ne dersin, ulusal iyiliksever keşişler örgütü'ne girelim mi?
So I was sitting in the Kartal cultural center looking at Modern world classics translated into Turkish yesterday and I got a case of supreme culture-arrogance-inspired-suspicion. I had recommended L'assommoir in the Turkish translation, and had been looking at copies of "meyhane" all over the city, but sort of felt like the only thing that really makes it worth reading is the colorfully dated slang and descriptions, and the cool way Zola "achieves the effect of a single, harmonious narrative by the rapidity of his transistions between the form of subjective narrative and the more usual objective narrative- that is to say between the words of an authoritative narrator and the voice of one of its characters". The translator ( I finally gave up trying to read it in French after the wedding procession, my French dictionary was giving me carpal tunnel syndrome). English has an amazing wealth of registers to choose from, from Biblical puritanism to cockney to instruction booklet to hip-hop to Shakespeare to parenthetical blog (Alas! Were I but worthy to be drafted into this pantheon of Englitude!). But I don't know if Turkish's cultural inheritance gives it that same breadth. The first time I noticed was while watching revolutionary road and glancing down at the subtitles. Kate and Leo sounded wonderfully tupperwareish even when they called eachother cunts because the dialogue was so subtely tainted with the 50's (perfect example "swell", the turkish translation just said the word for great, no nostalgic register to make the dialogue seem as deliberately dated as the costumes) Take the end of Chapter 3 of l'assommoir
"- Ça ne vous empêchera pas d'y passer, ma petite ? Vous serez peut-être bien contente d'y passer, un jour ? Oui, j'en connais des femmes, qui diraient merci, si on les emportait."
My translation in English is slightly cockney, 19th century-ish "It won't stop you getting there, darling. You may even be happy to go, one day. Yes, there are some women I know who would thank you for taking them off" (actually, I chose to copy a bad passage out of the Turkish version to make my point, there aren't any really strikingly dated words, just a sort of antique syntax, but oh well, just believe me regardless)
Here is the Turkish "bu, sizin de oradan geçmenizi engellemez yavrum... belki de günün birinde oradan geçmek sizin de hoşunuza gider...evet, öyle kadınlar gördüm ki oraya götürünce. bize teşekkür ederler"
I mean, how dated does that sound? People (well I guess just old ladies climbing onto city buses) still say yavrum, does the syntax sound Ottoman? I don't know. I wonder if that would in any way work, to have hausseman era french workers speaking Osmanli. I wonder.
My study parnter showed me the verbose questions from her law exam prep book and it was super interesting how the higher, legalistic register of Turkish (I didn't say it only has one register (I mean if it did that would be great, I'm so burnt out on the diaglossal mindgames of that bane of my existence, Arabic) but that things are much more straighforward) is just transliterations of Arabic words. fooooooor example, the word for "resistance, putting your foot down" in normal Turkish is direnmek but in legalistic Turkish it is temerrüd which you can easily find in your Hans Wehr by looking at page 1059. How fucking cool is that!! It was like a cosmic linguistic magic carpet ride akin to when I realized the vaguely familiar surrrounding words like "इंतज़ार " and " असर' were just Arabic imports via urdu via persian.
So with these things in mind I rushed over to the English literature section and picked out Ulysses.
sarman, babaç Buck Mulligan, üzerine bir anayla bir ustura haçvarı konulmuş tıraş sabunu köpüğü dolu tasıyla merdivan başında belirdi
What better way to put Turkish to the test. Better than Shakespeare I think since Ulysses is more layered with registers, more appreciative and playful with phonology, more nonsensical and all-around baffling. The translator introduction (I love reading translator introductions, I can still quote the Arabic translator of a Muhammad Arkoun book I read الاخلاص فضيلة في كل شيء الا بالترجمة) didn't beat around the bush, he was reverant to the impossibility of his task (he said it took him fucking 40 years to translate it)
"...olay, ingilizce yazılmış bir şey yapıtı türkçe'ye çevirmek değil, Ulysses'ce iyi türkçe'ye çevirmektir"
"... to translate something written in English into Turkish isn't a work of art, translating something from Ulysses-ish into Turkish is "
and then more frankly " Ulysses' çevirmeye kalkışmak başlıbaşına bir çılgınlık"
which I think means "translating Ulysses is a head-numbing impossible insanity" or something like that
Which made me feel a little haughty ( in characteristic متغطرسي fashion) about speaking the worlds most subtle, flexible, and wide-spread language in the whole world. But I mean, that shit goes both ways . And also to be fair I looked at some other books I've read in English translation, and I made all sorts of completely amateurish conjectures. (speaking of amateurish, I was reading my book in Turkish on Mughal dynasty and mistakenly translated acemistan as "amateur land" instead of "Persia", Yuck yuck yuck) But look how Turkish sounds from Spanish:
ne dersin, ulusal iyiliksever keşişler örgütü'ne girelim mi? -seksek
kaçınılmaz bir şeydi- acıbadem kokusu ona mutsuz aşkların yazgısını anımsatırdı hep.
not too bad, but I have that sort of feeling that literary Spanish and literary Turkish both share a sort of unabashed formalism that sounds weird in English anyways (Garcia Marquez and Orhan Pamuk are incredibly similar to me, both sort of tools)
And then I thought that Turkish is very terse and sort of has a logical charm to it (I heard it from the Vito that esperanto was fashioned after Turkish for this very reason(not for my esperanto allusion to be overlooked, vito is esperanto for grapevine, ok, we're clear on that?) that can be put to some good use. I then thought about the most terse and absurdly logical thing I know written, which sounds super weird both in English and in New pornographers songs.
"the world is that which is the case"
Sure enough, the Kartal seaside cultural center had my good friend squeezed between Decartes and Fichte (I know, weird right? I have a theory that the Istanbul metropolitan government is anti-spinozian on one hand, and anti-anything after Hegel on the other, (only a municipal government that thought that "the role of the State as expressing the Spirit of a society, as a realization of God in the world." would plant 4 million tulips in the city limits))
And to it's credit, Turkish was able to squeeze the original german version's 9 words into 4, take THAT vienna Circle, maybe it was a bad idea to ward off the Ottoman siege after all!
"- Ça ne vous empêchera pas d'y passer, ma petite ? Vous serez peut-être bien contente d'y passer, un jour ? Oui, j'en connais des femmes, qui diraient merci, si on les emportait."
My translation in English is slightly cockney, 19th century-ish "It won't stop you getting there, darling. You may even be happy to go, one day. Yes, there are some women I know who would thank you for taking them off" (actually, I chose to copy a bad passage out of the Turkish version to make my point, there aren't any really strikingly dated words, just a sort of antique syntax, but oh well, just believe me regardless)
Here is the Turkish "bu, sizin de oradan geçmenizi engellemez yavrum... belki de günün birinde oradan geçmek sizin de hoşunuza gider...evet, öyle kadınlar gördüm ki oraya götürünce. bize teşekkür ederler"
I mean, how dated does that sound? People (well I guess just old ladies climbing onto city buses) still say yavrum, does the syntax sound Ottoman? I don't know. I wonder if that would in any way work, to have hausseman era french workers speaking Osmanli. I wonder.
My study parnter showed me the verbose questions from her law exam prep book and it was super interesting how the higher, legalistic register of Turkish (I didn't say it only has one register (I mean if it did that would be great, I'm so burnt out on the diaglossal mindgames of that bane of my existence, Arabic) but that things are much more straighforward) is just transliterations of Arabic words. fooooooor example, the word for "resistance, putting your foot down" in normal Turkish is direnmek but in legalistic Turkish it is temerrüd which you can easily find in your Hans Wehr by looking at page 1059. How fucking cool is that!! It was like a cosmic linguistic magic carpet ride akin to when I realized the vaguely familiar surrrounding words like "इंतज़ार " and " असर' were just Arabic imports via urdu via persian.
So with these things in mind I rushed over to the English literature section and picked out Ulysses.
sarman, babaç Buck Mulligan, üzerine bir anayla bir ustura haçvarı konulmuş tıraş sabunu köpüğü dolu tasıyla merdivan başında belirdi
What better way to put Turkish to the test. Better than Shakespeare I think since Ulysses is more layered with registers, more appreciative and playful with phonology, more nonsensical and all-around baffling. The translator introduction (I love reading translator introductions, I can still quote the Arabic translator of a Muhammad Arkoun book I read الاخلاص فضيلة في كل شيء الا بالترجمة) didn't beat around the bush, he was reverant to the impossibility of his task (he said it took him fucking 40 years to translate it)
"...olay, ingilizce yazılmış bir şey yapıtı türkçe'ye çevirmek değil, Ulysses'ce iyi türkçe'ye çevirmektir"
"... to translate something written in English into Turkish isn't a work of art, translating something from Ulysses-ish into Turkish is "
and then more frankly " Ulysses' çevirmeye kalkışmak başlıbaşına bir çılgınlık"
which I think means "translating Ulysses is a head-numbing impossible insanity" or something like that
Which made me feel a little haughty ( in characteristic متغطرسي fashion) about speaking the worlds most subtle, flexible, and wide-spread language in the whole world. But I mean, that shit goes both ways . And also to be fair I looked at some other books I've read in English translation, and I made all sorts of completely amateurish conjectures. (speaking of amateurish, I was reading my book in Turkish on Mughal dynasty and mistakenly translated acemistan as "amateur land" instead of "Persia", Yuck yuck yuck) But look how Turkish sounds from Spanish:
ne dersin, ulusal iyiliksever keşişler örgütü'ne girelim mi? -seksek
kaçınılmaz bir şeydi- acıbadem kokusu ona mutsuz aşkların yazgısını anımsatırdı hep.
not too bad, but I have that sort of feeling that literary Spanish and literary Turkish both share a sort of unabashed formalism that sounds weird in English anyways (Garcia Marquez and Orhan Pamuk are incredibly similar to me, both sort of tools)
And then I thought that Turkish is very terse and sort of has a logical charm to it (I heard it from the Vito that esperanto was fashioned after Turkish for this very reason(not for my esperanto allusion to be overlooked, vito is esperanto for grapevine, ok, we're clear on that?) that can be put to some good use. I then thought about the most terse and absurdly logical thing I know written, which sounds super weird both in English and in New pornographers songs.
"the world is that which is the case"
Sure enough, the Kartal seaside cultural center had my good friend squeezed between Decartes and Fichte (I know, weird right? I have a theory that the Istanbul metropolitan government is anti-spinozian on one hand, and anti-anything after Hegel on the other, (only a municipal government that thought that "the role of the State as expressing the Spirit of a society, as a realization of God in the world." would plant 4 million tulips in the city limits))
And to it's credit, Turkish was able to squeeze the original german version's 9 words into 4, take THAT vienna Circle, maybe it was a bad idea to ward off the Ottoman siege after all!
wowon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen
üzerine konuşulamayan konusunda susmalı
üzerine konuşulamayan konusunda susmalı
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