This panel explores 'translation' as a methodology deployed by Tanzimat novelists engaged in exploring ideas of modernity and of generating new ideas of citizenship and subjectivity. Conceiving of the Tanzimat period as one of translation allows the discussion to move from a linear one of non-Western 'response' to the West, to a three-dimensional set of largely contemporaneous conversations in multiple directions. Such an approach foregrounds the dynamics internal to the debates themselves as well as the connections between different nexuses of conversations, as 'connected histories.'
Translation typically denotes as its object textual and cultural contexts with a particular directionality of moving from one to another, but here the project is to refocus ways in which Translation operates not simply between cultures or languages, but within them. We seek to explore ways in which Tanzimat authors 'translated' ideas across time and tradition, emerging, differently conceived, as new patterns of thought, of new epistemologies, and methodologies, but without the distortion inherent in denying their complex genealogies. Translation also avoids the pitfall of assuming that the modern is what it claims to be: a rupture, a departure, a denunciation of the past in its framing of its binary, 'traditional.' It instead facilitates visibility of continuities and recastings.
Our concept of 'translation', unsettles the relationship between sign and structure, as the interaction of various scripts makes demands on new modes of textual production and reading, undermining the conception of cultural contact as encounter between binaries and consolidating, instead, the conception of culture as assemblage, demanding a focus on questions of agency rather than of ownership.
Papers closely observe the project of modernity as Tanzimat novelists themselves viewed it, and privilege an exploration of their terms of engagement, their solutions, and intentions. Paper 1 examines authorial intention in the creation of literary techniques that structure new subjectivities of participatory reading and citizenship. Paper 2 explores the intersection of the choices made in translation as a way to investigate translators as agents of innovation. Paper 3 focuses on ways in which translation serves as trans/scription as authors experiment with and integrate a variety of new scripts into production. Paper 4 examines ways in which moments of rejection of both western and existing Ottoman norms suggest methodologies of legitimizing innovation. Collectively, the panels suggest how Tanzimat authors, and reformists more generally, negotiated translation as a means of innovation and creativity in their construction of an Ottoman modern.
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Mr. Melih Levi
Conceived as a creative pursuit, translation requires a negotiation of various identities: the translator’s position is always destabilized by shifting alliances that result from identifying as/with the position of the reader and the author (which are always many). The language of choice often reveals an uncanny fetishizing of the original (often mistakenly reduced to one) so that the quality of the translation is always measured by its distance from the original: an attempt that always paradoxically invents yet another translation. When choice attains value solely through its ability to recreate meaning, it inevitably falls into the pitfalls nationalism, of reducing choice to participation and reinstating the imaginary topos that is beyond argument. Choice, however, is never only the end but also, perhaps more importantly, the beginning of action, and in literature, it sets the stage for performative undertaking: it allows, both a conscious and unconscious, subversion of one’s identity. I’ll show how the performance of authorial agency in Felatun Bey ve Rakim Efendi constructs such performative spaces where the author-reader equation short-circuits and invites an acute awareness of active modes of implication, often involving questions of accountability, complicity and resistance. At such moments of authorial intervention, the reader at once recognizes his enforced participation into an imagined community of readers and the very artificiality of such constructions. The appropriation of the authorial mode from its European counterparts does not turn Felatun into a mere imitation but a theatre, where both the reader and the author become increasingly conscious of their roles and continuously consider the social implications of getting in and out of character. Tanzimat writers stress the importance of doing away with the idea of translation as a set of choices and emphasize instead the performative stakes of translation. That movement – from choice to performance – inaugurates conceptions of identity and subjectivity that significantly differ from how Tanzimat literature has come to be studied as part or in anticipation of a nationalist project. This paper, then, will show how Felatun Bey ve Rakim Efendi promotes a bottom-up organization for Ottoman reform that is rooted in the production of relational subjectivities, and advocate for a renewed interest in translation in the Tanzimat era through the lens of performance theory.
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Dr. Etienne Charriere
In the nineteenth century, the largest metropolises of the Ottoman Empire concurrently served as major literary centers for a relatively large number of linguistic and religious communities. In the Ottoman capital alone, literature was for instance written, published, consumed and, perhaps even more importantly, translated from and into multiple languages. In this distinctive cultural ecosystem of the late Ottoman Empire characterized by an uncommonly dense traffic in languages and texts, literary translation –and, in particular, the translation of foreign prose fiction- became, at a time marked by acute social and political change, a crucial vector of what Antoine Berman called the "experience of the foreign." Emphasizing local literary exchanges between communities as a way to counter the diffusionist narratives that have approached Tanzimat-era translation as a largely unidirectional phenomenon of transfer between Western Europe and the Ottoman world, the present paper mobilizes the notion of "script" in its exploration of the practice of translation in the late Ottoman Empire, a period in which the existence of shared alphabets and the complexity of the social uses of competing writing systems often interfered with the theoretical compartmentalization imposed by the so-called millet system. Examples of these tensions around scripts during the period included, among others, the coexistence of at least three writing systems used for the printing of Ottoman-Turkish (the Arabo-Persian script, as well as the Greek and Armenian alphabets), the debates around the choice of a "national" script among the Albanian intellectual circles of Istanbul, or the particular situation of Judeo-Spanish, commonly printed in the semi-cursive Rashi script interspersed with Hebrew block characters).In framing Tanzimat-era translation as "transcription," this paper reads the rapid and massive increase in the number of translations of foreign prose fiction in the various literary idioms of the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century in articulation with the proliferation of scripts employed for the printing of these translated texts. In making use of the various connotations carried by the idea of "script," this paper argues that a recourse to the concept and to its dual meaning of "typeface" and "template" or "convention" (as it is used, for instance, in the notion of "cultural scripts") can lay the ground for an analysis of late Ottoman translation going beyond the exclusive study of textuality and encompassing both typographic traces and cultural practices.
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Dr. Burcu Karahan
Starting with the translation and serialization of François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque into the Ottoman by Yusuf Kâmil Pa?a in 1859, the Ottoman literary scene witnessed an intense translation activity that resulted in explorations with the novel form, experimentations with the language(s), multiple retranslations, republications, and emergence of a new literary system. Numerous heated debates between Ottoman intellectuals and translators on translation practices were carried out in the journals and newspapers of the day and in the prefaces of translated novels. Although the existence of these discussions reveals various translation strategies and the critical position of translation(s) in the creation of a new literary system, early translations in the late nineteenth century Ottoman literature are either thrust aside as irrelevant, unsystematic, and unimportant, or they are referred to as arbitrary group of works that have no meaningful relation to each other or to the original novels that followed them. However, identifying what the translators chose to convey from these Western prose texts into the Ottoman, rather than concentrating on the differences between source narratives, bares methodical selections and unexpected similarities between early translated texts. In this paper, I argue that early translations are not a group of random works, but they represent shared concerns and deliberate choices of their translators. The majority of the translations made between 1860 and 1890 exhibit seafaring protagonists who rise to their feet after enduring trials: the kind of man that the Tanzimat intellectuals longed for. I will frame my discussion around three novels by three different writers with dissimilar styles from three different literary backgrounds; and these Western novels were translated into Ottoman Turkish by three different translators who employed disparate translation styles. These translations are made from François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (1699), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Alexandre Dumas, père’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1845). Although these novels serve unrelated purposes, I claim as a group they all provide for the same goal: to create self-sufficient, a self-confident male character with which the Ottoman man can identify himself.
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Dr. Monica Ringer
This paper focuses on the Tanzimat literary giant Ahmed Midhat’s novel Felatun Bey and Rakim Efendi as a deliberate project of generating citizens through modeling participatory subjectivities. In particular, I seek to uncover the author’s strategies of legitimizing change. Framed as a story of a dialectic between a Westernized Ottoman and a traditional Ottoman, this novel imagines the modern Ottoman citizen, someone who is neither formed through imitating the West, nor by a defensive embrace of the Ottoman status quo, but rather by what I term ‘creative innovation’ of the Ottoman, using Western forms and ideas instrumentally insofar as they address the needs of the Ottoman ‘modern’.
I am interested in the novel as embodying and modeling translation – how modernity is embodied, literally, in various characters that exhibit transitions and departures both between cultural spheres, as well as within them. In particular, I focus on ways in which Ahmed Midhat’s language and strategies of legitimization are embedded in and thus visible through the method of cultural translation itself; how claimed ‘borrows’ from the West to justify departures, even as he simultaneously authorizes innovation as a return to an essentialized original.
Although a staunch advocate of translating Western literature into Turkish/Ottoman, Ahmed Midhat did not see himself as simply transmitting Western ideas, but rather as advocating an instrumentalist use of Western novel forms. The role of Western characters in his novels must be understood as part of his larger project of creative innovation. I seek to focus on several instances of his use of relationships between European and Turkish/Ottoman characters to illustrate ways in which he insists that European cultural and moral practices are inferior to their Ottoman counterparts. At one level these instances can be read as Ahmed Midhat’s rejection of Western assumptions of superiority and a defense of Ottoman cultural norms. At another level, however, they suggest Ahmed Midhat’s strategy of legitimation of a genuine departure from Ottoman practices, yet not an imitative departure – instead one of creative innovation.
