Translation Studies

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Beyoğlu/Pera as a translating site in Istanbul

Şule Demirkol-Ertürk & Saliha Paker

To cite this article: Şule Demirkol-Ertürk & Saliha Paker (2014) Beyoğlu/Pera as a translating site
in Istanbul, Translation Studies, 7:2, 170-185, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.874538

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.874538

Published online: 10 Feb 2014.

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Translation Studies, 2014
Vol. 7, No. 2, 170–185, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.874538

Beyoğlu/Pera as a translating site in Istanbul

Şule Demirkol-Ertürka* and Saliha Pakerb
a
Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Yeditepe University, Turkey; bDepartment
of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Boğaziçi University, Turkey

In this article the Beyoğlu/Pera district, heart of cosmopolitan Istanbul, is

conceived as a site of “interculture”, of interaction, involving a nexus of
translators and publishers from different ethnic, cultural and linguistic back-
grounds. To explore the making of new culture repertoires replacing those
dominant in the early years of the Turkish nation state, the context is set with a
brief history of the social/political/cultural change in Istanbul, before and after the
1990s. Here, “interculture” gains urban concreteness, enabling analyses of
multiple translating/publishing practices which concern specifically Armenian
and Kurdish “minority” cultures and languages of Turkey, as well as Turkish.
Discourses are foregrounded to illuminate (a) aspects of the translators’/publish-
ers’ habitus regarding current resistance to patterns set by the dominant
discourse, and (b) the agents’ intentions to work for change in creating new
spaces of inter-communication and interaction, opening closed societies and
standing against “structured” differences among ethnic and linguistic collectivities
that operate in the same area of Istanbul.
Keywords: Beyoğlu/Pera; Armenian and Kurdish “minority” cultures; intercul-
ture; culture repertoire; translator’s habitus; translation as resistance; history of
translation

The city […] does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines
of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the
windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning
rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with
scratches, indentations, scrolls.
(Calvino 1978, 11)

Istanbul wasn’t always Istanbul. It has been Byzantion, Constantino-

polis, in the mid-Byzantine period it was simply Polis, in the Ottoman
period it was Konstantiniyye, İslambol, Dersaadet, and had many
other names; but it was never only Istanbul. During the first half of the
20th century, the names, except for Istanbul, were almost completely
wiped out. The city became Istanbul. This, as always, signifies more
than just a name change.
(Tanyeli 2008, 43)

Names are fragile ciphers for dramatically changing realities.

(Simon 2012, 15)

*Corresponding author. Email: suledemirkol@gmail.com

© 2014 Taylor & Francis
 Translation Studies 171

As its various names imply, Istanbul is a city of multilayered memories and histories.
With the complex, multifaceted aspects of its past and present, it stands like a
“plural”, “writerly text”, as defined by Roland Barthes ([1974] 2002, 5), which lends
itself to multiple readings and rewritings. In such a “plural” city, stories and histories
depend on the perspectives of its readers: visitors travelling its streets or lifelong
residents, immigrants from different parts of Anatolia or from different countries of
the world, those living in the shanties or those who had to leave it never to return.
The city means a different past and a different present to each who writes about it.
Authors writing about Istanbul also read the city as a “plural” text (Demirkol-Ertürk
2010, 8–9). Just like a translator who “must make choices, selecting aspects or parts
of a text to transpose and emphasize” (Tymoczko 2000, 24), they highlight parts of
the city-text and create alternative narratives of the city, since it cannot be reflected
in its entirety (Demirkol-Ertürk 2010, 8–9).
For the contemporary international reader, one among these various narratives
seems to have prevailed over others: the Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk’s
reading of the city, in his Istanbul, Memories and the City (Pamuk [2005] 2006). The
image he has produced travels the world through its interlingual translations and
rewritings based on or inspired by it. According to Pamuk (ibid.), Turkey’s
“westernization” project failed and the multicultural character of the city was
destroyed due to nationalist movements born hand in hand with it: “It was the end of
the grand polyglot multicultural Istanbul of the imperial age; the city stagnated,
emptied itself out, and became a monotonous monolingual town in black and white”
(ibid., 238, 245–246).
It is true that the city has changed remarkably in the last century. As Uğur
Tanyeli (2008) pointed out, a process of social and cultural homogenization took
place from the 1920s onward, in the course of which the city “forgot” many of its old
names. Istanbul became the standard designation for the city as “the least political,
least religious and least ethnical [sic] among the names in use” and “the singulariza-
tion foreseen by nationalist imagination appeared to have been established” (ibid.,
44–45).1 However, a new cosmopolitanism has gradually come to replace the
traditional one: “The city of fixed communities and statuses, where inflow and
outflow was strictly controlled, now (especially after the 1980s) set out to become
one shaped by the countless parameters of individualities, preferences, expressions,
interests, groupings and separations” (ibid., 45).
Without claiming to be exhaustive in scope and detail, this article sets out to
break new ground in exploring the cultural networks of the city – focusing on the
Beyoğlu/Pera district of contemporary Istanbul in light of shifting parameters
occurring in culture, language and politics, especially since the 1990s. This particular
decade marks a significant turn in the creation of new culture repertoires to replace
those dominant in the early years of the Turkish nation state. Naturally, translating
and translations play an essential role in this process, as they did in the days of
Ottoman Konstantiniyye and further back in Byzantine Konstantinoupolis. The
Beyoğlu district on the European side of the city is specifically selected as the focal
point of this article as it represents an intriguing example of a modern “interculture”
where conflicts and divergences in cultural memory seem to have entered a process
of negotiation and mediation through translation activity. Beyoğlu, the heart of
cosmopolitan Istanbul, has also been known as Pera (from the Greek to pera, “the
other side” of the old city) since Byzantine and Ottoman times.2 The name Pera,
172 Şule Demirkol-Ertürk and Saliha Paker

which had fallen into relative disuse in the idiom of Istanbul until the 1990s, has
since then been revived as a symbolic designation of the new cosmopolitanism of
Istanbul. Here we chose to refer to the district as Beyoğlu/Pera for its resonance with
the past.
Istanbul has been aptly described as “an interzone of mediation” (Eldem, quoted
in Simon 2012, 154), which would apply equally well to Beyoğlu/Pera. Using the
concept of “interculture” (as will be discussed below) which has already made a place
for itself in translation studies, we have chosen to explore Beyoğlu/Pera as an
example of not an abstract notion, but one which gains an urban concreteness in this
context. We have observed that Beyoğlu/Pera, representing a nexus of active agents
from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, working with different languages,
lends itself to analyses of multiple translating activities. The very existence of
translations and of translators, working today in Beyoğlu/Pera from different
“minority” languages of the city into Turkish and also in the opposite direction,
may be seen in itself as an indicator of a will to communicate and of mutual
recognition between communities, in contrast to non-translation which can be inter‐
preted as a sign of neglect or rejection, or of a need to retreat into closed circles –
as in the case of the “minority” communities of Istanbul during the early republic
but also for a long time later until the 1990s. Translators and publishers are now
crossing borderlines to ensure permeability by negotiating the rules of interaction
between ethnic, cultural, ideological differences. The Armenian and Kurdish
communities in particular can no longer be considered “invisible minorities” (Cronin
2010, 250) in the interculture of Beyoğlu/Pera as their translators and publishers
actively introduce options that are changing the established culture repertoires. For
this reason, such agents are discussed here not only as professionals but as
“socialized individuals” (Meylaerts 2008). Through an overview of the statements
by translators and publishers, the present article takes a first look at their ways of
resisting normative structures, which obviously calls for more research into aspects
of their habituses (Bourdieu [1979] 2005; Simeoni 1998; Meylaerts 2004, 2008, 2010;
Sela-Sheffy 2005). Such research would focus on a larger social context with a critical
awareness of the “overemphasis placed on translators’ submissiveness as a universal
component of translators’ habitus” (Meylaerts 2010, 2) and pay more attention to
the “the structuring role of translators vis-à-vis the translational norms” (Tahir
Gürçağlar 2008, 45). In this respect, Rakefet Sela-Sheffy’s criticism also deserves
attention:

It may be argued that in established cultures such as those of English and French
speaking communities today, which Simeoni probably had in mind, translators are more
inclined to comply with overpowering domestic standards. Yet in peripheral or nascent
cultures submissiveness is not always a prevailing strategy. (2005, 5)

Such approaches support our preliminary findings regarding the various agents of
the newly energized interactions among linguistic and cultural communities of
Istanbul, who are no longer submitting to structures that prevailed in Turkey till the
1990s. Therefore, the concept of habitus is conceived here as a “dynamic and plural”
one (Meylaerts 2008, 94), shedding light on the translators’ power to resist and
change. From this theoretical perspective, the present article sets out to examine if
the work of translators and publishers of different languages in Istanbul is an activity
 Translation Studies 173

which opts for resistance at a macro level by challenging official narratives and
resisting dominant discourses about different communities of the city and by
offering, by this means, new options for the city’s culture repertoires (Even-
Zohar 2010).
Our main focus is on translation/publishing practices concerning Armenian and
Kurdish cultures and languages, the former recognized as an official “minority”
language, the latter unrecognized and banned as such, until 1991. As Karin
Karakaşlı claims, “ ‘Kurdish’ and ‘Armenian’ are usually attached to the concepts
of ‘problem’ or ‘issue’ in Turkish rhetoric, revealing something problematic about
these identities” (2012). For us, translations done by and published by Armenian and
Kurdish agents of interculture stand for complexities to be looked into and analysed
rather than “problems”. For reasons of space, we could not include our findings on
the new Greek3 publishing company, Istos, founded in 2012. Istos is engaged in
translating from and into Greek, and aims to resist “ghettoization” (cf. Cronin 2010),
by overcoming structures interiorized by the Greek community of Istanbul (see
Benlisoy et al. 2012). This case and the rather different one of the Sephardic (Jewish)
contribution to the network of interculture need to be taken up separately and
studied in detail. To be mentioned here is the importance of Rifat Bali’s research
on minorities and Karen Gerşon Şarhon’s leadership in reviving the Ladino/Judeo-
Spanish language (Şarhon 2014).
We begin with a brief historical overview, paying close attention to the 1990s in
the course of which significant political and cultural changes took place. To flesh out
our description of Beyoğlu/Pera as an “interculture” in the next section, we draw on
our interviews with two writers and translators, Karin Karakaşlı and Muhsin
Kızılkaya, for their “take” on this area from Armenian and Kurdish perspectives.
This discussion is followed by two sections of analytical overview of the discourse of
agents involved in translating and publishing Armenian and Kurdish texts.
Samplings of their statements (some from seminars and panel discussions organized
in the district) are foregrounded here to focus on their intentions, modes and lines of
resistance since it is important to discover how and in what contexts they aim at
challenging official narratives and dominant discourses about different linguistic and
cultural communities of the city. Translators and publishers seem to show active
cooperation in challenging normative structures which had set borderlines between
co-existing linguistic and cultural communities. Creating new spaces of intercom-
munication and interaction, standing against “structured” differences among ethnic
and linguistic collectivities, appear to be common goals of agents operating in
Beyoğlu/Pera. However, in general terms, their individual statements also indicate
that their ultimate goals in producing books in their mother tongue and translations
into and from Turkish, as well as from other languages, need to be differentiated in
terms of both communities.

Istanbul, a city of multilayered histories

In her Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin (2008,
242–251) gives a short but lively description of the “cosmopolitan society” of the
imperial capital in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in which at least 14 languages
(ranging from Scythian to Catalan) were spoken by the multi-ethnic population.
Greek was required for taxpayers. During the Ottoman reign, until the Greek
174 Şule Demirkol-Ertürk and Saliha Paker

uprising against Ottoman rule, leading to its independence (1821–1832), Greek

families, mostly Phanariots, served as interpreters in the Ottoman court. Greek,
Jewish and Armenian intellectuals took part in learned societies for the translation of
European sources into Ottoman Turkish (Mardin 2000, 234, 236, 238–239). In
nineteenth-century Istanbul, newspapers, magazines and other printed matter were
published in eighteen different languages besides Turkish.4
The language policies changed altogether with the birth of the Turkish Republic
in 1923 as a nation state. The Constitution defined the official language as Turkish.
Moreover, Article 42 established that “[n]o language other than Turkish shall be
taught as a mother tongue to Turkish citizens at any institutions of training or
education” (Constitution of the Republic of Turkey). An exception is the case of
“official minorities” whose rights were defined by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).5
Thus Armenian, Greek and Jewish communities (mainly residing in Istanbul) could
send their children to their own schools and publish journals and newspapers in their
own languages.6 However, those of different sects of Islam or of different ethnic or
linguistic background were not granted official minority rights (Oran 2007, 36–37;
2011, 9–10).
The sociocultural conditions of Turkey’s “minority” populations, be they Muslim
or not, would be better understood in the context of early republican culture planning.
Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, the first to study this subject in detail, writes:

The first twenty years of the republic were marked by intensive planning activity which
aimed to westernize Turkey while building a nation equipped with a unique Turkish
identity, […] a new and secular identity which would ideally rise upon a common
culture, language and history instead of religion. (2008, 49–50)

According to Rifat Bali (1999, 1), various ethnic communities remaining from the
old empire were expected to quickly accommodate themselves to this urgent identity
change. However, the new nation state was conducting nothing less than a major
cultural revolution (mainly from Ankara, the new capital, not from Istanbul) which
imposed radical measures (rather than offering “options”) in planning or engineering
changes in language, script, dress and women’s status. In their rejection of
everything to do with the Ottoman Empire, such measures concerned the larger,
traditional Muslim population as much as non-Muslim minorities. It may well be
argued that the whole nation was subject to multiple forms of “translation”. Baskın
Oran (2010, 3), a political scientist and advocate of “minority” rights, argues that
while trying to create a nation with a singular identity, the new republic worked on
assimilating its Muslim communities but failed to do the same with the non-Muslim
ones, choosing to force them out of the country through a series of laws and bans.7
In 1928 a campaign was initiated in Istanbul, calling on all “Citizens” to “Speak
Turkish”.8 The politics of Turkification (based mainly on language politics)
regarding the non-Muslim communities were active until 1945 (Bali 2001), while
pressure on religion continued until the 1990s with ups and downs (Oran 2010).
It was in the 1990s and later that questions of identity and “minority” rights
(Muslim or not) gradually became issues of heated public debate in Turkey. Such
discussion was triggered by the large-scale urban demolitions (1986–1988) in
Beyoğlu’s Tarlabaşı district which was once inhabited by the non-Muslim popula-
tion of the empire and by the Levantines (i.e. descendants of Europeans who had
 Translation Studies 175

settled in Istanbul), but later by migrants from Anatolia (Bartu 1999, 36). A rising
awareness of cultural diversity was expressed as municipal plans to transform
Istanbul into a global city in the twenty-first century were put into action. Turkey’s
application for membership in the European Union in 1987, and acceptance of its
candidacy in 1999, played a crucial role in the process. However paradoxical it may
seem, so did the rise of political Islam. The Welfare Party won the Istanbul
municipal elections of 1994, hailing the “second conquest of the city” by its “real
owners” (ibid., 40), with their own politics of identity up for debate. How this
political shift figured eventually in the celebration of Istanbul as the “Cultural
Capital of Europe”9 in 2010 and the controversies over keeping a balance in the
representation of the Europeanized (translated) aspects of the city and those of its
Ottoman past (naively presumed to be untranslated) deserve a separate study.
The official language regime faced several challenges in the 1990s due to the rise
of politics of identity which supported claims endangering the presumed integrity
and homogeneity of the nation’s cultural and linguistic representations (Balçık 2008,
5–6). Of historic importance was the 1991 repeal of the ban on the Kurdish
language,10 put into place in 1983 by a law following the notorious military coup of
1980. This constitutes a milestone in the history of the languages of Turkey, not only
opening the way for publications in Kurdish (ibid., 133), but also acknowledging the
diversity of cultures and languages cohabiting the same cities of the same country.
Following the overturn of the ban on Kurdish in 1991, Rewşen, the first
magazine legally published in Kurdish, was started by the Mesopotamian Cultural
Centre founded in Beyoğlu to revive Kurdish and provide patronage to Kurdish
authors and translators. Nûbihar, another magazine, which was predominantly in
Kurdish, followed in 1992 (in Beyazıt) as well as Avesta Publishing in 1995, also in
Beyoğlu, specializing in original Kurdish publications as well as translations from
Kurdish into Turkish. The founding of Aras, the Armenian publishing house in 1993
in Beyoğlu, followed by that of the Armenian weekly newspaper Agos in 1996 (in
Osmanbey, closely connected to Beyoğlu) were also major enterprises of the decade.
The discourse of peace, mutual recognition and understanding was advocated by the
late Hrant Dink, founder of Agos and its chief editor until 2007. His assassination
was met with horror and indignation and must be considered a dramatic turning
point in the self-identification of the “majority” with “minority”, or in the
minoritizing of majority. Hrant Dink had stated that Agos was published in Turkish
(with four pages in Armenian) so that the Armenian community could break
through their confinement to better express themselves, uphold their identity, and
explain problems common to both Armenians and Turks (Dink and Duman 2006,
129, 131). According to Karin Karakaşlı (2012), the Kurdish movement for cultural
rights made a strong impact in opening up the Armenian community. She finds it
significant that the first publication by Aras was Mıgırdiç Margosyan’s Gâvur
Mahallesi [Neighbourhood of Infidels]. This was based on the lives of Armenians
and their Kurdish, Chaldean, Assyrian and Jewish neighbours in Diyarbakır, now
the mainly Kurdish city in south-eastern Turkey, where Margosyan was born (ibid.).

The Pera of Istanbul as an “interculture” and its translators as “socialized individuals”

Reine Meylaerts’ (2004, 289) statement reflects precisely what is taking place in
concrete terms in the interculture sited in Beyoğlu/Pera: “in multilingual geopolitical
176 Şule Demirkol-Ertürk and Saliha Paker

contexts, geo-linguistic barriers between ‘source’ and ‘target’ cultures are indefinite
so that translations, both as a process and as a product, also function in the source
culture”. In turn, Meylaerts’ words resonate to a certain extent with Saliha Paker’s
contention that in the case of the “Ottoman interculture”, with its imperial
translation strategies that were mostly appropriative of Persian and Arabic sources,
the boundaries between “source” and “target” became less distinct as from the
sixteenth century, but also later, in the nineteenth century, when French was
introduced (Paker 2002, 136; 2006, 331; 2011, 468). Now, in the twenty-first century,
we can site an interculture in Istanbul, more specifically in Beyoğlu/Pera, that
operates in a network of a very different nature, but building on the Ottoman legacy.
For the sake of distinction, some might choose to site “source” and “target” cultures
in the different linguistic communities (some of which are defined legally as
“minorities”) who, in fact, can share the same streets, the same districts, the same
public spaces, within the same country. However, this would defy any binary
relationship because of the fact of the hybridity of each. Karin Karakaşlı offers an
explanation:

Everything started with an uneven and lumpy letter “A” I wrote on the wall. Inside the
house my grandmother showed me other signs for A and B. “What’s this grandma?”
“It’s Armenian.” There I was, totally confused and fascinated with two labyrinths of
alphabets that looked like ciphers and two languages, both rivalling each other for being
my mother tongue; one for home and one for the street. Sometimes I would confuse
them and create my unique language in a single question: “Bu inç e?” meaning “What is
this?”: “bu” in Turkish, “inç e” in Armenian. (2012)

The historical cosmopolitan site of Beyoğlu/Pera stands today as not just a

multilingual interaction zone, but a cultural network that is inherently hybrid,
which is closer to what we mean by “interculture” (an overlap of diverse domestic
cultures and languages, which may not be easily described as “source” and “target”
in translations produced from one into the other by a network of cultural agents).
Interculture does not correspond to the concept of “multicultural” either: the latter is
imagined and promoted in official or semi-official rhetoric as a “mosaic” of many
cultures, representing mutual recognition and tolerance. Turkish discourse places
multiculturalism mostly in an imagined Ottoman history, in some sort of nostalgic
context. However, the locus of discussion chosen for this paper is not the
cosmopolitan, multicultural Beyoğlu of the late Ottoman times but a new space of
resistance, challenge, as well as mediation, intended for the voices of “minorities” to
be heard and, hopefully, understood. Memories of numerous conflicts and hardships
and resulting sensitivities inevitably interfere and one cannot speak of equality in
terms of social, cultural, political power. Therefore, in this context, it is more than
interesting to observe how translators and publishers as agents of interculture resist
and challenge social structures and sociocultural power relations which they had
internalized. Muhsin Kızılkaya, writer, translator and political commentator, offers
an absorbing insight into what we mean by Beyoğlu/Pera as an interculture:

Above everything else, the birds of Beyoğlu don’t only sing in Turkish. For a long
while, “other” birds had their beaks stuffed with straw but now each sings in its own
tongue in this unique place. Since my days in the 1980s, Beyoğlu has given me the same,
unconfined air to breathe as on the mountains of Hakkari [on the border with Iran and
 Translation Studies 177

Iraq, where he spent the first 20 years of his life], making me feel the same as I did in my
birthplace. […] My adventures as a translator started in Beyoğlu when […] I was
introduced to the founder of the modern Kurdish novel, Mehmed Uzun, and when, one
day in Çiçek Bar, Yashar Kemal assigned me the task of translating Uzun’s Siya Evînê
into Turkish. […] Uzun’s Kurdish originals were brought out by two publishers in
Beyoğlu. Avesta which has published almost the entire corpus of classical and modern
Kurdish literature, was also founded here. Many contemporary Kurdish institutions […]
including the Kurdish theatre group Seyri Mesel, started operating here. Time which
had frozen still in 1918 seemed to come back to life after ninety years. (2012)11

Kızılkaya draws attention to an important historical fact which is not widely

known:

In 1918, Jîn (Life), the publishing organ of the Society For Kurdish Advancement was
founded here in Beyoğlu and became the centre for Kurdish enlightenment. In 1919,
Mem û Zîn, the founding classic of Kurdish literature (1695) was first edited and
published by Hamza of Müks [Hemzeyê Mûksî], with a preface so bold that it could not
be reprinted in 1968. Tolerance for the Kurdish language once shown in Beyoğlu had
long disappeared by 1968. I couldn’t find a publisher for Mehmed Uzun’s novel when I
first translated it into Turkish in 1995. People were disdainful: was there enough of a
Kurdish language to produce a Kurdish novel? So I’ve always wondered why Mehmed
Uzun first found his readership in Istanbul, Beyoğlu, instead of his homeland,
Diyarbakır?12 (Ibid.)

In Kızılkaya’s view,

the rest of the country remains a province of Istanbul, of Beyoğlu, in terms of our
modernization history. From the days of a genteel district, to those of crime, for a while,
and to its eventual transformation into a centre of arts and culture, Beyoğlu was the first
place where the voice of the “othered” could be heard. (Ibid.)

Publishers and translators of Armenian: Aras Publishing and Agos Weekly

Mıgırdiç Margosyan’s Gâvur Mahallesi [Neighbourhood of Infidels] was mentioned
above as the first publication by Aras in 1993. In 2011, Aras brought out a trilingual
volume of the same work, in Armenian (Mer Ayt Goğmerı, the original), its rewrite
in Turkish by the author, and the Kurdish version (Taxa Filla, published initially by
Avesta in 1999). The publisher’s note stated that their aim was to “transform into
reality the desire for all ancient Anatolian languages to live side by side in peace”.
The book is a remarkable example of “minoritizing” (cf. Cronin 2010) Turkish, the
dominant language, through translation in a mediating role. It also highlighted a
meaningful collaboration between Armenian and Kurdish literary communities: one
pushed away into the shadows as an “official minority”, the other, with no legal
minority status at all, banned for many decades.
Aras publishes translations that serve the creation of an alternative histori-
ography which aims at resisting and challenging the dominant official one. “For
decades 1915 was a historical taboo or a subject of official history, related and
taught with the use of hostile generalizations that described Armenians as ‘traitors’
who collaborated with the Russian armies and were, therefore, deported”, says Karin
Karakaşlı (2012). From this perspective, Aras’ publications of Turkish translations
from Armenian and other languages used by Armenians in diaspora, about
178 Şule Demirkol-Ertürk and Saliha Paker

Armenian experiences under Ottoman rule and the early Republic, may be better
appreciated with particular attention to the Armenians’ will to articulate their sense
of belonging to Anatolia and to its cultural history. One of the most important
historiographical studies to come out from Aras is 1915 Öncesinde Osmanli
Imparatorlugunda Ermeniler (2012), a very recent Turkish translation of Les
Arméniens dans l’Empire Ottoman à la veille du genocide [Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire on the Eve of the genocide] originally published 20 years ago by Raymond H.
Kévorkian and Paul B. Paboudjian.
Another book, published earlier this year by Aras, deserves special attention.
This is a collection of short stories translated from Armenian into Ottoman Turkish13
and edited by Sarkis Srents in 1913 in Istanbul (Srents [1913] 2012): Ermeni
Edebiyatı Numuneleri 1913 (titled in English as Anthology of Armenian Literature
1913, in the Aras catalogue 2010–2011). First serialized and well received in a
prestigious Ottoman Turkish literary journal, the book is now a republication of the
1913 translation into Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic script) accompanied by a parallel
intralingual translation into modern Turkish (transcribed in the Roman alphabet) to
make it accessible for contemporary Turkish readers. The co-translator, Ari
Şekeryan (2012, 15), states in his introduction that the book is yet one more
contribution to increasing Turkish awareness of Armenian history, language, culture
and literature. The stories which represented, at the time, a lively existing literature,
are, in Şekeryan’s words, “but a pale reflection of what has perished since: Ottoman
Turkish is no longer a living language, there is no literary production in Armenian in
Turkey anymore and the Western Armenian language used in most of the narratives
in the book is sinking into oblivion” (2012, 13). It is also ironic that in his
commendatory preface for the 1913 edition, Haratyun Şahrigyan should have
claimed “Ottoman Turks had no sacred sense of nation”; it was

just beginning to emerge among Armenian intellectuals. […] One of our responsibilities
towards Turkey is to establish this sacredness in all its purity. […] Only then will
understanding bear fruit between us and hand us back the right to live, thus making way
for respect, mutual sacrifice, maturity, a common goal and friendship, working together
for the welfare of our common homeland. ([1913] 2012, 62–63)

Such a commitment brings to mind the words of Karin Karakaşlı, who is an

Armenian journalist and translator, as mentioned above, but also well known as a
fiction writer and poet in Turkish:

Finding a new language for old history, for the present we live in and the future to come
is now more than a necessity for being a writer. This was instilled in me as a leitmotiv by
my mentor Hrant Dink, editor-in chief of Agos, who, despite his dedication to the peace
struggle, or because of it, was assassinated in front of the office building in 2007. Now a
stone in Armenian and Turkish, carved into the pavement on the spot where he fell
dead, reminds me of my debt to him each and every day I enter the building. Inspired by
his discourse, I would call this new language a poetic-political language, rooted in the
awareness that the Armenian and Kurdish “problems” constitute Turkey’s actual
impasse […] in calling it a poetic-political discourse, it simultaneously becomes possible
to underline the autonomy of each individual and to undermine stereotypical general-
izations such as “Turks” and “Armenians”. The poetic element gives depth to the
political one which is no longer experienced as short-term politics bound to national
interests, bargaining and conjuncture, but one that reveals the truth about societies in
 Translation Studies 179

the way political science would have it. Among all the languages I pour my words into,
Armenian, Turkish, German and English, the one I hold dearest is this new poetic-
political language of understanding each other and expressing oneself. To me, red lines
are not taboos’ warning signals, but exit signs. Only by touching on and overcoming
them can we reach freedom. That is the legacy of Hrant Dink’s language dedicated to
peace, to challenge the red lines of state policy. What we most need nowadays is an
intralingual translation: of words resonating in the heart with confidence in oneself and
trust in the other, so that the language of peace and reconciliation may be reached.
(2012)

The latest catalogue of titles by Aras Publishing, which consists of a wide range of
literature in Armenian before the 1950s and an equally impressive range of
translations into Turkish, is ample proof of an energetic contribution to the
challenging of “red lines” as well as to the growing repertoire of interculture.

Publishers and translators of Kurdish

Original publications in Kurdish and translations from Kurdish into Turkish and
vice versa, are seen by many as part of the movement for the right to be legally
recognized in terms of identity, language and culture. For Abdullah Keskin, the
founding of Avesta Publishing (1995) was “a passionate ideal, a matter of honour”
(Keskin 1995). Since then, publishing books in Kurdish and translations from
Kurdish into Turkish has proliferated widely not only in Istanbul, but also in
Diyarbakır. “Publish your books in Kurdish”, a campaign started by Turkish writers
in 2010, added new dynamics by calling for more translations from Turkish into
Kurdish (Bia Haber 2010). But in our view the real change had come about in the
1990s with the Turkish translations of works by the late Mehmed Uzun (1953–2007),
the leading modernizer of the Kurdish novel.
Translations of Uzun’s novels into Turkish not only introduced the readers of
Turkish language to modern Kurdish literature but also drastically changed their
perception of the Kurdish language: readers and publishers had no idea that such
fiction could exist in Kurdish (Temo, Tarık, and Akınhay 2007; Kızılkaya 2012).
Besides, this phenomenon raised the complex question of assimilation – in this case,
“where to position Uzun as a translated Kurdish author: in ‘Turkish literature’, in
‘literature in Turkish’, or in the ‘literature of Turkey?’ ” (Spangler, MA diss., in
progress).
Michael Cronin draws attention to a crucial question arising from “assimila-
tionist translation pressures”:

writers in a minority language have frequent recourse to auto-translation into a major

language […] to facilitate their presence as writers/translators in other languages. […]
Does the frequent practice of auto-translation create not a literature-in-translation but a
literature-for-translation? (2010, 260; italics in original)

Although Uzun was involved in self-translating a novel of his into Turkish at one
stage of his career (Spangler, MA diss., in progress) and cared a lot about being
translated into Turkish and other languages, we don’t think he would have been
involved in “literature-for-translation”, because his main concern was to forge a
Kurdish prose style for modern Kurdish fiction and, as Spangler has pointed out (in
a personal communication), to give priority to publishing his books in Kurdish “for
180 Şule Demirkol-Ertürk and Saliha Paker

the fostering of the Kurdish novel, almost forcing readers of both languages to
approach the Kurdish first”. However, Cronin’s question brings to mind a different
case. Yavuz Ekinci and Murat Özyaşar are two young Kurdish fiction writers,
educated in Turkish, having had no training in their mother tongue. So far, they
have published their books in Turkish and won significant literary prizes. Therefore
it is fair to say that they were subjected to “assimilationist translation pressures”.
However, since 2011 their fiction has been translated into their mother tongue by
Kawa Nemir, Lal Laleş and Mehmed Said Aydın, all accomplished writers and
translators whose achievement needs to be taken into account also as a form of
resistance against the consequences of assimilationism, one that would perhaps
compensate for the loss suffered earlier by Ekinci and Özyaşar, and others like them.
Ekinci says he “was delighted that his novel was translated into his mother tongue
and met with a completely different readership” (2012).
The chief mission that Mehmed Uzun had set out for himself was to master
literary Kurdish, to refine it by drawing on the oral narrative tradition for the
renewal of the modern Kurdish novel. Kawa Nemir, “a Kurdish poet, writing in
Kurdish”, adopted a parallel strategy in translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which he
called a “revolution in Kurdish”: it was to enrich his mother tongue (Nemir and
Stêrk 2010). Similarly, Lal Laleş, Kurdish translator and publisher, believes that
translating world classics into Kurdish and reviving forgotten Kurdish authors will
help build a modern Kurdish literature (Evrensel 2010).
The first major, comprehensive, two-volume, bilingual Kürt Şiiri Antolojisi
[Anthology of Kurdish Poetry, with Turkish translation] (2007) is an impressive
step towards reviving classical and modern Kurdish literature. The co-translator and
editor Selim Temo “lived for many years far away from Kurdish, without a sense of
belonging to either Kurdish or Turkish” (Temo and Günçıkan 2011). He first started
to translate and to work on Kurdish literary history when (like Mehmed Uzun,
whom he also translated), he decided to “win back” Kurdish as his native literary
language and work for its recognition (ibid.). For Temo, “a literature becomes
known only through translation”, but his own poetry should be published in Kurdish
and kept “untranslated” (Temo and Tuna 2012). The Turkish reviews of his
anthology revealed widespread astonishment: “nobody ever thought such a history
of poetry could exist” (Temo, Tarık, and Akınhay 2007). Temo’s anthology also
came as a surprise to Kurdish intellectuals, whom he criticizes for paying attention
only to the oral roots of the language while ignoring the classical works written in
religious circles (ibid.). While acutely aware of ongoing political troubles, “feeling
them in his flesh”, Temo refuses to discuss his work outside its literary context (Temo
and Tuna 2012). In Temo’s view, the misfortune of Kurdish literature lies in its “self-
orientalist” perception. Literariness is missed or ignored, as literature is read only
from a certain political, ideological perspective (Temo and Günçıkan 2011).
We leave the last word to Kızılkaya:

As Turkish is joined by the languages that were once banned, the “common wisdom”
which once ruled these lands will be eventually re-established. Today, the country has
once more come to know about Armenian literature, at least through Turkish
translations. It is thanks to Turkish translations that Kurdish has been recognized as
one of the oldest Mesopotamian languages, that it is not only a medium for politics but
also for literature. To quote Oğuz Atay, our cult novelist, our adventure in translation
and in different tongues is a long-term journey towards “Turkey’s psyche”. (2012)
 Translation Studies 181

Concluding remarks
This study, which sites a network of interculture in Beyoğlu/Pera, has yielded results
that draw particular attention to translators and publishers involved in two
“minority” languages, Armenian and Kurdish. As regards Istanbul Greek, the newly
established Istos Publishing will be interesting to explore in the future.
Publications as well as aims, intentions, criticisms aired in discourse show that
translating into Turkish, the dominant language, is considered by agents mentioned
in this study as a primary function of the interculture network, one which runs
parallel to making the “originals” visible/readable/audible. While the Armenian
emphasis appears to be on recognition of history, the Kurdish insists on recognition
of language. Hence, the stronger will to write/read/publish in Kurdish and to
translate into Kurdish. In the Armenian context, translations that focus on the long
history and difficult cultural survival of Armenians in Anatolia/Istanbul are
foregrounded, while the newspaper Agos continues to function actively as a
translating site, be it interlingually or, as Karakaşlı (2012) put it, “intralingually”.
In the Kurdish context translating is given different roles: translations from Kurdish
into Turkish as well as from Turkish and other languages into Kurdish are seen as
part of the Kurdish people’s struggle to maintain their identity, language and
traditions, while translations, along with text production in Kurdish, are expected to
contribute to developing the Kurdish mother tongue as a written and literary
language, and to creating a modern Kurdish literature through the import of
canonical works of western literature into Kurdish.
Published originals and Turkish translations are intended (a) to confront
Turkish readers with their loss of memory of the domestic languages, literatures
and cultures of identities “othered” and repressed, especially until the 1990s; (b) to
challenge and change sociopolitical attitudes and “red lines” set by the establishment
as represented in the Turkish normative official or semi-official discourse; but also
(c) to revive “minority” languages and win recognition; and (d) to offer ways (overt
or covert) towards mediating differences, avoiding further conflict and promoting
understanding.
In terms of habitus, it is evident that publishers and translators operating as fully
“socialized” agents not just of “minority” groups but of the interculture which also
embraces Turkish agents, have more than resisted dominant policies and attitudes.
Along with significant steps taken towards a more democratic and liberal society
since the 1990s, efforts have been made to change established norms in translating
and publishing.
We may also conclude that the interculture sited in Beyoğlu/Pera has served as a
dynamic source of options currently enlarging the repertoires of cultural revival not
only on a “minority” level, but also on a “majority” level with the greater
involvement of Turkish publishers, translators and readers. These new and wider
repertoires of interculture are worthy of close analysis.

Notes
1. In her inspirational study of Kolkata, Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal in Cities in
Translation, Sherry Simon (2012) also dwells on the homogenization of Istanbul, in terms
of a “duality” brought about by the nationalist pull for a Turkish “monoculture” of the
182 Şule Demirkol-Ertürk and Saliha Paker

Republic (founded in 1923) away from former Ottoman pluralism and diversity. This, in
Simon’s view, takes the form of a “dual translation”: of language, from Ottoman
(hybridized with Persian and Arabic) into modern Turkish, of a society of multiple ethnic
minorities into a nation of dominant Turkish identity (ibid., 156). Thus it “was translated
out of its messy imperial multiplicity, away from its past, and given a simpler shape”
(ibid.; italics in original). Simon’s palimpsest metaphor for Istanbul, Kolkata and Trieste
is a powerful one: “translation has been a writing-over, the effacement of the past,
the sponging out of competing memories” (ibid.). An aspect that needs to be clarified in
the case of Istanbul, is that it defies description as a “dual city” in which “two languages
vie for the role of a tutelary language” as in the case of Kolkata, Trieste, Barcelona and
Montreal (ibid.). Especially in the case of Istanbul since the nineteenth century, tensions
between imperial or republican state policies and diverse ethnic identities/languages may
not be easily reduced to the duality of individual ones between Greek and Turkish,
Armenian and Turkish or Judeo-Spanish and Turkish.
2. For a full history of Pera, see Millas (2001).
3. The Greeks of Istanbul are called “Rum” in Turkish, “Konstantinoupolites” or simply
“Polites” in Greek. İlay Romain Örs refers to them as “Rum Polites”, combining the two
terms in Turkish and Greek, and argues that “for the Rum Polites the context of cultural
belonging beyond the nation-state is specifically centred on the urban cosmopolitan
experience of being from Istanbul” (Örs 2006, 81). In our paper, “Greek” refers to the
Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul and their idiom.
4. Çok Dilli İletişim Merkezi (Multilingual Communication Centre at the School of
Journalism, Istanbul University).
5. For a detailed discussion of the Treaty of Lausanne, its interpretation and implementation
by Turkey see Oran 2007.
6. For example, Armenian newspapers Jamanak/Ժամանակ (1908) and Nor Marmara/
Նոր Մարմարա (1941), Greek newspapers Apoyevmatini/Απογευματινή (1925) and
Iho/HXΩ (1977), the weekly Jewish newspaper Şalom/‫( שלום‬1947), largely in Turkish
since 1984, all of which are still running.
7. See “The Greek Turkish Population Exchange”, http://cmes.arizona.edu/sites/cmes.
arizona.edu/files/3.%20Case%20study%20-%20Greek%20Turkish%20Population%20Ex
change.pdf.
8. This campaign was initiated by the Students’ Association of the Law School of the old
university known as Darülfünun (today, Istanbul University) at a congress held on 13
January 1928. In a later meeting organized by the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları,
founded in 1911 by Ziya Gökalp, the champion of Turkish nationalism), it was decided to
put up posters in public spaces and give conferences at schools calling all citizens to speak
Turkish in public. Similar campaigns followed not only in Istanbul but also in different
regions of the country until the end of the Second World War. Another campaign, started
after the military coup of 1960, was quashed soon after (see Bali 2006 and Akdoğan
2012).
9. See Göktürk, Soysal, and Türeli (2010).
10. The Kurdish languages/dialects, each a separate language divided into sub-dialects
according to Ziya Gökalp (1995, 32), are as follows: Goranî, Kirmanckî (Dimilî, Kirdkî,
Zazakî), Kurmancî (the one most translated into Turkish), Lorî and Soranî.
11. All translations from Turkish are ours unless otherwise indicated.
12. Diyarbakır is only just beginning to emerge as a centre of Kurdish culture after decades of
economic deprivation, sociopolitical and military conflict and emigration to western
Turkey, especially to Istanbul.
13. Ottoman Turkish, composed of Turkish, Persian and Arabic lexical and syntactic
elements was the language of “Ottoman interculture”, written in the Arabic script. Under
the Turkish Republic, the Arabic script was replaced by the Roman alphabet in 1928. The
Language Reform which was started in the 1930s, aimed to “purify” Turkish of Persian
and Arabic linguistic/literary structures. Contemporary Turkish readers often need
intralingual translations in order to understand works originally written in the Ottoman
language.
 Translation Studies 183

Notes on contributors
Şule Demirkol-Ertürk is assistant professor of translation studies at Yeditepe University,
Istanbul. Her research interests include translation of urban narratives, translation and the
transfer of cultural images, and Turkish literature in translation. She has published articles in
English, French and Turkish on the role of literary translation in the creation and circulation
of the images of the city of Istanbul. She is also an active translator of literary and scholarly
texts from English and French into Turkish.
Saliha Paker is the first professor of translation studies to be appointed in Turkey. In 2008 she
retired from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, but still teaches a course in the PhD programme in
the same department and continues to serve on PhD dissertation committees. Her research has
covered Turkish translation history, with special emphasis on literary-theoretical aspects of
translation in the Ottoman period, and the history of Turkish literature in English translation.
Her articles have come out in international publications since 1986, and her co-translations of
modern Turkish poetry and fiction have appeared in the UK and USA.

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