And will Turkey be affected by the collapse of Dubai’s towers of Babel, as the country’s state-owned (i.e., sheikh-owned) property development company seeks to defer its debts? And though opposition leader Devlet Bahçeli denies the very existence of swine flu, has he been stricken already by mad politician’s disease as he seeks legal redress for the rude expletives (discernable only by lip reading specialists) which he claims the prime minister muttered under his moustache during a recent parliamentary debate?
I confess my mind remains stuck on higher things. Just before the Bayram began I went to Brussels to chair a meeting at the istanbul Center there, what I can only describe as a wonderful event. Along with the audience I eavesdropped on a conversation between Maureen Freely and Kjell Espmark, two very different people joined by a love of books. Freely is a professor at England’s Warwick University and the author of several novels set in istanbul. She is also the English translator of many of Orhan Pamuk’s books and accompanied him to Stockholm when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was there she first met Espmark, a prominent literary figure in his native Sweden, a poet, novelist and critic. He has, since 1981, held Seat No. 16 at the Swedish Academy, which decides the world’s most prestigious literary award.
In front of an ultra-attentive audience, the pair continued a conversation begun at the Stockholm Gala dinner. The conversation turned around the work of the Nobel committee in trying to shift literary critical attention not just outside the Western ambit but to the non-English speaking world. Espark is part of a generation which felt the need to shine the searchlight for literary excellence on other continents and other cultures. Freely described her reluctant conversion to becoming a translator in order to allow other perspectives and ideas scale the seeming impregnable wall around “fortress English.” In many countries, more than 50 percent of books in print are translations; in the English-speaking world that figure goes down to some 3 percent.
Of course some of the discussion centered on Pamuk. Members of the Swedish Academy are bound by a 50-year rule which prevents them from rushing to the papers to explain how a particular decision is made. This has not, of course, stopped the gossips in the Turkish press from attributing all sorts of bizarre political motives to the awarders of the prize or accusing Pamuk himself of manipulating a gullible Swedish Academy through naked stratagem. It takes about 45 seconds of listening to Espmark to grasp just how ludicrous and vitriolic such speculation has been. The notion that the Nobel Committee might sing to a political agenda or even any agenda other than the service to literature was enough to cause him to evince a dignified shudder. This is a man still haunted by the possibility that in the 1930s the academy even considered giving the prize to Margaret Mitchell and “Gone with the Wind.”
Most of the evening, however, was spent pondering on how translation works, how it succeeds or fails in reweaving the fabric of the original, whether the translator was responsible for explaining the book to the foreign reader, how publishers can encourage or trample the translators’ art and how to answer the editors’ perpetual moan, “You can’t say this in English.” (“You can’t say this in Swedish, either.”) Literature, particularly poetry, is so often about doing damage to the language whereas translation inevitably is about trying to reconstruct something that is already unfamiliar, Espmark said. Inevitably, translation is a compromise between the original and what the second language can take. Inevitably, too, the translator becomes the writer’s most intense critic, and it can be a difficult relationship to sustain. Many are the book reviewers who clearly haven’t read past Chapter 4. The translator is there to the bitter end.
