〖 Found in translation 〗
Found in translation
Found in translation
The reader will find, seeded throughout Issue Three, some translation tales from writers in Arabic, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, finding their way into German, Greek, Italian, Serbian, English and more. These tales can be filed with (also in this issue) Oksana Forostyna’s parsing of « untranslatable » Ukrainian humor and with Alexander Wells’s defense of Denglisch (and Berlinglisch, and Globish).
Translation, as a topic, tends to invite polemic or lamentation. Does the ERB have a stance? Not really. Our premise is that translation finds as much as it loses. The ERB’s editorial assistants, Nienke Groskamp and Job Wester, asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
An inquiry into varieties of translational experience became a series of reflections on artful error and unexpected intimacy.
☞ Mona Kareem: « Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »
☞ Carlos Fonseca: « Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »
☞ Agnes Lidbeck: Why are you so cold-hearted?
☞ Defne Suman: Borrowed time is borrowed money
☞ Hans von Trotha: Judge a book by its covers
☞ Iman Mersal: Panties of the people
☞ Krisztina Tóth: « droid » ➞ « druid »
☞ Lavinia Braniște: Overalls & eyeglasses
☞ Lydia Sandgren: Read between the stripes
We asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader of yours has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
The Silence of Scheherazade takes place in the Ottoman Empire of the early twentieth century, in one of its very cosmopolitan harbor towns called Smyrna. Though World War I is raging on, some rich people in Smyrna are partying — French, Brits, Americans, Greeks, Turks, all together. They don’t care about wars or anything. In an archive I read how one British general told these people that while they were having this much fun, there was war behind the mountains, and that they didn’t know they were « living on borrowed time and the due date is very near ».
When I started writing the book, the working title was Borrowed time — I had an English title before I had a Turkish one. In Turkish, it translated to Emanat zaman. When I submitted the book to a Greek publisher, they said: « We love the book, but we don’t like the title. It’s a very poetic story and the title matches your book, but these days we’re borrowing money from Germany, and nothing with ‘borrowed’ in the name sells. » They asked me to come up with a new title. I understood that they wanted the title to sound more « Oriental », and that is how the title became The Silence of Scheherazade.
The expectation from Westerners is that you’ll only write about the suffering of your land. Unfortunately, there is this burden on translated literature to give a little taste of your culture. It’s understandable: when I read Abdulrazak Gurnah, I want a taste of Zanzibar. But sometimes I’d like to write a book that could happen anywhere in the world, like my novel At the breakfast table. You can take that story, put it in another country — make it Serbian, make it Italian — and it still reads the same.
I heard from a lot of readers that The Silence of Scheherazade reminded them of Pachinko, that Pachinko must have been an inspiration. But I had never read Pachinko. Before I had written At the breakfast table, I had not read Elena Ferrante’s books either, but outside of Turkey readers came to me saying that the novel and my short stories sound so much like Ferrante. When I read her books I understood — the angry female voice is similar. Maybe there is a cloud above all of us, and when it rains down on us we get this inspiration from each another.
Defne Suman is a Turkish author living in Athens. The US edition of her latest book, At the breakfast table, was released in February 2023. It has also been translated into Armenian, Greek, Serbian, Croatian and Norwegian.