Maureen Freely is now the official English translator for the books of the Turkish Nobel writer Orhan Pamuk, published by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom. The prestige of the publisher usually indicates the prestige of the work, and in this case, the translation. Maureen is an American who grew up in Istanbul and can be counted as a bilingual in English and Turkish. I came across her translation of Pamuk's 'Kara Kitap' ('The Black Book') while sheltering myself from the rain in Borders this afternoon and I felt inspired reading the her Afterword to the book. I had spent the whole afternoon in the Oriental Institute Library reading about Turkic languages. She talked about the characteristics of the Turkish language and the difficulty of translating from English to Turkish:
'... the vogue among Turkey's leading writers for the devrik cümle. This is a sentence - usually a very long sentence - in which words appear in an order different from that ordained by custom and practice, and cascading clauses create a series of expectations that are subverted by the verb at the very end. The poet Murat Nemet-Nejat has described Turkish as a language that can evoke a thought unfolding.'
'The accepted view, especially among bilingual Turks, is that the translation should pay close attention to the sentence's "inner logic". This might also be described as its architecture - the elegant way in which the various parts reflect one another and together, reflect the mystery that must never be coarsened by words; the games with voice and tense and the imaginative melding of different epochs and places in sentences that may be admired at length like pictures in a museum.'
'All too often, the grand allusive flourishes are lost on readers accustomed to the simpler and more straightforward logic of English. The passive becomes cumbersome and even obfuscating... Mesmerizing lists of verbal nouns begin to grate on the nerves. The tenses are robbed of their nuances, and the graceful unfolding of cascading clauses becomes an ungainly procession of non sequiturs. The verb that should have been the twist in the tail appears so early it robs the long sentences of its suspense, so that, instead of gaining momentum, each sentence seems to double back on itself. It's not just the meaning that gets muffled, it's the music.'
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Rafael Carpintero is the translator of Orhan Pamuk into Spanish. He learnt Turkish when he was my age in my very same university, and moved to Istanbul with his wife, and they have lived there ever since. His wife is professor of Spanish in the University of Istanbul, I think.
ReplyDeleteI met him in real life a couple of years ago. He used to be very good at learning languages when he was young - i saw "was" because I dont know if he has learnt any other language during all this time - and he actually learn Arabic and meant to spend a year abroad in Cairo. For some reason I forgot, he couldn't and went to Turkey instead. Probably, that change the course of his career.
He told me that when He was young, he loved learning "weird" languages, first Latin, then Arabic, and finally Turkish. It is something that reminded me of myself, since I used to be a top student of Latin, then studied Arabic for a while, and finally I ended up learning Turkish (although I have still to work on it... but I'm on my way!).
I don't really see the point of writing about how translating deforms a text. That applies for every language. Turkish is straight forward enough I think, sometimes I find that the way they write is not as complicated as the Spanish way, and they have a tendency for short sentences. Also, I find literary Turkish somehow artificial, even more than Spanish or English.
I am reading Pamuk's "Beyaz Kale" in Turkish. I find I'm making my way through it rather easily, but I have to check my dictionary more than I wanted to. Oh well, at least now I'm able to read it, something that was unthinkable a year ago!
Btw, I guess you mean "Kara kitaP".