This is melding of language, let’s leave the cultural to one side for the time being, is represented, in translation, in various forms Īs the Americans say, seriosity killed the cat: of course my word play is lost in translation. Its ruling never had the force of law except in school curricula, but Arabic and Persian words were gradually purged. Besides, the Turkish Language Society (TDK), founded in 1926, was still active. By the time in which this book is set these theories were more or less dead, but their ghosts lived on, and here and there haunt the narrative. In the 1920’s and 1930’s some wild theories flourished: that it was the Turks who had brought the beginnings of civilization from central Asia to Anatolia, that Turkish was the primitive language from which all others derived. With the nationalism of the revolution this changed. The Ottomans had no great interest in pre-Islamic Turkey, and, besides, the official language was full of Arabic and Persian. In the introduction to “The Disconnecte d”, a potted history of language reform in Turkey is presented The book uses various forms of Turkish, “such as the heavily arabicised Ottoman Turkish and the purist, reformed Turkish” (thanks to The Untranslated blog) this making the work of a translator difficult, and begs the question of how to render these different styles in English? As you will see in my posts, the use of French, Middle English and English is the approach the translator has taken. Known as being “untranslatable” the work finally made its way into Dutch in 2011 and now finally it is available in English, albeit in a very limited print run of only 200 copies.
First published in 1971 & 1972 (as two books due to the publisher not being able to fund a single release), it has entered the Turkish psyche and although the book wasn’t “discovered” until after Oğuz Atay’s death, it has now been reprinted in Turkey at least seventy times.
In 2004 UNESCO listed Oğuz Atay’s “Tutunamayanlar” (“The Disconnecte d”) as an important literary work in need of an English translation. Like my irregular posts here about “Bottom’s Dream” I intend to post about my progress through another work described as “untranslatable”. I’ve added another “difficult” work to my reading agenda, not happy with slowly working my way through Arno Schmidt’s “Bottom’s Dream” I am now tackling the Turkish “Ulysses”, Oğuz Atay’s “Tutunamayanlar” (“The Disconnecte d”).
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