translate. These included words like börek, yalı, and meyhane. Orhan (dismissing my proposal as “ethnic” and “folkloric”) wanted me to translate these words as “cheese pie,” “Bosporus waterside mansion” and “modest drinking establishment,” even when they made multiple appearances in a single paragraph. If you look at the five books we have worked on together, you’ll see that the battle lines kept changing. But there were other times when Orhan won important victories (as when I agreed never to start a sentence with “and”). And there were edicts I resisted (as when I successfully withstood a sudden and temporary ban on the semicolon). While I refused to make any compromise that resulted in a sentence that sounded foolish in English, I grew to respect Orhan’s long, winding sentences as I came to better appreciate their cumulative effect.

Our greatest area of difficulty was the language of emotion, which tends to be expansive and even anatomical in Turkish. Sometimes—as when Orhan decided that the hero of Snow went into a panic too often—he decided to change his own text. This would lead to problems later, when conscientious translators working in minor or non-Western languages referred to both the English and the Turkish versions and found discrepancies. Many took the trouble to write to me for clarification. But scholars finding differences between the two versions have been less inclined to consult before charging me with Orientalism. There is now a small but vigorous literature examining the ways I have set out to make Orhan more palatable for Western readers.

But when we sent our final version of Snow out to the publishers, both Orhan and I thought we’d done an honest job. I also thought my job was more or less over. Having brought the book into an English translation that reflected his aesthetic as well as mine, I could fade into the woodwork to watch from a distance as the book spoke for itself.