Vol. 26 No. 15 · 5 August 2004
pages 30-32 | 4293 words
A Turk, a Turk, a Turk
Christopher Tayler
- Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
Faber, 436 pp, £12.99, May 2004, ISBN 0 571 22065 7
‘Be yourself,’ a beautiful woman called Ipek says to Ka, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s newly translated novel, Snow (Kar, 2002), when he asks how to win her heart. Though kindly meant, it’s discouraging advice to give one of Pamuk’s characters, for whom being themselves is difficult. ‘No one can ever be himself in this land,’ says the shadowy figure who may or may not be responsible for the double murder that closes The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990; translated in 1994). ‘In the land of the defeated and oppressed, to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore I am.’
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 18 · 23 September 2004
From Güneli Gün
In his piece on Orhan Pamuk, Christopher Tayler says that I have 'a wayward sense of register', that my 'English sentences are often hard to decode', and that my 'translations read very awkwardly in a way that all the other translations of Pamuk do not' (LRB, 5 August). In 1998, Professor Talat Halman said of my translation of The New Life: 'Güneli Gün … has done an impressively successful translation, faithful and idiomatic. Some critics have characterised the translation as stilted at times, but this is hardly Gün's fault. Pamuk … occasionally writes some awkward sentences. If anything, the translation has managed to expurgate many of the careless clauses.' Pamuk, who keeps a sharp eye on his critics, has been modifying and simplifying his language in his last two books, My Name Is Red and, more recently, Snow. But vintage Pamuk can be hard to read. Other translators of his work have phoned me, thanking me for unpacking some of his more enigmatic sentences. Yet I was unwilling to disrupt his prose, because every linguistic puzzle he presented seemed worth solving.
Güneli Gün
Oberlin, Ohio
