Abstract
ABSTRACTThis thesis explores the ways in which Orhan Pamuk and his pre-Nobel novels in English translation were recontextualized, i.e. received and (re)presented, in translation and journalistic discourse in the UK and USA, two major centers of the Anglophone literary world. The English translations of Pamuk’s books and their reception as presented in the reviews or other journalistic articles are inarguably two crucial factors in establishing Orhan Pamuk as a writer of world literature. Therefore, the analyses in the present study focus on the translations themselves on one level and on another, the journalistic texts, such as reviews, interviews with and news articles about Pamuk, all of which form the discourse surrounding Pamuk’s novels, shaping and representing their reception in the target cultures. The corpus of the present study comprises Pamuk’s pre-Nobel novels, namely The White Castle (1990), The Black Book (1994 and 2006), The New Life (1997), My Name is Red (2001) and Sno ...
ABSTRACTThis thesis explores the ways in which Orhan Pamuk and his pre-Nobel novels in English translation were recontextualized, i.e. received and (re)presented, in translation and journalistic discourse in the UK and USA, two major centers of the Anglophone literary world. The English translations of Pamuk’s books and their reception as presented in the reviews or other journalistic articles are inarguably two crucial factors in establishing Orhan Pamuk as a writer of world literature. Therefore, the analyses in the present study focus on the translations themselves on one level and on another, the journalistic texts, such as reviews, interviews with and news articles about Pamuk, all of which form the discourse surrounding Pamuk’s novels, shaping and representing their reception in the target cultures. The corpus of the present study comprises Pamuk’s pre-Nobel novels, namely The White Castle (1990), The Black Book (1994 and 2006), The New Life (1997), My Name is Red (2001) and Snow (2004). Among these, The Black Book in its two translations, and Snow, Pamuk’s last novel published in English translation before he won the Nobel Prize in 2006, are subjected to comparative textual analysis as two case studies. The analyses of the journalistic texts reveal that the (re)presentation, hence the reception, of Pamuk’s novels are heavily marked by “metonymics” (Tymoczko 1999), the representative potential of literary translations to stand for the socio-cultural, political and historical realities of their source culture. In this respect, Pamuk’s novels are linked, in the overwhelming majority of these texts, to a broader discourse on Turkey’s identity and status in world politics and in what is conceptualized as “the Muslim world”, mainly described in terms of the idea of “clash of civilizations”. As such, the novels were received and presented as providing insights into the history, politics and cultural identity of the country. Orhan Pamuk’s own influence on this reception was also demonstrated by the analysis of his interviews and articles. Taking translation and the formation of the journalistic discourse (manifested mainly in reviews) as two significant dynamics in the process of recontextualization that traveling literature undergoes, the study also sets out to show how translational and discursive analysis can be linked methodologically. For this reason, a chapter is devoted to the exploration and problematization of the extent and nature of translation’s presence (or non-presence) as a topic in the reviews. More importantly, however, the analysis in the case study on the retranslation of The Black Book is almost completely based on the comments on the first translation by Güneli Gün and the retranslation by Maureen Freely in the reviews as well as other critical work on the translations. This case study also provides insights into the “literary positioning” (Göknar 2013) Pamuk wanted to achieve as an author in the Anglophone world, since the retranslation of The Black Book was his initiative, involving him actively in Freely’s retranslating process. As a major finding of this case study, the two translations of The Black Book establish different metonymies with the Turkish source text, which is a consequence of various factors such as retranslation dynamics, Pamuk’s changed status as a world writer in a span of 12 years, and the status envisaged for The Black Book in the Anglophone world as a novel establishing different intertextualities. In the second case study, the translational analysis of Snow and the insights provided by the translator Maureen Freely bring out the parallelisms between the novel’s reception in the reviews and its English translation published in two editions, one by Knopf, and the other by Faber and Faber, a comparative analysis of which demonstrates differences between them. These differences bend the novel towards seriousness and the assumed expectations of the target readership, most of the time against the will of the translator, through revisions by editors. Findings of this case study also shed light on a process whereby the English translations of peripheral literatures are subjected to assimilative and reductive dynamics.All in all, focusing on a significant period in Orhan Pamuk’s career, i.e. from the publication of his first novel in English translation in 1990 until his Nobel Prize in 2006, the study reveals in its entirety the dynamics and the roles played by actors of world literary space in the making of Orhan Pamuk an established member of this space.
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