"Women's Genre Writing: From Turkey to the Rest of the World"

A one-day, online symposium, 29 April 2022
Organized as part of the Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction Network
Özyeğin University
With support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK
Registration link: https://ozyegin-edu-tr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUtf-yprTIsEtwigKCmN6r11QdjN_Mar9-a

Translation is credited with breathing new life to texts, and giving voice to the voiceless. The work of women authors, however, remain bereft of new lives and new voices in the world’s many languages. This one-day symposium will focus on the work of women writers of Turkey in global waters. What does it mean to be an author from Turkey in the global book market? How does an author’s cultural identity play out in international mobility, promotion and reception of the work? More specifically, what happens when gender and sexual orientation in relation to national identity come into play in the categorization of the works? Are the works expected to comply with certain expectations in terms of their subject matters? Are they refracted (1982), or manipulated (1992), in Lefevere’s vocabulary, and if yes, in what ways? How does genre act as a variant in women’s writing? Is there a feedback loop?: do expectations of representation also affect the act of translation? What kind of ‘after-life’ awaits these works once they are on the move? The symposium will be an opportunity for colleagues to discuss the politics of being a woman writer of Turkey in the global book market. It will contribute to current debates on World Literature and the growing field of Feminist Translation Studies.

Keynotes

Maureen Freely

Professor Maureen Freely is a writer, translator and professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies and a member of English PEN. She is the author of six novels (Mother’s Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca, and Enlightenment) as well as four works of non-fiction (Pandora's Clock, What About Us? An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot, The Parent Trap and Angry in Piraeus). She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her translations include The Black Book, Snow, Other Colors: Essays and a story, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk , My Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin, The Well of Trapped Words: selected stories by Sema Kaygusuz, Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (with Alexander Dawe), The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (with Alexander Dawe), A Useless Man by Sait Faik Abasıyanık (with Alexander Dawe) and In the Shadow of the Yalı by Suat Derviş. She is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She also works with campaigns aiming to promote world literature in English translation. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.

Professor Freely’s keynote lecture is entitled “ENTER STAGE LEFT: Turkish Women Writers in the World.”

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Aron Aji

Dr Aron Aji is a translator, poet and academic. He is currently an Associate Professor of Instruction and the Director of MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. He has translated novels, short stories and poems by many Turkish authors into English, including Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, Latife Tekin, Bejan Matur and Nedim Gürsel, and won multiple accolades in recognition of his work. His translation of Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats won the 2004 National Translation Award and A Long Day’s Evening was a finalist for the 2013 PEN Translation Prize. Most recently his co-translation, with David Gramling, of Murathan Mungan’s Valor: Stories received the Global Humanities Translation Prize; the book will be issued by Northwestern UP this year. Also this year, his translation of Ferit Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales is planned for publication by NYRB. Aji has contributed to the world of letters not only by making gems of Turkish literature available for international readers but also through service to the translation community and teaching. He was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019. Currently he leads the Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation, theory, and contemporary Turkish literature. He contributes regularly to World Literature Today as well as scholarly journals in literature.

Dr Aji’s keynote lecture is entitled “Gendering Translation: Performative Techniques.”

Abstracts and speakers

Aysun Kıran

Recontextualising Ece Temelkuran in the UK: A Paratextual Look at the English Translations of Her Works

Literary and non-literary works from Turkey have become more visible in the UK market through translations since the early 2000s. This increased interest in Turkish titles has been accompanied by the expectation from the authors to speak for their communities and represent their countries. Hence, translation has constituted a site of political signification in that Turkish authors’ works have largely been discussed in view of the information and/or criticism they provide about their social and political contexts of origin. Following in the footsteps of the literature on the promotion and reception of Turkish authors in translation, this paper examines the English translations of Ece Temelkuran’s selected works with a focus on how they were presented in the UK. Specifically, it will offer a descriptive analysis of the paratextual elements of Turkey: The Insane and The Melancholy and Women Who Blow on Knots. In doing so, this study will focus mainly on the front and back covers, translated titles, visuals and blurbs of the selected books. It shows that the translator’s work is more likely to be recognised when a Turkish title is selected for translation for its literary success in its country of origin rather than for the timeliness of its political commentary. In parallel, it will be argued that the selection of an author’s books for publication in the UK based on their literary merit provides more room for that author to release the burden of political signification.

Aysun Kıran completed her BA degree in Translation and Interpreting, and her MA degree in Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. She obtained her PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII) at University College London, UK. Her PhD thesis investigates the uses of translation, multilingualism and intertextuality in new Turkish cinema. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor in Translation Studies at Marmara University. Her research interests include multilingual films, representations of multilingualism and translation, paratexts in literature and media.

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Şule Akdoğan

Locating Translated Literature by Women Writers from Turkey in Contemporary Discussions of Genre and Narrative: Fictions of Memory and Multiperspectival Narration

While translated literature and its circulation have the potential to create fruitful cross-cultural dialogues, different forms of bias and reductionist perspectives create multi-layered challenges during the circulation and reception phases of the texts in translation. Aiming to create a platform to discuss how scholarly knowledge production can challenge insufficient and/or unequal perceptions, I will look into the translated literature by women writers from Turkey through the rhetoric of genre and narratology. I opine that interpretive and communicative function of genre and narratology can contribute to the formation of spaces to explore translated literature in scholarly and pedagogical sites within comprehensive frames and thus facilitate inclusive knowledge production. Fictions of memory and multiperspectival narration seem especially important since they have the potential to afford a space for diversity, and different viewpoints and discourses. I propose that such space can create a more comprehensive understanding of women’s writing from Turkey and encourage inclusive and non-hegemonic discourses within and across-borders. The works I will refer to include Ece Temelkuran’s The Time of Mute Swans, Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend and Ayfer Tunç’s The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse.

Şule Akdoğan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at TED University. Before TEDU, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her current research interests include transnational feminisms, feminist literary theory, women’s writing and Turkish literature in comparative contexts. Her publications include “Representation of the Female Body in Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Ölmeye Yatmak and Leyla Erbil’s Tuhaf Bir Kadın” and “‘World’-Travelling and Transnational Feminist Praxis in Women Who Blow on Knots.” 

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Amy Spangler

Translation, Reception and Selection

Amy Marie Spangler is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, with B.A. degrees in Near Eastern and Classical Archaeology and German Language and Literature. She co-founded AnatoliaLit with Dilek Akdemir in 2005. In addition to being a literary agent and her teaching activities at Boğaziçi University and Okan University, Spangler is also a translator, primarily from Turkish into English. Her published book translations include The City in Crimson Cloak by Aslı Erdogan (Soft Skull, 2007), Noontime in Yenişehir by Sevgi Soysal (Milet, 2014), and Dawn by Selahattin Demirtaş (co-translated with Kate Ferguson, Hogarth, 2019). Her latest published translation is A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil (co-translated with Nermin Menemencioğlu, Deep Vellum, 2022), and she is currently translating Kalan (What Remains), by the same author, together with Mark David Wyers and Alev Ersan, for publication by Deep Vellum in 2023.

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Çimen Günay-Erkol

Confrontation of women writers with socialism and Islam in Turkey: Suat Derviş and Neriman Hikmet

Ottoman feminism began in the Tanzimat Era (1839-1876) and developed, especially in the Second Constitutional Monarchy Period (1908-1922) when Sultan Abdulhamid II was forced to restore the constitutional monarchy and accepted reduced power (Zihnioğlu 2003: 21). Women’s education and participation to social life were at the explicit center of the discussions but it was believed that Westernization of certain trends should not lead to the contamination of Islamic values (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 128). A socialist feminist lineage also flourished among women as it did elsewhere in the Middle East, but this lineage is relatively less explored in the Turkish context. Suat Derviş (1903-1972, real name Hatice Saadet Baraner), a popular writer and journalist who grew into fame with her pieces on the lower strata of the society, for example, is in fact a powerful actor that attempted to develop an intersectional feminism to connect different members of the society. She attempted to develop a materialist feminist critique and continued her efforts to fight political authoritarianism in the post-Ottoman period (Peruccio 2021). Despite the well-deserved respect she earned with her pen, Suat Derviş has mostly been referred as the “wife” of Reşat Fuat Baraner, a Turkish communist, Comintern representative and the secretary general of the Turkish Communist Party in Turkish malestream history (Freely 2021). A similar attempt for erasure from history also applies to Neriman Hikmet (1912-1987), who not only worked in solidarity with Suat Derviş as a journalist, but also supported her as a close friend. Suat Derviş wrote numerous novels and short stories. Neriman Hikmet published poetry, and one novel. Both worked as journalists starting from late 1930s, in periods of upheaval when Turkey gradually got stuck in the magnetism of the Cold-War. I intend to focus on how Suat Derviş and Neriman Hikmet “bargained” with socialism and Islam (Kandiyoti 1988, 1991, 2007) in the predominantly traditional culture of Ottoman Empire-turned-Republic of Turkey, particularly in terms of their impact on women, and comment on how these women actors, through a strategy of negotiation with dominant patriarchal discourses, attempted to carve out a space of freedom and rights for women.

Çimen Günay-Erkol is associate professor of Turkish Literature at Özyeğin University, İstanbul. She obtained her MA in Turkish Literature at Bilkent University (2001) and PhD in Literary Studies at Universiteit Leiden (2008). Her PhD manuscript, Broken Masculinities: Solitude, Alienation and Frustration in Turkish Literature After 1970 (CEU Press, 2016) is about the post-coup novels of the 1970s in all its complexity. Her fields of interest are masculinity, trauma, literary theory and history.

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Esra Almas

Roman Gibi: Sabiha Sertel’s novelistic memoir as an account of A Life of Struggle

A pioneering activist, feminist, and writer who shaped journalism in Republican Turkey, the life and work of Sabiha Sertel have been much discussed, especially in relation to the troubled relationship with Turkish modernity and freedom of speech. Sabiha Sertel wrote Roman Gibi (Like a Novel) in 1967 in exile in Baku, accompanied by her daughter Yıldız and her husband Zekeriya, while battling cancer. She died the following year. She dedicated the memoir to her grandson, addressing the narrative not as a retelling of past experiences, but as a “tale” and “novel.” The memoir chronicles Sertel’s life as a committed yet persecuted writer, publisher, and translator. It is an invaluable historical record that provides a first-person account of the struggles for freedom of expression in early twentieth-century Turkey, with personal anecdotes of the key literary and political figures of the period, from Nazım Hikmet to Kemal Ataturk. The narrative is rarely read as a literary text rooted in history. The recent translation of her memoir to English as The Struggle for Modern Turkey (2019) follows the same trend, fulfilling what Arif Dirlik terms the ‘burden’ of translated works to speak for an authentic identity of their departure communities. Taking its cue from the dynamic between the personal and the political that marks memory writing as a genre, this paper explores the role of ethnic identity and gender in the international mobility, promotion, and reception of Sertel’s memoir.

Esra Almas is an assistant professor in the program of Turkish Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara. She holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at the University of Amsterdam and at İstanbul Şehir University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Almas has published on autobiographical narratives and Istanbul’s modernist literary cityscape. Her current project sheds light on the multidirectional memory of the region through Jewish memories of modern Istanbul.

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Nicholas Glastonbury

World Literature as World System: Notes from the Semi-Periphery

The liberal premise of world literature is that translation builds bridges across difference to facilitate dialogue and a mutual recognition of common humanity. Under this premise, translation is an inherently auspicious mode of “activism” or “decolonization.” Yet this notion of world literature neglects the political and economic structures that engender the very forms of cultural hierarchy, conflict, and inequality against which it putatively stands.

In this talk, I argue that world literature is an expression of an ongoing neocolonial world system. Translation, from this perspective on a world system, can serve as a vector for importing the “raw material” of global South literatures into the neocolonial core of Europe and North America, and for exporting the cultural products of empire into the global South as literary periphery.

By examining the world system of world literature from the semi-peripheral context of Turkey – which has, with some notable exceptions, been excluded from the world literary marketplace – I suggest possibilities for translating against the grain of empire. By throwing a wrench into the cogs of the world literary machine, writers, editors and translators alike can produce and circulate literatures that are “anti-neocolonial” and refuse work that sustains the inequality and violence of the present world system.

Nicholas Glastonbury is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and an instructor in the anthropology department at Fordham University. His translation of Sema Kaygusuz’s novel Every Fire You Tend (Yüzünde Bir Yer) received the 2020 TA First Translation Prize from the Society of Authors. He is presently at work on co-translations of Murat Uyurkulak’s Tol and the third volume of Sakine Cansız’s memoir.

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Simla Doğangün

Going Global: The Role of Gatekeepers in the Transnational Reception of Defne Suman’s The Silence of Scheherazade

On August 12, 2021, with hashtags, #historicalfiction, #translatedfiction, #greece, #turkey, #armenia, #levant #empire, #Scheherazade, Defne Suman announced the release of her English-language debut novel, The Silence of Scheherazade on social media. The novel centres on the tale of the burning of Smyrna in 1922, seen and told through Levantine, Greek, Turkish and Armenian inhabitants of the city. Her gatekeepers, Head of Zeus Independent Publishing Company, the book’s translator Betsy Göksel and her literary agent Nermin Mollaoğlu were among the first ones to receive tribute for their hard work and support in the process. In the following months, Maureen Freely hosted the book’s launch in an online event, organized by Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. Succeeding interviews, book reading events and podcasts concentrated on the writer’s upbringing, other authors who influenced the style of the author, the translation process, the role of history in the book, as well as the motivation behind its title, which was different from its Turkish version, Emanet Zaman (2016).

If World Literature is constituted by “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language,” as Damrosch (2003: 4) states, then, other actors who are involved in the work’s interaction with the world audience pave the way for its success in the global market, as William Marling claims in  Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature in the 1960s (2016:1). Taking its cue from the convergence of these insights, the paper focuses on the multi-layered gatekeeping process of Suman’s Scheherazade and explores the ways in which people and institutions have become integral components of its global dissemination.

Simla Ayşe Doğangün completed her PhD on a comparative study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary Anglo-Indian and Turkish novels at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the University of Amsterdam. She participated in the Summer 2021 session of The Institute of World Literature organized by Harvard University. She has published on English, Anglo-Indian and Turkish literature. Her research interests include neoliberalism in world literature, comparative postcolonial studies, and exile narratives. Her research on Elif Şafak’s fiction as cultural commodity in the global capital has been published in Turkish Literature as World Literature (2021) by Bloomsbury. Currently she works in the Department of English Language and Literature at Marmara University.

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Kaitlin Staudt

Halide Edip Adıvar and Anglophone Turkish Women’s Writing

While Halide Edip Adıvar is often referred to as the mother of Turkish literature, in the late 1920s and 30s, while living in England in self-imposed exile, she published two of her most important works in English: The Memoirs of Halide Edip (1926) and The Clown and His Daughter (1935). Edip later self-translated these works into Turkish, significantly changing aspects of the texts for her Turkish readersip. Turkish scholars have only recently begun to explore Edip’s status as çiftdilli bir yazar, meaning a writer with paired, or dual languages.  Instead of the standard translation of bilingual as ikidilli, or with two languages, Hülya Adak suggests that there are substantial differences in how Edip approaches genre and the expression of political ideas in each language. 

Examining archival documents from her publisher, George Allen & Unwin, alongside reviews of her work in the British press, such as the Times Literary Supplement, and drawing on The Clown and His Daughter as a case study, I argue that Halide Edip’s Anglophone in this period writing is strongly linked to her role as a critic of modernizing reform in Turkey, particularly in reference to women’s rights. In this way, Halide Edip’s Anglophone writing initiates a tradition of Anglophone Turkish women’s writing upon which later writers, particularly Elif Şafak have drawn on. In doing so, this paper reflects on the little-theorized practice of self-translation as a political strategy that operates between national publishing markets.

Kaitlin Staudt is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at Auburn University. Her research interests include global modernisms, the Turkish novel, and inter-imperial aesthetic practices. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2018 where her research was supported by the DAAD, the British Institute at Ankara, and Turkey Scholarships. Her articles have appeared in venues such as Feminist Modernist Studies and Middle Eastern Literatures. She is the Turkish section editor of the Global Modernists on Modernism anthology published by Bloomsbury Academic (2020), which was recently awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for an for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection. Currently she is completing her first monograph, “Move Forward and Ascend!: Temporality and The Politics of Form in the Turkish Modernist Novel.”

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Ahmed Nuri

Halide Edip Adıvar Goes to Sweden: The Swedish Translations of Her Novels, the Forgotten Archives, and the Image of the International Author

This paper explores the presence of Halide Edib Adıvar`s literature in Swedish, its reception by the Swedish literary public, and the image of Halide Edib as an international female author from Turkey. The main focus of the paper is her two novels translated into Swedish, Eldskjortan: roman från världskriget (Ateşten Gömlek) and Rabia, Koransångerska (Sinekli Bakkal), and how they were interpreted in the Swedish context, using some archives untouched in Sweden. The two novels were translated into Swedish by Hjalmar Lindquist in 1928 and Lennart Westlinder in 1947, respectively. They are, indeed, the first two works of modern Turkish literature directly translated from Turkish into Swedish until the 1950s. However, the translations and reception of Halide Edip`s literature in the Swedish context have remained examined. In this respect, this paper focuses on the historical and literary context of these two translated novels and investigates their reception in Sweden. This attempt and its preliminary remarks may help us find a new avenue to discuss women`s writing in Turkish and its transnational circulation via translation in the context of World Literature. However, the existing materials are not limited to the translated novels and the introductory writings of the translators about these novels. There are also innumerable articles about the translated novels and Halide Edib as an international author published in various Swedish journals and newspapers. These articles also touch upon the various aspects of Turkish literature as well. Analyzing them, therefore, helps us to understand how these two prominent novels were evaluated and discussed in the Swedish context if also considering Turkey`s nationalist modernity process. Moreover, there exist some letters sent between Halide Edib and Hjalmar Lindquist as well as the translator`s notes and practices on Halide Edib's original work. These documents allow one to trace the translation process at first hand. Both existing letters and notes written in different languages (i.e., Turkish, English, French, and Swedish) show the inter-cultural and inter-linguistic complexities in the translation and the circulation of literary works. This paper, therefore, intends to contribute to current debates on World Literature, scrutinizing the case of Halide Edip in the Swedish context.

Ahmed Nuri is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam, studying the intricate relationship between modernity, the idea of the tragic, and parody in the twentieth-century Turkish novel. He was previously a research fellow at The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul in 2019 and Netherlands Institute in Turkey in 2020. He has been simultaneously developing a research project, “The Literary Encounters Between Turkey and Sweden,” that investigates the presence and reception of Turkish literature in Swedish in the context of World Literature, involving the archives in Sweden.

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Elif Su Işık

The Many Lives of Nihal Yeğinobalı’s Lilac Girl

The main focus of the research will be Nihal Yeğinobalı whose literary output as a translator and a novelist stretches from the 1950s to the 2000s. This paper will specifically focus on her novel Eflatun Kız which offers a rare subject for analysis as it has been published and translated into three different contexts for reception: In 1957, it was serialized in the newspaper Vatan under Yeğinobalı’s own name as a Turkish novel; In 1964, it was published as a romance novel set in New Orleans, under the pseudonym Vincent Ewing; In 1988, it was translated back into Turkish and published as a feminist, social realist work. In Yeğinobalı’s attempts to surmount gendered prejudices in publication; her novel transformed; changed nationalities and revealed shifts in notions of womanhood, social responsibility and sexuality throughout 20th century Turkey. By offering close readings of these three texts and marking the ways in which they deviate and the ways in which they remain the same, I argue that each of these pseudo-translations captures something specific about the desires, anxieties and fantasies of the society of its time. Through this case study, this research aims to raise questions such as: What does it mean that a female Turkish writer was able to write an “American novel”? What does it mean that the same novel can be “a Turkish novel” and “an American novel” in translation just seven years apart? What does this translatability imply in terms of the time-bound character of literary activities?

Elif Su Işık has received her MA degree in Comparative Literature and Criticism from Goldsmiths, University of London and her BA in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University. She is currently an MA student at Bilkent University’s Turkish Literature Department. Her research interests include intertextuality, hybridity and canon formation in comparative literary studies. She works as a translator of Turkish literature into English as well.

Organizers

Şima İmşir

Şima İmşir is an assistant professor of English at Özyeğin University. She obtained her PhD from the Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in 2018 and she is a recipient of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Ph.D. scholarship. Her current book project, entitled Health, Literature and Gender in Twentieth-Century Turkey, focuses on constructions and uses of illness in modern Turkish literature (Routledge, contracted). Her research outcomes have appeared in several edited volumes and journals, including Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2021), Journal of Research in Gender Studies (2014), Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021), Women of the Middle East (Routledge, 2016), and Monsters in Society: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Brill, 2019).

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Duygu Tekgül-Akın

Duygu Tekgül-Akın teaches translation at Istanbul’s Yeditepe University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Exeter, where she did research on reading groups. Her areas of interest include sociology of translation, intercultural communication, cultural and creative industries, and Turkish literature in English translation. Her articles have appeared in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Perspectives, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Translation Studies.