Ideals and Realities: Translating Lamartine’s Raphaël

In 1918, the German orientalist Otto Hachtmann wrote that the Turks were “the translating people of the Orient.”¹ Late Ottoman society was indeed a translation culture, a fact which had ripple effects beyond specific texts and translation strategies. Periodicals were the main arena for the translation of fiction into Ottoman Turkish, and the 1890s represented a peak in both translated and Turkish-language serializations, or tefrikas.² On one hand, the press promulgated a discourse of translation by disseminating ideas about which purposes translation should serve; that is, by educating the readers in morally purposeful ways rather than merely entertaining them. Yet the press also engaged in translative discourse by providing examples and models for a developing Turkish literature, and through the publication of actual translations of serial novels, mainly the works of “popular” authors such as Xavier de Montépin and Paul de Kock—despite the fear that these texts could prove harmful to Ottoman morals.³ These serials were immensely popular not only across communal borders in the Ottoman Empire, but also in Europe. The serial novel was in this sense a transnational genre, tightly connected with the capitalization of reading culture and the need to make the reader buy yet another issue.⁴ The reader was also a consumer. The tefrika was thus a major player in the nineteenth-century print economy.⁵

In June 1898, three major Istanbul periodicals, Tercüman-ı Hakikat, İkdam, and Servet, organized a translation competition. All three were translating and serializing Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1849 novel Raphaël. The serialization of a fifty-year old love story stood out among the other serializations published by these magazines, which consisted mostly of “popular” novels. One can identify a tension between the ideals propagated by the leading intellectual voices of these magazines, such as Ahmed Midhat Efendi in Tercüman-ı Hakikat, and the need to earn enough money to make the publication function.

Raphaël, solidly anchored in the romantic or emotionalist tradition, tells the story of Lamartine himself as a young man experiencing a brief and unhappy love affair.⁶ The borders between fiction and reality are blurred; indeed, as much as the novel is a semi-autobiographical love story, the work is also a lyrical exploration of young love. In Tercüman-ı Hakikat, the “classic” nature of Lamartine’s work was underlined in the foreword written by the serial’s translator, Selanikli Tevfik: as he wrote, “For a couple of years we have felt a growing desire in our heart to translate the classical works of the West into our language.”⁷ Servet similarly emphasized Raphaël’s contribution to literature: “[…] we are not setting about translating this work in order to make our abilities seen but in order to render a service […] to literature.”⁸ Beyond such statements, the three publications’ choice of Raphaël as a suitable vehicle to render these services is not explained. Moreover, Raphaël had already been published as a book at least twice.⁹ The choice of Raphaël was, in other words, not even a first-time translation.

We might relate this context to what in literary scholarship of the late Ottoman period is called the “classics debate” (klasikler tartışması), in which a series of “translation problems” were discussed.¹⁰ This debate was kicked off in 1897 as an appeal to “the talented writers […] to translate the European classics.”¹¹ The definition of “classic” was, however, somewhat intangible. Neo-classical and romantic works were the ones perceived as classics, and verse was repeatedly emphasized as more complex to both write and translate than prose.¹² A “classic” seems to have represented a “literary stage” rather than a specific period. It was a work that was remembered, and that would not be quickly forgotten like the “corrupting stories of Émile Zola or the scandal-driven works of Paul Bourget,” to use Ahmed Midhat’s examples.¹³

The Raphaël competition can thus be placed in connection with the “classics debate,” and can even be...