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ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur proposed the concept of “linguistic hospitality” as a labour of translation between discrete national languages. But in the instance where what is designated as foreign was once intimately part of one’s own language, linguistic hospitality becomes a potential project for reconciliation within a single language. This article examines Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil’s 1938 intralingual translation of his seminal novel Mai ve siyah (“Blue and Black”, 1896–1897) occasioned by the Turkish republican script and language reforms that intentionally produced a linguistic schism in order to divorce the Turkish nation from its cosmopolitan Ottoman past and forge a “purified” national language. A comparative analysis of the Ottoman Turkish and the Turkish versions of his novel demonstrates that, in defiance of enforced national forgetting, Halid Ziya’s project points to an alternative literary language enriched by its plurilingual past.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Nasrin Rahimieh for her thoughtful feedback and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 All English translations from the Turkish are mine.
2 The eighteenth century saw early attempts at linguistic reform and became pronounced in the nineteenth century, as Şerif Mardin (Citation1961) argues, with the rise of print capitalism and journalistic movements.
3 The title of the column, run in Radikal, as Parla observes, is a play on the meanings of dil where dil yâresi signifies both “wounded heart” and “wounded tongue”.
4 Halid Ziya writes about students unable to access the great Ottoman writers (Citation1955, 35–37) and without any knowledge of Ottoman letters (Citation1955, 12–14).
5 The problem of communication between father and son reappears in “Lisanımıza hangisi uygun: nahiv mi sintaks mı” (Which Term Suits Our Language: Nahiv or Sintaks?) (Citation1955). Here, Halid Ziya points to grammatical terminology, where the language reforms facilitated the replacement of existing terms with terms of European origin making it impossible for father and son to speak to each other about their own language.
6 The process of stabilizing and standardizing Turkish, as Albachten (Citation2015) notes, was partially executed by the production and dissemination of state-sponsored dictionaries. The first spelling dictionary, İmlâ lûgati, appeared in 1928. The more ambitious Osmanlıcadan Türkçeye söz karşılıkları taram dergisi (Review Journal of Equivalents in Turkish for Ottoman words) followed in Citation1934, containing 30,000 suggested substitutes of Turkic origins for words of foreign origins. Similar kinds of phenomenon can be observed in European contexts, but it lies outside of the scope of this paper.
7 Mai ve siyah, first serialized in 1896–1897 in Servet-i fünun, appeared in book form in the Ottoman Turkish script in 1900 and 1914. I examine the last edition in the Ottoman Turkish script (1914), which contains slight grammatical modifications and edits from its previous editions due to earlier purification trends – and thus could be considered an intralingual translation itself – in comparison with Halid Ziya’s Citation1938 edition in the Roman script containing major modifications.
8 Ultimately, Ahmed Cemil is combining in unprecedented ways the languages that formed a space of overlap that Saliha Paker has termed “Ottoman interculture,” which she describes as “a hypothetical site where poet-translators operated in the overlap of Turkish, Persian and Arabic cultures” (Citation2002, 120).
9 For Halid Ziya, distorting the pronunciation and spelling of Arabic loanwords was a “strange” (garip) fad that could not render them Turkish (Citation1955, 69).
10 See, for example, “Türk ‘a.b.c.’sinin sakat çocukları: b, c, d” (The Crippled Children of the Turkish ABCs: b, c, d) (Citation1955).
11 In a speech given by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the new alphabet in 1928, as Ertürk notes, the old script of Ottoman Turkish was identified as illegible and alien while the Latin alphabet was to be regarded as a newly native element of national Turkish culture (Citation2011, 91).
12 See, for instance, Lisan bahsinde sakat bir merak: Arap kelimelerinin telâffuzlarını bozmak (A Crippled Fad in Language: Distorting the Pronunciation of Arabic Words) (Citation1955).
13 In contrast to Halid Ziya’s language politics, prominent writers in the 1930s avoided writing an apostrophe, except for vak’a, as per the spelling guidelines laid out by İmlâ lûgati and Osmanlıcadan Türkçeye söz karşılıkları taram dergisi. They also conformed to republican orthography and avoided compound expressions. See, for example, Adıvar (Citation1936), Güntekin (Citation1934), and Karaosmanoğlu (Citation1933).
14 In San’ata dâ’ir, Halid Ziya frequently denies being a linguistic “conservative” (muhafazakâr).
15 The historical contexts of republican Turkey and postcolonial India differ as the latter was subject to a foreign power and the former was not. However, both experienced shifts in power structures, even if on a different scale.
16 Indeed, Tepeli devotes much attention to categorizing how Halid Ziya “Turkifies” Persian compounds. But he ignores the compound expressions that Halid Ziya left untranslated.
17 Halid Ziya also frames the few other compounds left untranslated – for instance, kasr-ı billûr, ruh-i üryan – as belonging to Ahmed Cemil’s unique poetic “idiom” (şive).
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Monica Katiboğlu
Monica Katiboğlu is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. Her teaching and research focus on Turkish and French literatures, critical translation theory, and theories of modernity. Her work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.