On the history of Turkish translations of Russian classics: Works by Ivan Turgenev

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of reception of Ivan Turgenev’s creative heritage in Turkey and is of an overview nature. We consider translations of Ivan Turgenev’s works into Turkish in chronological order. The reception of Ivan Turgenev’s works, translated in Turkey, can be divided into five main stages: the first is the period of acquaintance with Turgenev in the Ottoman Empire (1895–1923); the second is the translation activity of the first years of the Republic (1923–1938); the third is the era of institutionalized, state-supported translations after the opening of the Special National Translation Bureau in Turkey (1939–1960); the fourth is the time of transformation of translation activity under the influence of political and cultural circumstances (1960–1990); and, finally, the fifth is the “translation boom” (after 1990), associated with the increase in the number of translators who speak Russian and the general growth of publishing activity. The study revealed that Turgenev’s novels, such as “Fathers and Sons” and “Smoke”, were translated into Turkish more than once and published by different publishers (the phenomenon of translation multiplicity). Clearly, the history of Ivan Turgenev’s translations into Turkish is not merely a literary rendering of meaning: translations of Turgenev’s texts (and of classical Russian literature in general) reflected the general cultural politics of Turkey’s modernization process, as well as changes in the structure of the country’s readership at different points in time. Literary translation is not only a means of cultural communication, as is commonly believed, but also a form of self-knowledge for the recipient. Ivan Turgenev was interesting to the Turkish reader not simply as a “writer of Russia” (a country with which Turkey has always had very complex geopolitical relations), but first and foremost as a “Russian Westerner,” a bearer of a Westernized consciousness (and therefore part of the fashion for everything European), to whom the Turkish people were drawn despite all the contradictions of the historical dialogue between the West and the East, which took place first within the Ottoman Empire and then in Republican Turkey.