‘The clamour of Babel, in all the tongues of the Levant’: multivernacular and multiscriptal Constantinople around 1900 as a literary world

Abstract

With a focus on the crafting of Constantinople as a literary world, this article considers how the city's particularly rich and composite soundscape, linguascape and scriptworld around 1900 contributes to a vernacular poetics. Such a poetics, I suggest, could be described in terms of a heterolingual and multivernacular foregrounding of linguistic difference and asymmetry. Issues relating to the materiality of language and linguistic diversity, including the role of scripts, are explored in a selection of ten Western European travelogues and narratives set in Constantinople during the last period of the Ottoman era (1876-1922) and written in Italian (De Amicis), French (Loti), Danish (Jerichau-Baumann), Norwegian (Skram), and Swedish (Lindberg-Dovlette and Beyel). Proceeding from the soundscape via the linguascape to the scriptworld of the city, it is demonstrated how these '-scapes' and worlds are established, rendered, thematised, transcribed, and inscribed as heterolingual, multivernacular and multiscriptal in Constantinople as a literary world. Different textual and paratextual strategies are identified and analysed with regard to their auditory, visual and material features. However, as a part of monoscriptal Western European literature using Roman script, this literary world becomes cosmopolitanised. In this case the vernacular poetics did not embrace the many scripts of Constantinople.

Narrating the crisis of Constantinople 1908–1922: A lost world in Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Russian

“…Clearly, Pamuk's talk is a strong vindication of literature's world-making power. But, contrary to Pamuk's view that this has been accomplished by his novels, my aim in this chapter has been to demonstrate that the four analysed novels reveal that Pamuk's home city was certainly already the centre of the world a century earlier, while the crafting of this earlier Constantinople as a literary or aesthetic world has been scattered in the literature of several different languages (Bodin 2020). As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, three of the selected novels were also circulated in translation into various (Western) languages -in the case of the novels in Greek and Turkish from quite early on, while the Armenian novel was translated only recently (and the Russian novel remains a non-translated and posthumously published avant-garde work).…”

“…Consequently, as to the situation of Constantinople, there has never been any single Constantinopolitan world, only several different ethnic, linguistic and religious worlds. By means of various multilingual strategies, these worlds have been represented in literary texts published in different languages (Bodin 2020).…”

“…A small colony in Pera has taken possession of an embankment and hung up two blankets to make it seem homelike. (Solano 1922: 654) Descriptions and enumerations of the many people of various ethnicities and languages crossing the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn is a topos in travelogues from Constantinople (Tekdemir 2017, Bodin 2020. When Solano describes this scene, she mentions first of all -before people of Armenian, Greek, Western European, American, Chinese, Japanese and Persian origin -the Russians, since they are so many; she notes 158,000 as of October 1920 (Solano 1922: 655).…”