12

Reviving Virgil in Turkish

Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken

What does Virgil mean to Turkish readers? How, if ever, does his reception in Turkey
differ in itself and from others at the cross-cultural level? What role have translators
played here? These are the questions at the outset of this study, and we have
addressed them with a threefold interdisciplinary perspective based on literary
history, reception studies, and translation history.
Whether we call it Asia Minor, Diyar-ı Rum (Roman land), Anatolia, or Turkey
from different perspectives of historical geography, the unique feature of bridging the
three continents and numerous different cultures has always set this region apart
from the rest of the Mediterranean world. Therefore it is not always easy to deter-
mine the most appropriate methods to explore the complexities of its history.
Restrictive and usually misleading interpretations based on politically charged
East–West dichotomies have largely been abandoned in recent cultural studies. On
the other hand, studies of the transmission of knowledge to and from Asia Minor via
translations often require consideration of that constructed dualism’s history. This is
even more critical when it comes to canonical texts, among which Greek and Roman
classics constitute a distinct group by virtue of their textual history, their wide scope
and coherence, and the centrality and often universality attributed to them.¹
The flourishing field of reception studies has shown that classics and politics, both
chasing archetypes and ideals, can inspire each other,² and this relationship has
proven strong enough to create new myths and to shift paradigms. One may think,
for instance, of Quattrocento artists and humanists who portrayed the Turks as the
descendants of the Trojans (or Teucri, as Virgil referred to them), led largely by their
common territory and the resemblance of their names.³ They did in fact follow in the
footsteps of the medieval Latin authors who viewed the Normans and the Turks alike
as heirs of the Trojans.⁴ On the other hand, although Mehmed the Conqueror’s

¹ Lianeri and Zajko 2008, pp. 9–15; see Porter 2005.

² For an interesting case study, see Bebbington 2008.
³ See Harper 2005; Bisaha 2004, pp. 89–93.
⁴ See Balivet 1998; Runciman 1972.
 EKİN ÖYKEN AND ÇİĞDEM DÜRÜŞKEN

assumed self-portrayal as the avenger of Troy (right after the conquest of Constan-
tinople), reported by the Byzantine chronicler Critobulus,⁵ and the spurious letter to
Pope Nicholas V, attributed to the sultan, that claimed a common origin for Turks
and Italians must have corroborated the myth about the Trojan ancestry of the
Turks, Renaissance minds did not always agree about their origin and ethnic
character.⁶ Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was a ‘multi-religious, multi-lingual, and
multi-cultural conglomeration’.⁷
Another interesting example of political use of the classics in a similar context is
De fortitudine (read to Pope Clement VII in 1523) by Girolamo Balbi,⁸ who saw the
Aeneid as an ethical and political guide to Europe’s liberation from the threat of the
Ottomans and who delivered speeches calling for the Christian princes to unite
against them.⁹
These introductory examples remind us that cultural identities, continuously
manipulated by politics, are usually constructed through other cultures and that
reciprocal identification between isolated nations that engaged in conflict is inher-
ently more transformative. As might be expected, we have deliberately chosen these
examples because of both their Turkish and their Virgilian allusions, in order to mark
out some external factors that may have contributed to the Turkish reception of
Virgil before and along with the translations of his poems, which we can now proceed
to explore.

12.1 Distant but Not Apart

While Turkish readers had to wait until the twentieth century for a full acquaintance
with Virgil, we should not suppose that Ottoman learned circles, at least during the
late empire, which roughly coincides with the long nineteenth century, were com-
pletely unaware of Virgil and his legacy. Their members, who were often exposed to a
wide range of cultural encounters in various social settings both at home and abroad,
can challenge us into reconsidering the definitions of some traditional categories.¹⁰
Therefore one should avoid drawing general conclusions about their literary know-
ledge and intellectual background. We should nevertheless note that classical Greek
and Roman culture was generally known through French translations and adapta-
tions, most of them philosophical compilations or didactic literature such as Aesopic

⁵ Critobulus 1983, p. 170. ⁶ Heath 1979; Poumarède 2009, pp. 59–63.

⁷ Volkan and Itzkowitz 2000, p. 228. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire reached its height in the
sixteenth century, when the empire included the entirety of Asia Minor, Thrace, Crimea, the Middle East,
North Africa, and Eastern Europe. Turkish, an agglutinative language, was introduced into Asia Minor by
the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century and later became the official tongue of the Ottoman Empire, then
of the Turkish Republic.
⁸ Balbi 1792. ⁹ See Scott 2004. ¹⁰ Mardin 2000.
 REVIVING VIRGIL IN TURKISH 

fables or Fénelon’s neoclassical novel Les aventures de Télémaque, and that the
mainstream reception was therefore heavily influenced by French culture.
Due to the multitude of unedited Ottoman manuscripts and poorly catalogued
materials in various libraries and archives, it is not yet possible to identify all of the
early texts concerning Virgil, and therefore his first occurrence in Turkish literary
history cannot be securely dated. The growing interest in him from the late nine-
teenth century on, in parallel with the general curiosity about European culture and
lifestyle, suggests, however, an introduction rather than a rediscovery. The earliest
mentions of Virgil we know of are found in newspaper columns, magazines, and
histories of literature, along with personal correspondence, a dictionary of universal
history and geography, all written in Arabic script and dating back to the fin de siècle.
It can be easily observed that this early contact involved mostly self-appointed agents
rather than a systematic programme of translation or cultural reform. These indi-
viduals, like their counterparts in many other countries, were promoting change in
their society and significantly contributing to it by introducing, and translating from,
authors they considered luminaries. Translation studies scholar Gideon Toury gen-
erically called them ‘agents of change’.¹¹ It seems that the Ottomans had them from
early on, in a variety of ethnic origins, social and occupational statuses such as former
prisoners of war turned imperial interpreters, renegades, Venetian permanent rep-
resentatives known as baili, Phanariots (Greek officials in Constantinople under the
Ottoman Empire), statesmen, poets, savants, scholars, writers, and journalists. Their
activity, however, seems to have seldom involved Greek and Roman literature,
despite the facility for Greek and Latin that some of them had. This does not
mean, though, that translation was not fully institutionalized in Ottoman society.
There were, after all, by the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror, if not earlier, quite a
number of state organizations for translation.¹²
On the other hand, it is also worth asking whether a particular polarity may not
have emerged between Virgil’s supposed ‘Christianity’ and the Islamic aspect of the
Ottoman literary tradition that may have delayed recognition of his work by Turkish
readers.¹³ Although one cannot expect to answer this satisfactorily without consid-
ering the Turkish reception of classical culture in its totality, which is certainly
worthy of a larger study,¹⁴ we hope that the present study, which touches upon the
microhistory of the early modern translations of Virgil into Turkish, may provide a
new perspective on his status as ‘the classic of all Europe’.¹⁵

¹¹ Toury 2002, p. 151. ¹² Kayaoğlu 1998; Paker 2009.

¹³ See Haecker 1934, pp. 60–9, 82–91, 109–14; Eliot 1953, pp. 7–11; and compare Kermode 1983, pp. 25,
139. See also Comparetti 1895, pp. 99–103; Courcelle 1957; Kallendorf 1995; MacCormack 1998,
pp. 21–31.
¹⁴ For preliminary works, see Ortaylı 1996; Açık 2004; Kranz 2017.
¹⁵ See Eliot 1945, p. 31; compare Prendergast 2007, p. 195.
 EKİN ÖYKEN AND ÇİĞDEM DÜRÜŞKEN

12.2 Virgil and His Silent Interlocutors

The earliest Turkish text about Virgil we were able to find is a short translated
biography published in the Ottoman newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat by Selma Rıza,
who was among the first Turkish women journalists, if not the very first one.¹⁶ This
well-educated young woman, versed in European culture, was encouraged by Ahmed
Midhat (1844–1912), the founder and chief editor of the newspaper, who was also a
prolific writer, translator, and publisher.¹⁷ He himself might have been thinking that
Turkish readers should discover Virgil, given that in an anthology published a few
years earlier he had oddly mistitled his translation of the opening lines from the first
two books of De rerum natura as ‘A Translation from Virgil’.¹⁸ He must have fallen
victim here to his boundless enthusiasm for teaching Ottoman people about all
aspects of Western culture, as well as to the haste of journalism.¹⁹ Yet that very mistake
may be the reason why he encouraged Selma Rıza to publish literary biographies of
Latin and European authors such as Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. This should come
as no surprise, as in the columns of the same newspaper a decade later Ahmed Midhat
sparked a spirited exchange known as the ‘classics debate’ over the necessity and the
most suitable source of a literary canon for Turkish culture in the process of change. To
sketch the nature of this war of pens that swelled the columns for a few months, we can
simply say there were at least three main positions: (1) Ahmed Midhat’s own claim
about the necessity of translating and grasping European classics such as Dante,
Shakespeare, Corneille, and Goethe; (2) hesitation regarding the universality of the
classics; (3) and finally, rejection of that necessity. While Greek and Roman classics (not
Virgil though) are mentioned only in passing, this debate nevertheless represents a
milestone in the history of Turkish literary criticism.²⁰ The following years witnessed an
increased interest in European, Greek, and Roman authors, including Virgil, that
materializes in literary histories and universal dictionaries.²¹ Yet the knowledge of
Virgil’s actual poetry, like that of many other classical poets, was still incomplete, not
to say rudimentary.
Within the framework of Virgilian reception, the cultural agents of this long initial
stage might be called the ‘silent interlocutors’, a reversal of Raymond Schwab’s
‘invisible interlocutor’, which stands for Asia, and particularly western Asia, and
its cultural impact on European thought.²² This metaphor, later adopted by Aziz
Al-Azmeh, highlights the intensified dialogue between Europe and Asia in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the obscurity of Asia’s performative identity
in it.²³ Our version, though, has the Virgilian tradition of Europe on one side and its
Ottoman students, visible yet silent, on the other. This is not to be confused with the

¹⁶ Rıza 1888; see Toros 2000. ¹⁷ Midhat 1888. ¹⁸ Midhat 1886.

¹⁹ See Demircioğlu 2009. ²⁰ Kaplan 1998; Paker 2012.
²¹ See Gerçek 1890, p. 35; Sami 1898; Loliée 1901.
²² Schwab 1984, p. 475. ²³ Al-Azmeh 2007.
 REVIVING VIRGIL IN TURKISH 

‘indifferent silence’ that Edward Said used to describe the passivity and obedience of
the Orient vis-à-vis the West.²⁴ It seems fair to say that the ‘pensive’ silence of the
Ottomans here was rooted in their lack of a thorough familiarity with things Greek,
Roman, and, to a lesser degree, European, as much as in the social and political
disparity with Europe. While Ottomans discovered Virgil, Europeans explored both
the mythical settings of his poetry in Asia Minor and its Ottoman inheritors.
Concerning the latter, envoys and travellers come first to mind, such as Busbecq,
Sandys, or Lady Montagu. One can read in them how this dialogic encounter enlivens
the Virgil they know.²⁵

12.3 The Early Turkish Translation History of Virgil

To the best of our knowledge, the first Turkish translation from Virgil, like the first
biography, appeared in an Ottoman periodical. That was the Eclogues, translated and
published serially during 1928 by the Turkish journalist, writer, and politician Ruşen
Eşref (1892–1959) in Türk Yurdu, a journal of ideas and culture.²⁶ After the adoption
of the Roman alphabet, which became effective at the end of the same year, Eşref
published in the same journal his translations of the first two books of the Georgics.²⁷
Türk Yurdu was the official organ of Türk Ocakları, a civil organization that was
founded in 1912 to serve the Turkish nationalism and modernization movement and
played a major role in the nation-building process. In 1929 Eşref published a revised
version of his translation of the Eclogues as the initial book in a planned series of
classics; it was one of the first Turkish books printed in the new Roman script.²⁸
The most interesting feature of this translation is certainly its paratextual material.
The relatively long Preface opens with a eulogy of Virgil. Eşref declares there that he
translated the Eclogues from an intermediary French text and compared it afterwards
with another French translation. His source text is the 1859 translation by Jean-
Pierre Charpentier, and the comparison text Henri Goelzer’s Budé edition.²⁹ He
acknowledges that translating a piece of literature from a language other than the
original detracts from it, and thus explains his doing so:
I must confess that what I have managed to render here is nothing more than a pale and
fleeting reflection of the eternal verse of this glorious poet, whose work stirs the soul of every
modern nation and has remained more vibrant than the subject it celebrates, although his
language has been forgotten and the realm whose deeds he praises has long gone. This
translation is just a dim light on our horizon of that gleaming soul traversing time and
space. How else could it be! I am unable to bring it from its original source. My hands could
only collect its last drops, maybe slightly muddied by being transferred between vessels over
and over again. . . . Virgil’s poems had not been heard yet in Turkish, while they were repeat-
edly listened to in all languages. I ventured to translate Virgil so that my endeavour might be

²⁴ Said 1979, pp. 94–5. ²⁵ See Pollard 2012. ²⁶ Eşref 1928.

²⁷ Eşref 1929a. ²⁸ Eşref 1929b. ²⁹ See Charpentier 1859 and Goelzer 1925.
 EKİN ÖYKEN AND ÇİĞDEM DÜRÜŞKEN

useful and might motivate the emergence of young Turks, trained in Greek and Latin, who are
also interested in literature.³⁰

Next he focuses on the importance of translation in the making of a national literature.

Reminding his readers that Turkish versions of European classics such as La Fontaine,
Molière, and Victor Hugo were made already during the nineteenth century, Eşref
criticizes Ahmed Midhat and his redoubtable debaters for wasting time with speculation
on the ideal classics and their translatability into Turkish when they could just pick one
text and try to translate it.³¹ To his disappointment, even great Persian and Arabic
authors such as Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Saadi have not yet been translated. Eşref ’s remark
here, which is also interesting in terms of the Ottoman cultural system, needs to be read
within the larger framework of Turkish humanism on the horizon:
Had we attached greater importance to translation and got involved with it earlier, we could
have been aware and made use of the artistic manifestations that contributed to the intellectual
awareness and spiritual strength of the nations surrounding the frontiers of the state a century
ago. More importantly, we would thus have thoroughly learned the nature and reason of the
national awakening of the various elements within the [Ottoman] imperial community of that
time, each longing to become a free identity.³²

We should add that, although he finds fault with Ahmed Midhat, who initiated the
‘classics debate’ some thirty years earlier, Eşref regarded translation in much the
same way. To begin with, the two seem to subscribe to similar norms. He asserts, for
instance, the pointlessness of verse translation of poetry, along the classical line of
argument that claims its impossibility, already adopted by Ahmed Midhat.³³ More-
over, they both emphasize translation’s role in civilization, condemn the Turkish
belatedness in it, and try to actively promote its advance.
In closing that general discussion, Eşref signals a change of stance regarding
translation and celebrates Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk), the leader of
the Turkish War of Independence and founder of the Republic. To our surprise,
perhaps, he does so by directly addressing Virgil and by using a striking metaphor,
which compares his poems to Mustafa Kemal’s deeds, in a passage that deserves to be
quoted at some length:
O Virgil, the sweet voice whose words have been passing from mouth to mouth for two
millennia! Your golden lines, more penetrating than all the spears and arrows of Roman
armies, illuminate souls with ardour rather than extinguishing lives as they do; they should
have celebrated the magnificence of Mustafa Kemal, who saved the glory and freedom of his
own nation and brought the civilization of all centuries to his country as the laurels of his noble
and humane triumph, instead of Augustus’s victory which you embedded in Aeneas’s tale and
which became the calamity of other nations. Having written in triumph a new epic, a new

³⁰ Eşref 1929b, pp. 9–10. All translations belong to the authors, unless otherwise noted.
³¹ Ibid., p. 12. ³² Ibid., p. 13.
³³ Paker 2012, pp. 330–2; Eşref 1929b, pp. 12–13; Demircioğlu, 2009.
 REVIVING VIRGIL IN TURKISH 

Aeneid for a country, Mustafa Kemal is writing now a new Georgics on the land beside his
abode, turning barren hilltops to golden fields and green groves. However, you still have no
equal here, at this time. If it is not in the hope of one day having poets like you, for what reason
do we venture, in spite of our incompetence and worthlessness, to put you and your peers,
eminent poets and writers, into our language through intermediary translations? Is it not for
the purpose of inviting the comprehension and sensibility of those children to nobler and more
humane sources? Is it not in order to get them taught by reading you and your peers, by
enriching their feelings and knowledge, as you were taught by reading Homer, Thucydides and
Theocritus? That custom of the world has not changed since your day: most of the people who
speak in an inventive and elegant way flourish by listening to the voices of their immortal
predecessors, who once spoke alike. Indeed, the success of ignorant zeal is unpredictable, its
fruit tasteless, its existence ephemeral.³⁴

Given the two major historical events of the period, namely victory in the War of
Independence (1922) and the foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923), with its
new institutions, this passage directly refers to the changeover from a military and
geopolitical campaign to a socioeconomic one, represented by the Aeneid and
Georgics respectively. While the first analogy requires no explanation, the other is
about the new agricultural programme, which had as its symbol the recently estab-
lished Forest Farm near the presidential residence in Ankara.
Despite the all-too-obvious ideological discourse in the preface, it appears that Eşref ’s
main concern was to familiarize his readers with Virgil’s literary world and to show the
excellence of his poetry, so he endeavoured to emulate in Turkish the charm and
vividness of the original. Although they are typologically different languages, Turkish
and Latin share some structural features, such as noun declension and preferential SOV
(subject–object–verb) word order.³⁵ Furthermore, they both allow alteration of this
default order for pragmatic purposes. As he translated from French, Eşref could not
have ventured to use this similarity and reproduce the word order of the original Latin
sentences. Nevertheless, he has effectively used this aspect of Turkish to create, for
instance, a comparable colloquialism in the opening lines of Eclogue 1:³⁶

Hey Tityrus! Sen bu sık yapraklı kayin ağacının gölgesine uzanmış,

Hey Tityrus! You this densely foiled beech of-tree in-the-shade lying,
ince kavalında rustaî havalar çalıyorsun; biz ise yurdumuzdan sürülmüşüz;
slender on-your-pipe rustic airs you-are-playing; we however from-our-country
have-been-exiled;
onun şirin ovalarını bırakıyor, vatandan kaçıyoruz. Halbuki, sen Tityrus,
its sweet plains [we are]-leaving, from-[our]-country we-are-running-away. Whereas,
you Tityrus,

³⁴ Eşref 1929b, pp. 15–16.

³⁵ Devine and Stephens 2006, pp. 79, 98, 137 n. 2. See also Göksel and Kerslake 2005, pp. 337–50.
³⁶ Eşref 1929b, p. 169, which was translated from the French version of Verg. Ecl. 1.1–5 in Charpentier
1859, p. 63. All references to Virgil’s Latin text are to Mynors’s (1969) Clarendon edition.
 EKİN ÖYKEN AND ÇİĞDEM DÜRÜŞKEN

gölgeye atılca yatmışsın, ormanlara şu aksisedayı öğretiyorsun: ‘Amaryllis güzeldir!’

in-the-shade idly you-have-lain-down, the-woods this echo you-are-teaching:
‘Amaryllis is-beautiful!’

The language of this prose rendering is clean and smooth; largely free from the
elaborate Persian and Arabic compounds typical of Ottoman literary diction, it
heralds the hastening of Turkish language reform (which ended by replacing nearly
all the words from these languages with revived or newly created Turkish ones), whose
supporters include the translator himself.³⁷ Indeed, throughout the late Ottoman and
early Republican period in particular, translation was often seen as a means of reform-
ing, often drastically, the language of the target culture. Not surprisingly, the peculiar-
ities of a language in transition occasionally make themselves felt in the Eclogues
translated by Eşref, who did not refrain from using synonyms of Persian–Arabic and
Turkish origin in close proximity, with no apparent difference in meaning:³⁸

Köhne yıldız-bürçlerinin doğuşunu seyretmek-te nedenmiş ey Daphnis?

old of-constellations at-the-rising of-staring what-is-the-point o Daphnis?
Sen Venus’ün oğlu Sezar’ın sitaresinin ilerilemesine bak: hayırlı yıldız!
you, of-Venus son of-Caesar of-the-star at-the-advance [should]-look: auspicious
the-star!³⁹

Although they might have evoked different associations (Eşref probably meant to
emphasize the uniqueness of Caesar’s star), yıldız and sitare, the former a native
Turkish word and the latter a Persian loan, refer to the same thing: they both mean
‘star’, for which a single word was repeated in the French translations and in the Latin
original. In fact, this and similar co-occurrences bear witness to the richness of
Ottoman language as much as to the natural consequences of language planning.
The fact that Eşref prioritized the cultural and literary value of Virgil’s poetry is
also reflected in his decision to accompany the translation with Sainte-Beuve’s
famous study on Virgil, along with the introduction and summaries of Henri
Goelzer’s recently published Bucoliques, all translated into Turkish. He also
appended an ad hoc dictionary of Greco-Roman mythology and biography. Never-
theless, one should keep in mind that he saw Virgil through the lens of European
culture and largely observed foreign norms of translation.

³⁷ Sağlam 2004, pp. 52–8. Tendencies towards lexical purification and grammatical simplification of
Turkish had already surfaced during the Ottoman centuries. An early but still important study is Levend
1960. See also Aytürk 2008.
³⁸ Levend 1960, p. 382 asserts that in the late 1920s many authors kept using Persian and Arabic
loanwords, while they usually discarded the compounds borrowed from these languages.
³⁹ Eşref 1929b, p. 256. This line is translated from the French translation of Eclogue 9.46–8 in
Charpentier 1859, p. 107, which reads: Pourquoi, Daphnis, contempler le lever des anciennes constellations?
Vois s’avancer l’astre de César, fils de Vénus, astre bienfaisant.
 REVIVING VIRGIL IN TURKISH 

To complete this outline of Eşref ’s Eclogues, we proceed now with the reviews of
this publication in order to locate it more exactly within the literary culture of the
day. Appearing shortly after its publication in 1929, these reviews were unanimously
positive. Like the translator himself, most of the reviewers belonged to the inner circle
of Turkish modernists. Apart from the fact that they were united around the ideal of
introducing a new Turkish diction and saw a reification of it in this translation of the
Eclogues, they did not fail to recognize its translator’s literary skills. His prose
rendering, in their view, was not short of poetic charm; his language was recognized
as being lucid and graceful, his style spirited.
One of the reviewers was the acclaimed writer and politician Yakup Kadri
(1889–1974). He is arguably the one on whom the Eclogues exerted the greatest
influence, so that he took it as a paradigm of Turkish translation from classical authors
in a period where still very few, if any, were able to translate directly from Latin or Greek:
In my thinking, such a useful effort has greater merit than any scholarly work. Ruşen Eşref has
added a good deal to Virgil’s Eclogues from his own heart and soul. Therefore these two
thousand-year-old poems read as if they were written for us yesterday. Virgil’s soul sings
behind his. Even more interesting is that this prominent poet from the age of Augustus
inspired a sensitive author of Mustafa Kemal’s time, which is also why this translation is so
original and differs from others.⁴⁰

Briefly put, Eşref ’s Eclogues marks the beginning of a new era in more than one sense.
It represents, above all, a turning point in the establishment of some new translation
norms and, for us classicists, the beginning of a deepened awareness of the import-
ance of classical philology and scholarship.
While the Eclogues thus influenced the cultural life of the early Turkish Republic, the
second full translation, namely the Aeneid of Ahmed Reşit (published in two volumes in
1935 and 1936), had a somewhat different background and fate.⁴¹ Once again, prose
translation was chosen and a French version was used as source text, namely the
bilingual Garnier edition of Maurice Rat.⁴² Ahmed Reşit (1870–1956), who was both
a writer and a politician, complemented his translation with the introduction penned by
the original French translator for his 1932 volume, in the manner of his young
predecessor. However, his Aeneid differs from the Eclogues in many other aspects. To
start with, the two translations sharply contrast in their Turkish usage. Reşit’s language
immediately strikes the reader as elaborate, even high-flown. Here is the opening
invocation to the Muse (Aen. 1.8–11, Reşit 1935–6, vol. 1, pp. 44–5):

Ey ilham alihesi (Muse), bu vekayiin esbabını tahattur-ederek, bana söyle-ki

o of-inspiration the-goddess (Muse), these of-events the-causes remember [and]
me tell,

⁴⁰ Kadri 1929, p. 57. Having a broadly similar background, Kadri himself adheres strictly to the same
approach in his own Horace compilation, published two years later.
⁴¹ Reşit 1935–6. ⁴² Rat 1932.
 EKİN ÖYKEN AND ÇİĞDEM DÜRÜŞKEN

alihlerin kraliçesi, alihiyetine karşı ika-edilmiş ne türlü bir tecavüze ve

of-gods the-queen her-divinity against perpetrated what kind-of a violation and
hangi hakarete ceza olarak, mukaddesata riayetle müştehir o kahramanı
what insult the-punishment-of as, of-sacred-things for-[his]-reverence renowned
that hero
bukadar tehlükeler geçirmeye, bukadar beliyelere gö ğüs-germeye sevketti.
such dangers to-undergo, such calamities to-endure she-made.
Semavî alihlerin ruhunda bu derece hiddet olur-mu?
heavenly of-gods in-the-soul[s] that much rage can-it-be?
The language here seems to have arisen mainly from the translator’s attempt to
convey the epic character of the original.⁴³ After all, having witnessed the culmin-
ation of the previous renewal efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, and having
himself adopted a simpler diction in his earlier works, he was neither a language
purist nor a radical reformist.⁴⁴
The translation strategies in Reşit’s Aeneid are also different. Although the single-
page Foreword does not reveal much about his approach or decisions, Reşit seems
generally to follow the more old-fashioned nineteenth-century Ottoman practices.
Those quasi-traditional norms are based upon a complex concept of translation,
which does not always comply with modern notions of fidelity.⁴⁵ For instance, Reşit
did not refrain from weaving into the main text sections from the explanatory
footnotes of the French translator, as he does for instance here:⁴⁶
‘Ganimed’in ‘Olenp’e kaçırılıp tebcil-edilmesi vakiasını kalbinin samimine hak-edmişti.
Ganymede’s to-Olympus [of]-abduction [and] reception the-incident of-her-heart
to-the-core she-had-inscribed.
While the original of the corresponding part reads l’enlèvement et les honneurs de
Ganymède (‘the abduction and the honours of Ganymede’), Reşit added from the
original note the detail of location (Olympus), which, in this case, he kept at the cost
of redundancy.
A general observation about Reşit’s footnotes is worth mentioning here. He
included almost all the notes to the French text, except some specific ones that
may have seemed to require from the reader an extensive prior knowledge of the
subject. Sometimes, on the contrary, he added his own notes when he considered that
a short explanation would suffice. A remarkable example of the latter is his explan-
ation of the French word chœur, which occurs in the context of Amata’s Bacchic revel

⁴³ See Erhat 1940, p. 90. ⁴⁴ See Reşit 2014, pp. 69–70.

⁴⁵ See Paker 2012; Demircioğlu 2005.
⁴⁶ Reşit 1935–6, vol. 1, p. 46. The Turkish translation renders the French translation of Verg. A. 1.26–8
in Rat 1932, vol. 1, p. 5, which reads: elle garde, gravé au fond de son coeur . . . l’enlèvement et les honneurs de
Ganymède. This is not an isolated case, and this tendency of Reşit was seriously critized by Erhat 1940,
p. 91, from a normative approach of translation.
 REVIVING VIRGIL IN TURKISH 

at 7.389–91: ‘The collective singing and dancing of people is called “Koro”

(Chœur).’⁴⁷ Unnecessary as it may appear at first glance, this note was quite useful.
Although the newly founded republic officially supported Western classical music,
which had already been introduced during the Ottoman Empire, ‘chorus’ (absent
from traditional Turkish music) must have still been an enigmatic term for the
general reader in the mid-1930s. This illustrates well the translator’s concern to
capture as much detail of the original as possible. Nevertheless, foreignizing was
not the only strategy that Reşit adopted. There are occasions where he favoured a
domesticating approach—as for example here:⁴⁸
Parklar tarafından bast ü izhar-edilen levhai takdirin hükmü böyleydi.
the-Fates by spread-out and declared of-the-plate of-destiny the-command thus-was.
In the Islamic symbolism of fate, which surfaces here, all future events, including
human lives, are inscribed on a primordial plate. The interesting thing is that Reşit
combined the symbol of the Roman Parcae with its Islamic counterpart by making
them keepers of the plate. He did not fail, though, to add a brief note to explain the
Greek and Roman origin of these divinities. In a similar case, however, Eşref had
preferred foreignization by preserving the original concept and relying more on the
explanation given in his appended dictionary:⁴⁹

Parques (Parklar) kaderin değişmez iradesiyle uzlaşarak:

the-Fates (Parcae) of-destiny unchanging the-command by-agreeing:
‘Dönünüz iğler, bu bahtlı asırları iğiriniz!’ demişler.
[go on]-turn spindles, these blessed ages spin they-said.

The translation decisions of the two authors differ in some other respects as well. For
the spelling of proper nouns, for instance, Eşref ventured to restore some of their
Latin forms—unlike Reşit, who generally adopted the French forms, simply adjusting
them to Turkish spelling (in fact someone unfamiliar with classics might mistake his
Aeneid, at first sight, for a book by a French author, because the title page reads
Virgile, L’Énéide). Likewise, Eşref seems to have pondered over the title page, which
reads: Virgilius, Çoban Şiirleri: Bükolikler (‘Virgil, Shepherd Poems: Eclogues’). He
also used the term türkü (‘folk song’), a derivative of the word Türk, which means
‘Turk’, for the title of separate eclogues. These indicate Eşref ’s tendency towards mild
domestication of the original.
The archaism throughout Reşit’s translation can also be seen as a deployment of
his own particular cultural capital (to employ Bourdieusian terms), namely a rem-
nant of his bureaucratic career. As a court scribe under Abdülhamid II for a decade

⁴⁷ Reşit 1935–6, vol. 2, p. 29. ⁴⁸ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 46, translating Aen. 1.22.
⁴⁹ Eşref 1929b, p. 208, translated from the French translation of Verg. Ecl. 4.46–7 in Charpentier 1859,
p. 82, which reads: Tournez, fuseaux; filez ces siècles fortunés, ont dit les Parques d’accord avec l’ordre
immuable des destins.
 EKİN ÖYKEN AND ÇİĞDEM DÜRÜŞKEN

and a half, Reşit had written thousands of official letters replete with grandiloquent
expressions; at that time he was an active member of the progressive literary
movement Edebiyat-ı Cedide (New Literature), until that movement was forbidden
by the sultan.⁵⁰ Hence he acquired a good command of different styles and registers
of language, and his strategies in the Aeneid, the linguistic ones at least, probably
depended on his cultural background and ingrained habits as much as on the
traditional translation norms that he consciously followed. Finally, it should be
added that Reşit did not say anything about the importance of philological study
or about future translations from the classics, whereas Eşref ’s prediction about young
classical philologists had already begun to be fulfilled. This modern era, which we
plan to study in another work on the modern reception of Virgil in Turkish, began in
the 1930s, when Turkish university reform laid the foundation of classical studies.
From then on, the field achieved diversity through various translations and grew to
maturity thanks to thorough philological studies.
Our initial question, ‘What does Virgil mean to Turkish readers?’, still waits to be
answered and what we have presented here can provide, at best, no more than a
general overview of a complex response concerning a remarkably different literary
and cultural system. Nevertheless, we find the simplest justification for future work
on Virgilian reception in a remark made by an important intellectual of the late
Ottoman–early Republican era: ‘There are poets whose literary life lasts as long as
their lifetime; or their poetic life covers some years, if not a chapter of their life. The
works of some others endure as long as the languages in which they are written
endure. A yet more fortunate group consists of poets whose works outlived their
language; Homer and Virgil belong to this blessed band of poets.’⁵¹

⁵⁰ Reşit 2014, pp. 64–80.

⁵¹ Cited in Polat 2005, p. 198, these are the words of Celal Nuri (1882–1936), a well-known late
Ottoman and early Republican intellectual, journalist, and politician, published in a literary magazine
(Rübab) at a time when Ottoman publishing enjoyed an unprecedented florescence, right after the 1908
Constitutional Revolution that dethroned Sultan Abdülhamid II, restored the parliament, and ended the
censorship aggravated by the sultan.
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors
LORNA HARDWICK JAMES I. PORTER
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the
present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the
centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old
and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts,
theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Virgil and His
Translators

EDITED BY

Susanna Braund and

Zara Martirosova Torlone

1
 3
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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank numerous scholars and friends for their assistance in
bringing this volume into being. The genesis of the volume lay in three workshops
and conferences, held in Vancouver (2012), in Paris (2014), and at Cuma near Naples
(2014). All three were inspiring events and we express our deep gratitude to all the
participants, many of whose papers appear in this book. Our co-organizers, Craig
Kallendorf at Naples and Siobhán McElduff at Paris, were crucial collaborators and
interlocutors to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude.
Two key scholars at the Vancouver event who are not present in the volume were
Stuart Gillespie and Stephen Harrison: we thank them profoundly for their insights
and encouragement. The level of discourse at all three events was exceptional and
exemplary; we recommend strongly the model we adopted, of precirculating the
papers, and we thank all participants for honouring our desire to maximize engaged
discussion at the events.
The conferences that generated this volume would not have been possible without
funding from several sources. The award, to Susanna Braund, of a Standard Research
Grant by SSHRC, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, funded the
Vancouver conference. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University
of British Columbia supported the Wall Colloquium Abroad at the Institut d’Études
Avancées in Paris with a generous award; we acknowledge with gratitude the warm
hospitality of the Institut and its director. The Villa Vergiliana and the Vergilian Society
provided Zara Torlone with the venue for the Naples/Cuma conference. The final stages
of editorial work on the volume have been funded by Susanna Braund’s Canada
Research Chair funds, which happily were finally released to her by the University of
British Columbia.
Translations from French and Italian were undertaken by Liza Bolen, Gillian
Glass, and Jelena Todorovic; we thank Marco Romani Mistretta for additional help
with Italian idioms. We thank Einaudi for permission to print an English translation
of pages from the introduction to Alessandro Fo’s Italian translation of the Aeneid.
Some additional acknowledgements of permissions to reproduce selected material
follow below:
• Josephine Balmer’s ‘Lost’ and ‘Let Go’ have been reproduced from her collection
Letting Go: Thirty Mourning Sonnets and Two Poems (Agenda Editions,
Mayfield, 2017), and ‘Creusa’ has been reproduced from her collection Chasing
Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, 2004) by kind permission of the author.
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon have been
reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press
(www.gallerypress.com).
• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968–1978 (Faber & Faber, London, 1980), The Cure at Troy (Faber & Faber,
London, 2002), and ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ and ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ from Electric
Light (Faber & Faber, London, 2001) have been reproduced with kind permis-
sion of Faber & Faber Ltd.
• The lines from ‘The Great Hunger’ and the poem ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh in
Chapter 27 are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn
(Allen Lane, London, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of
the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
For their dedicated hard work we thank Jake Beard for editorial assistance, Emma
Hilliard for devising the index, and Graham Butler for completing it. Brian North
worked wonders with a challenging set of proofs and we are most grateful. We
especially thank the general editors of the series and the readers for their extremely
thoughtful and constructive criticisms and guidance on the shape of the volume. No
volume of collected essays is perfect, but we believe that, thanks to the support we
have received, we have produced a balanced and polished book, which will stimulate
many future conversations on the important topic of the translations of Virgil.
Finally, we thank our immediate support networks, who provided calmness and
sanity when the volume was threatening to become unruly: Susanna thanks her
wonderful husband Adam Morton and her many old dogs; Zara thanks her husband
Mark Torlone, her two daughters Christina and Francesca, and her parents,
Dr Sergey Martirosov and Samvelina Pogosova, for their love and support. We
have both loved this collaboration with each other: we are always, it seems, on the
same page, and that has been affirming and encouraging throughout the project.
Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

The publisher and the editors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list.
If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
Contents

Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version 1

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Part 1. Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital

1. Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation 23
Craig Kallendorf
2. Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de
Villena’s Eneida of 1428 36
Richard H. Armstrong
3. Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia 51
Stephen Rupp
4. Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English
(from Caxton until Today) 63
Alison Keith
5. The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700 80
Gordon Braden
6. An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 97
Fiona Cox
7. Virgil after Vietnam 107
Susanna Braund
8. Translations of Virgil into Esperanto 124
Geoffrey Greatrex
9. Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek 136
Michael Paschalis
10. Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid 151
Sophia Papaioannou
11. Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian
Reception of Virgil 166
Marko Marinčič
viii CONTENTS

12. Reviving Virgil in Turkish 183

Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken
13. Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues
and the Politics of Language 195
Mathilde Skoie
14. The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’: Virgil’s Epic in French between
Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret 209
Séverine Clément-Tarantino
15. Virgil in Chinese 224
Jinyu Liu

Part 2. Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition,

Appropriation, and Identification
16. Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies 239
Richard F. Thomas
17. Du Bellay’s L’Énéide: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention? 260
Hélène Gautier
18. Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis 275
Stephen Scully
19. Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques
de Virgile 289
Marco Romani Mistretta
20. ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’: The Translation of Aeneid 2
by Giacomo Leopardi 305
Giampiero Scafoglio
21. Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition
of English Translations of Virgil 318
Philip Hardie
22. Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian
Translations of the Aeneid 331
Zara Martirosova Torlone
23. Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century 345
Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos
24. Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 355
Ulrich Eigler
 CONTENTS ix

25. Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the

Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol 368
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
26. Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian
Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 385
Ulrich Eigler
27. Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics 399
Cillian O’Hogan
28. Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid 412
Alessandro Fo
Afterword: Let Go Fear: Future Virgils 422
Josephine Balmer

Bibliography 431
Notes on Contributors 473
Index Locorum 481
General Index 496