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.But what theysee, they believe to be the truth not just about Turkey, but about whatthey so disarmingly call  that part of the world. And what they see isPart II: The Translator at Work122not a struggling and marginalized republic, but a nation harking to thecries of Islam, a clash of East and West.To put it crudely, all they see aretheir fears.When Snow went out into the world, I again revised my job descrip-tion.A translator did not just need to find the right words, stay in closeconversation with the author, and run interference for him as the bookmade its way through the publication process.She also had to do every-thing she could to contextualize the book for readers who were not fa-miliar with Turkey not inside the text but outside it, in journals andnewspapers, and at conferences, symposia, literature festivals, and along sequence of very frustrating dinner parties.As I made the rounds, Iwas at first encouraged by those who said to me,  I knew nothing aboutTurkey until I read Snow, you know, but now I can see it s a really fasci-nating country so I d like to know more about it. I thought the mostimportant thing was that they were interested.Only good could come ofthat, I thought.I was wrong.Because now it was 2005 and Orhan Pamuk had provoked an ultra-nationalist firestorm after making an off-the-record remark to a Swissjournalist about a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds having beenkilled  in these lands. His life in danger for having broken the state-im-posed taboo on discussion of the Armenian genocide, he fled the country,going briefly into hiding.Not long after returning, he was prosecuted for insulting Turkishness. Though the coverage abroad was extensive,even excessive, and though every story mentioned his famous statement,most of his readers in the Anglophone world at least, most of the hun-dreds and thousands of readers who shared their views with me didnot understand that he was being pursued by ultranationalists spon-sored by a shadowy group inside the military known colloquially as the deep state. Lacking any knowledge of the deep state and its workings,most readers outside Turkey assumed that Orhan was being prosecutedby Islamists on account of his Western ideas.Now, Turkish politics ishard enough to understand for those of us who ve lived in Turkey.But itshould, I thought, be possible to get across a few essential facts.I d hadtwenty years experience as a journalist.I knew how to communicate, toreach my readers and start from where they were.But though I did takeevery opportunity offered to me, it was like writing in the sand during ahurricane.The clash of civilizations may not exist, but it has a powerfulgrip on the collective imagination.Just as powerful is the romance ofMisreading Orhan Pamuk123the dissident writer the lone star who dares to speak truths that his na-tion cannot stomach, who champions Western values in the East.Running concurrently back in Turkey (but never properly noted orunderstood abroad) was the virulent media hate campaign, which wasalso sponsored by the abovementioned  deep state networks, and whichwould lead to Orhan and about a dozen other writers and activists be-coming death targets.Orhan s international success was used againsthim: he was cast as a traitor who had sold his country to Europe for hiscareer.In 2006 the story gained another twist: he became a traitor whohad been so successful in  selling his country to Europe that he won theNobel Prize.It was not just the newspaper-reading public in Turkeywho thought that.During the scores of English, European, and Ameri-can interviews I did after he won the prize, the first question was al-ways: Did I think he had won the prize because of the work he had donefor free expression?By now I was not just translating his books, and putting them into con-text, and telling the story of his shameful prosecution and persecution Iwas part of that story.I was attending trials, walking through funnels ofriot police, and coming face to face with deep state thugs.Wherever Ihappened to be in the world, a day rarely went by without a very strangeperson crossing the room with a boxy smile to offer me a very strange call-ing card.I was myself treated to a tiny media disinformation campaign,which caused me no real harm but promoted a version of my friendshipwith Orhan that he cannot have failed to find insulting and denigrat-ing.There was a time when hardly a week went by without some literaryor public figure saying that he wrote his books for one person and oneperson only.That person was his English translator.Poor Orhan wouldwrite his books and bring them to me and I would tell him  what to do.I would prefer to think that we are often a match for each other.Ourarguments have only served to deepen my understanding of his work.There has never been a day when I ve sat down to translate a page byOrhan in which I haven t been taken by surprise and learned something.But after I became a pawn in the hate campaigns against him, I wasagain obliged to expand my understanding of a translator s job.It wasnot enough to find the right words, and defend them, and work on theliterary peripheries to provide some sort of context, and fight to protectthe author as he was attacked on all sides in the name of 1,001 politicalagendas.I also had to fight for room to breathe not just for the writersand translators of fiction, but for literature itself.When the President ofPart II: The Translator at Work124the Swedish Academy introduced Orhan Pamuk s Nobel lecture, hequoted the previous year s winner, Elfriede Jelinek, who spoke abouthow important it was for writers to retain the right not to talk about poli-tics.It seemed to me that many of Orhan Pamuk s well-wishers in theWest were often, without knowing it, conspiring with his enemies inTurkey to take that right away from him.In the end he came back fighting, with an artful, generous, and re-demptive novel in which there is no clash of civilizations, and politics isa distant dark cloud, and the set is so well annotated that all its readersshould by the time they leave the book, and no matter how new theyare to its world blend its dreams with their own.In the Turkish, eachand every sentence has been structured to work toward this end.Thoughairy and transparent on the surface, each is shaped in such a way as tolink into a coat of armor, protecting the fictive world from outside influ-ence.So in my English translation, I faced a starker version of the choiceI d first made with Snow.To have attempted a replication of its linguisticstructures would, I felt, have created too thick a coat of armor.Aftermuch deliberation, not just with Orhan but with our excellent editor, Ichose clarity over structural correctness.My guide in this was the nar-rator, Kemal with the transparent heart.If I could make his voice heardin English, he would, I hoped, have no trouble making his world visible,even when addressing readers coming to him from a great distance.To Orhan s mind, a translation should be  perfect, by which I thinkhe means it should follow the author s intentions so precisely that it ex-erts no influence over its readers whatsoever.But I have known sincechildhood that translation is never neutral.It is politically charged atevery stage [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]