No abstract
Despite their incontestable worldwide influence on culture and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, serial novels are underrepresented in translation history research. This paper calls attention to serial novels as a fertile source of historical knowledge regarding translation, reception, and circulation drawing from a comprehensive study of translated and indigenous serial novels in three Turkish daily newspapers, namely Cumhuriyet, Akşam, and Vakit, published between 1928 and 1960. Based on this premise, the aim of the paper is twofold. The first is to display some common characteristics of serial novels, such as plasticity, anonymity, topicality, and ephemerality, along with the substantial impact these characteristics made on the way translations were performed in history. The second is to problematize the neglect of serial novels in translation historiography and suggest their inclusion in translation history research. The paper argues that serial novels and, when available, other serial publications are crucial primary sources for many sub-fields of historical research related to translation to the extent that their exclusion inevitably leads to gaps and, in some cases, even misrepresentations of historical reality. In order to abstain from such historiographical drawbacks, researchers of translation history, especially those focusing on retranslation, reception, and circulation of literary works, need to pay due heed to the practice of serialization.
This article aims to comparatively analyze the first translations of Yaşar Kemal's first novel, İnce Memed (1955), into English and French, and examine the role of these translations in establishing the author's international reputation. Mehmed my Hawk (1961), translated into English by Edouard Roditi, and Mèmed le Mince (1961), translated into French by Güzin Dino, were published in the same year and pioneered the way Yaşar Kemal was known as the world-renowned most important Turkish writer until the end of the 1980s. The comparative analysis of these two translations into English and French using paratextual and textual analyses shows that similar and different strategies are used in the translations. Strategies such as summarizing, omissions and/or additions used and the paratexts presented together with translations moved İnce Memed and Yaşar Kemal beyond being a writer and his first novel, and transformed them into figures that represent metonymically Turkish literature. These two translations have been well-received by critics and readers in the Western world. Reviews of Yaşar Kemal's style and his novel, which they see as a universal epic narrative, played an important role in reshaping the author's reputation in Turkey. Review articles and criticisms that were published abroad were used in Turkey, especially in the paratexts of his novels. In this article, how these first translations of Yaşar Kemal affected the author's position in the source culture and how his identity as the epic narrator, highly influenced by the oral culture, was rewritten through these translations will be investigated.
Although translated books and readers are visibly and inextricably linked, readers, readers’ expectations, attitudes and habits have only been partially analysed in translation research. In a similar vein, the relationship between translation and reader was rather left undiscovered by scholars studying translation/book/reading history. The aim of this paper is to present the findings of my comprehensive doctoral research on the pioneering role translation played in the history of reading and readers in Turkey between 1840 and 1940 by problematizing the relationship between translation, readers and their reading habits. This hundred year period is characterized by an apparent transformation in the literary production (especially in the number of translated works) and the publishing industry, which created an expansion in the number of readers and the development of new forms to suit the needs and tastes of this new readership. Data from a variety of sources including readers’ letters and auto/biographical accounts will be used in this article to investigate readers, their reading habits and the transformative process they experienced through this reading (r)evolution. In the absence of library records and marginalia due to the inherent characteristics of the period under study, these letters and auto/biographical accounts are of primary importance in providing evidence of what and how the readers were actually reading. Their active involvement in the process (of selection and consumption of translated and/or indigeneous works) is also reflected through the views, experiences and perceptions that are present in these letters and accounts.
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