Pseudotranslation as Passage into History: Murat Gülsoy's Gölgeler ve Hayaller Şehrinde as Transmesis

"Tarih insanı kendine çeken muazzam bir kuyu."[History is a colossal well that sucks one in.]

(Gülsoy 11)

The use of pseudotranslation as a textual strategy in the Ottoman and Turkish literary fields has been explored from various perspectives by Turkish translation scholars, often as part of an investigation of the ideological and political entanglements of translation and of cultural conceptions of translation (Işın Bengi; Tahir Gürçağlar, "Scouting the Borders"; Işıklar Koçak; Demircioğlu; Öztürk Kasar; Alt). The majority of these studies have focused on indigenous works credited to foreign writers. In contrast, my analysis of Murat Gülsoy's Gölgeler ve Hayaller Şehrinde (In the City of Shadows and Dreams, abbreviated here as GHŞ) focuses on a specific use of pseudotranslation in Turkish literature that has not yet been explored in any detail: the use of pseudotranslation as a frame story. Based on a textual and peritextual analysis of the novel, as well as printed and personal interviews with Gülsoy, I will discuss the writer's motives in writing a book that reads like a translation and in foregrounding translation as a self-reflexive tool. This exploration touches upon a rarely studied aspect of pseudotranslation and provides an analysis of an apparent paradox: the use of pseudotranslation, essentially in the form of a literary forgery, to circumvent expectations of realist historical fiction and create a more self-aware reading experience.

Crucially, the novel's use of pseudotranslational strategies cannot be analyzed in isolation from the other ways in which it engages with and/or foregrounds translation. To begin with, the novel contains genuine translations either done by the writer himself, or in the form of references to previously published translations. In addition, the writer creates a rich heteroglossia in the text that partly owes its existence to the use of Ottoman Turkish, French, Latin, and Italian phrases, which all serve to reinforce the impression of translation. The novel's use of translator/interpreter characters creates another translational layer and further invites discussion of the literary and pseudohistorical representations of translators. All these figurations of translation, I argue, fall under Thomas O. Beebee's concept of transmesis. Beebee defines transmesis as "literary authors' use of fiction to depict acts of translation" (2-3) and as "the mimesis of the interrelated phenomena of translation, multilingualism, and code-switching" (6). This notion of transmesis includes the following:

Texts whose mimetic object is the act of translation, the translator, and his or her social and historical contexts.

Texts that overtly claim to be translations, though no "original" exists. (This is the classic definition of "pseudotranslation," discussed below.)

Texts that mime a language reality such that the medium does not match the object depicted (e.g., when conversations taking place in Cuba between Cubans are given in English).

Texts that make standard language strange to itself (Emily Apter, "Translation without Original" 211), inasmuch as such departures are seen as the result of transcoding from another, more "original" language; code-switching; interference from another language; and so forth.

(6)

All of the phenomena that Beebee tries to capture under the concept of transmesis appear prominently in GHŞ; therefore, it is productive to approach the novel as a form of transmesis, as this will allow me to consider all translational aspects of the novel and not focus solely on its use of pseudotranslation as frame narrative. Furthermore, I will argue that the transmesis that helps shape the textual and thematic aspects of GHŞ also expands the concept of pseudotranslation by inviting a consideration of pseudotranslation as a plurivocal and heteroglossic form of writing in which innovative literary forces come together to create self-reflexive narratives.

Pseudotranslation as Frame Narrative

There has been a growing interest, over the last two decades, in the literary manifestations and functions of pseudotranslation. First analyzed in some detail by Anton Popovič, who named the phenomenon "fictitious translation," pseudotranslation has featured prominently in descriptive translation studies thanks to Gideon Toury's focus on the...