This paper problematizes our understanding of concepts such as “translation,” “adaptation,” and “influence” by focusing on the theme of East-West relations and its representation in contemporary Turkish literature and cinema. It traces how this theme has engaged writers and filmmakers, who not only rely on previous tradition but also expand on it, adopting and adapting it for their own purposes. My paper takes this theme to another level to show how Erdag Goknar, the translator of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Benim Adim Kirmizi, gave the theme an “afterlife” in English and how Dervis Zaim translated the same theme into cinematic language in Cenneti Beklerken/Waiting for Heaven. So far translation has been seen as word for word transliteration of one language into another. This approach ignores the translator’s agency, the process of translation, and how the final product is shaped and received and rewritten by editors, reviewers, and audience. My paper reveals some creative choices Goknar made in order to make Benim Adim Kirmizi (1998) and the theme of East-West relations available to western audience. In 2006 Zaim takes on the same theme in his film Cenneti Beklerken and “translates” it for the wide screen, asking his audience to weight eastern (miniature) and western (painting) means of visual representation against each other. His cinematic style breaks away from traditional Turkish cinematic didacticism and crude political film making and takes his viewer into the realm of arts and the limits thereof. In Benim Adim Kirmizi, Pamuk employs multiple narrators to provide his reader with multiple perspectives. Translating the novel, Erdag Goknar not only translates the plot into English but also engages with fine aspects of literary style to tune it for western audience. Zaim exploits the limits of visual representations by questioning the limits of miniature and painting and also the limits of his own camera to represent life. All three “creators,” writer-translator-film maker, end up questioning the limits of artistic language in the face of human experience.

?ne is a child-bride, who lived in a 16th century village of Aintab and introduced to us by historian Leslie Peirce in her Morality Tales (2003). Meryem, on the other hand, is a fictional character, originally created by Zülfü Livaneli in his novel Bliss (2002) that was adapted to cinema by Abdullah O?uz. Although there are a number of similarities between ?ne and Meryem, such as their young age and orphanage, the major common tragedy of their lives is that they are both raped within the family. ?ne is one of the very few girls whose case was taken to the local court so that we know of her. On the other hand, Meryem is fictional; yet, she represents the majority of the girls who disappeared in the dark pages of history. This paper discusses a case in history and a novel in comparison to its adaptation to cinema and how different genres attempt to reconstruct realities of blurry moral stories. To do so, I will first look at the strategies employed by Leslie Pierce as she tells the stories of women from the 16th century local court of Aintab. As opposed to historical facts with gaps and black holes, I will read Zülfü Livaneli’s novel entitled Bliss and its film adaptation with the same title by Abdullah O?uz and ask whether or not they could achieve to tell the story of the silent girl. The main reason for starting with a scholarly work and moving on to a comparison between literary and visual representations of the similar issue is to highlight the limitations of historical documents and the ability/authority of fiction to reflect the intimate stories of human condition. Although they cannot replace each other, I am interested in the fine line between history and fiction and how they create each other.

This paper will look into problematical representation of male characters in Nam?k Kemal’s novels and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films with a focus on interpersonal relationships of male protagonists with female characters. It explores how a certain male character type, the orphan, that emerged in the Tanzimat (reorganization) era novel, particularly in Nam?k Kemal’s novels, as a result of the social, intellectual, and political milieu is transformed into a problematic, “distant” 21st century modern man in Ceylan’s movies. In the novels of Tanzimat era that center on the orphan character, novelists had created two female characters that are portrayed as complete opposites to educate fatherless sons. In this plot, the orphan struggles between the ideal woman who is the embodiment of traditional values and the femme fatale who is the symbol of degeneration and foreign life style. Although the protagonist’s choice between the two female characters was intended to symbolize a young Ottoman’s struggle between East and West, a close reading reveals a narcissistic tendency shared by both male writers and male characters. On the other hand, Ceylan, in “Distant” (2002) and “Climates” (2006), takes on the similar web of relations and character formation and adapts it to bring meticulous insight into crisis of urban masculinity. His use of different female characters in his films serves to bring out egotism of alienated male characters, rather than to “educate” them. Different approaches to the same narrative by novelist Namik Kemal and director Ceylan brings to light the transformation of the male perspective on masculinity from Tanzimat to today.

This paper will explore Fatih Akin's use of literature in "The Edge of Heaven" both as a leitmotiv that identifies the social and personal problems that the movie addresses, and as a solution to them. These problems cover the whole gamut from poverty, prostitution, immigration, sexual and gender identity, the generational conflict to Kurdish and Islamist politics. The imaginative and generative locus of the movie that counters these is a bookstore in Istanbul. The movie seems to suggest that solution to these problems will come through the ideas that books and movies spread, through the understanding they make possible. The most important work circulating the movie is the German-Turkish novelist Selim Ozdogan’s book “Demircinin Kizi/The Ironsmith’s Daughter,” a typical Turkish melodrama that adapts the form to the needs and problems of a first generation German-Turkish experience. In the opening scenes of Akin’s movie, a son gives it to his father to read, and by the end, the resolution of the moral conflict between them is made possible by the father’s experience of reading it. His emotional response to the book as we see him finish and close it at the very end proves that he is a changed man who can be forgiven. By foregrounding this act of reading and the positive changes it makes possible, Akin takes a political stance for the resolution of social conflicts through education and communication. This message is strengthened through lectures on Goethe’s idea of organic development, delivered by the same son at the university. A detective working on the case of Kurdish separatists also comes back to stressing education as a solution. That this is revolutionary and not a cop-out to preserve the status quo, is signaled through the use of Nazim Hikmet as one of the authors to be read. Akin is suggesting that a reading, enlightened citizenry will look for other means of solving problems than violence, which just perpetuates the same vicious cycle of death. Akin’s strategic placement of the novel both at the beginning and the end paces his movie, and turns it to a metaphoric book jacket for the novel. Akin uses the book not only as a symbol of communication and transformation that is experienced, but as a means to structure his movie and announce his formal kinship with the novel as a parallel variation on the Turkish melodrama, but this time in film.