About the Work

by Nefise Kahraman

Born in 1936 in Istanbul, Ferit Edgü is one of the renowned writers of contemporary Turkish literature. Alongside novels, he has published in a variety of genres ranging from essays to poetry. His books have been translated into several languages and have won prestigious awards, including the Sait Faik Award for the novel Bir Gemide (On a Boat) in 1979. One of his novels, Hakkari’de Bir Mevsim (A Season in Hâkkari), was made into a film—a Turkish-German co-production—in 1983 and won the Silver Bear at the 33rd Berlin Film Festival, among other awards.

The story “Mirza” is included in Doğu Öyküleri (Stories of the East), a short story collection published in 2000. Collaboratively translated at our workshop by a group of translators with different levels of Turkish and English language skills, the story presented unique challenges with respect to the style of narration that Edgü employs. It uses free indirect style in the third person. The abrupt intrusion of the omniscient narrator who vocalizes the characters’ thoughts—not only those that are supposed to remain unspoken, but also those that are uttered by the characters—was mildly confounding. Blended into the dialogues between characters, those instances of intrusion by the omniscient narrator compelled the translators to pay closer attention to the author’s style. 

Towards the end of the story, Mirza, the eponymous protagonist of the story, reflects on an experience from his childhood in a long-deserted village with a maze. Reminiscent of a lucid dream, this sequence is focalized through the adult Mirza, but randomly switches to his childhood self. The past seeps into the present. Alternating between two consciousnesses, the narration urged the translators to pay attention to whose consciousness was being channeled to focalize the scene; was it the child Mirza or the adult Mirza? Occasionally, using the pronoun “he” for both proved to be confusing, and the translators opted for “the boy” to ensure clarity.

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The Translation Attached Translators Collective is a group of translators that collaboratively translates Turkish short stories and poems into English at its biweekly workshop. The collective was founded by Nefise Kahraman as the UToronto Workshop in Literary Translation: Turkish-English (WILTTE) in 2015, and has continued translating and evolving ever since. The collective has thus far translated stories from such authors as Aziz Nesin, Selçuk Baran, and Nezihe Muhiddin. Most recently, the collective’s translation of Neslihan Önderoğlu’s short story “The Cover” was published in Y’alla, the University of Texas’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ journal of Middle Eastern literature in translation. The workshop is unique in its focus on translating Turkish literature into English in Canada.

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