Translating with your Biography (presentation transcript)

This is the transcript of a masterclass I have given on Translating with your Biography, on 3 May 2021 for de Tank, a network for translators, writers and thinkers of colour, founded by artist and writer Neske Beks.

I have always been a translator, even before I learned to read and write. I was born into the Turkish language and only a year after, was transported into a country where French and Dutch live - would I dare say happily - next to one another.

During my first year in nursery school in Brussels, I had learned French by the time of the Saint-Nicolas (or Sinterklaas), then in primary school Dutch entered my tiny 6-year-old head with the word “vliegtuig”… which I found impossible to pronounce at the time.

At home, my mother who grew up in Turkey and could understand a little bit of English, would watch Flemish and Dutch TV where films were not dubbed but subtitled. My father, who grew up in Germany in the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, and then studied for as short time in Vienna, would watch the news and sports in German (to me, German was the sound of the Tageschau, of TV host Thomas Gottschalk and of Formula 1 cars racing on a Sunday).

English first entered my life through popular culture, then thanks to my parents’ good old American friend Mr. Jones who would travel a lot between the US and Belgium and regularly stayed in the HOTEL QUEEN ANNE in the city centre where my father was working as a night receptionist.

They became friends, he would come home often and would bring us Peter Pan peanut butter and Levi’s jeans from the US. And I would try to speak with him with my broken English. When we started to learn English in secondary school, I could already speak, read and even write. Years later, for the first time, I have started learning a new language: Spanish, this time by choice as I wanted to dive deeply into Spanish speaking literatures.

But no matter what I studied, read, watched or heard, with a higher education focused on English, French and Spanish, a professional life including Dutch, I have always been going back to Turkish. This language I don’t want to call my mother tongue, but rather my emotional tongue. The one I never received formal training for.

You can see from this short snapshot of my linguistic life that my immigrant background has been highly influential in shaping the translator I am today.

My father’s name is Abdullah. Abdullah Marasligil. I have never heard anyone outside the family call him Abdullah. He has always been called MARAS, even by his Belgian mother-in-law. It always seemed to me like a disregard towards his Turkish identity.

I personally have always resisted against the tendency to domesticate my name, even though I’m sure it would make my life easier on many occasions. I got used to being the kid with the weird name in class, each time the teacher would do the counting and stumble upon my name, I would automatically stand up and say “yeah, it’s me”, and we would move on. I never felt bad about it. I only knew I had a different name and I learned to be happy about this diversity I was bringing to the classroom.

At one of my former jobs at a prestigious Belgian cultural institution, my then direct manager told me totally horrified as we were setting up a new e-mail address for me that: “WITH YOUR NAME IT IS IMPOSSIBLE!”. It was the press department, and she was worried that the journalists would be confused by my name and it would just make communication difficult. I was very young at the time, this wasn’t a student job anymore and after all, I should feel lucky to have been able to enter this temple of culture in the heart of the European capital. So, I let her decide I would be “CONTACTPRESS” to the outside world. Until she left the institution, and at her goodbye drink she proudly said she wasn’t worried about the future of the department she’s leaving because “despite of her being Turkish, Canan is a hard worker”.

This story about my name and the rejection of my “Turkishness” has inadvertently shaped the translator I am today.

I very often have to explain to the people I encounter, and who are curious enough to listen and want to know, that the C in the Turkish alphabet is pronounced J. So Jaanan, not Canine. And most of the time, I love these exchanges. And not all of you would know this either, and this is OK. It is part of our richness. Also, it isn’t rare now to meet people who do know immediately that my name is Turkish, because they encounter more and more people or stories carrying those letters that are pronounced differently (hello representation!). And the more we share those stories, the more people will be open to welcome non domesticated words, expressions and names.

As translators, we often face a dilemma between remaining faithful to the source text or to the target audience. I believe this to be especially true when you grew up with several so-called native languages and among several cultures. Your understanding of the source text is very close to you emotionally and so is the target language. I very often face this when translating Turkish into French or English. While on the one hand I do not wish to alienate French or English-speaking audiences, I do tend to remain closer to Turkish, putting into practice the experience of my name.

This is known as foreignization in translation studies. Strategies called domestication and foreignization in translation are related to the degree to which translators make a text conform to the target culture.

I don’t particularly like the term “foreignization”, because to me, Turkish isn’t foreign at all. I am very closely linked - at an emotional as well as a knowledge level - to the Turkish language, and this has made some people question my ability to translate into the target language - especially when I work into French where institutions and the mainstream culture tend to be more conservative towards cultural differences.

For some, one can only translate to her so-called native language. I would identify this stance as a very conservative one. According to this approach to translation, the French or English language is simply not mine to play with. Looking from this perspective, it might be difficult to accept the fact that I intentionally choose to “foreignize”. It is a deliberate choice on my part and not simply a deficiency in my French or English. It is a logical continuity of my perspective on the narratives we build across our societies.

In L’imaginaire des langues, a series of interviews between Lise Gauvin and writer Édouard Glissant, Glissant tells how today a writer who does not know any other language does take into account when writing, even unconsciously, the existence of other languages around her. One can no longer write a language in a monolingual manner. He says, ‘we have to take into account the imaginary worlds of languages.’

A few years ago, I have started a project called City in Translation in which I capture words and sentences in different languages across public space (on walls, shop windows, trash, people’s clothes, graffiti, advertising… you name it!) and I collect them through photos and stories which I archive online through a website and Instagram. It first started as a personal activity before turning into an artistic practice which took me to work in collaboration with institutions such as universities and publishing houses in France, Belgium and the UK. City in Translation has been motivated by my ongoing conviction—just like Glissant’s—that multilingualism is so much part of our contexts that it feeds us in many ways, sometimes even without us noticing its impact.

This is another example of the impact of my own biography on my work as a translator.

  In European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, Fatima El-Tayeb writes:

The national often is the means by which exclusion takes place; minorities are positioned beyond the horizon of national politics, culture and history, frozen in the state of migration through the permanent designation of another, foreign nationality that allows their definition as not Danish, Spanish, Hungarian, etc.

This state of being constantly “frozen in migration” through discriminatory practices on different levels – personal, institutional, economic, political – is one I recognize. As you now know, my immigrant background has been highly influential in shaping the translator I am today, and also my urge to translate certain works more than others. And to advocate for more diversity in literary translation in the European context, as to include as many “European Others” as possible.

Born in a family of Turkish immigrants and growing up in the heart of Europe in bilingual Brussels, I have developed a certain sensitivity as to why some languages have been less valued within those various institutions—be it school or the workplace—than others.

I have now chosen to live between places, languages, emotions. I have chosen fluidity. Movement. It is constant and can be unpredictable. Throughout the years and through practising various methodologies around translation: from translating books to translating the city, I have been able to affirm the following: ‘I find myself in movement’.

In French, the word ‘ou’ changes its definition with only one accent: ‘ou’ without an accent means ‘or’, whereas ‘où’ with an accent means ‘where’. I see this as a movement, too: getting rid of the accent to transform place—‘where’, into a choice—‘or’. And it is one I have been embracing throughout this artistic practice because movement is also creativity.

Translation as well, is movement: physical and intellectual, between spaces and languages, across geographies, cultural and political contexts. It is also a movement between emotions: people moving each other.

I have the privilege to have acquired a European Union member citizenship next to my Turkish one in my early twenties. Since then, my freedom for movement has been expanded greatly. Not everyone has that same freedom and one of my urges to translate the city comes from that acknowledgement and the need to use my own privilege to create spaces where creativity through translation can occur.

I was not always aware of my yearning for movement until I was constantly reminded that I was never really ‘home’ in Brussels and that my language was alien in this city where I grew up since my earliest memory. What they insisted on calling my ‘mother tongue’ came to me through body and gestures. I have been looking for my language in so many ways because I was enjoined to reject her. That language I was born into has been made invisible for decades in these new lands where my family and I were just ‘guests’.

Now, through my work as a translator – whether it is in or outside the book, I am trying to reclaim my language and the stories surrounding her. I had no choice but to learn and speak my hosts’ languages. With time, I made them mine as well. In a sense, Turkish has become the mother of all my tongues, and transformed me into the translator and artist I am today.

You can say that I have turned my roots upwards in a way; I have created the possibility of being from nowhere so that I could belong everywhere. While still embracing my heritage and accepting the fluidity of my many identities. And in those spaces, movement happens. Translation and imagination, find each other.

A few years ago, I was asked to create an exhibition around the City in Translation I just mentioned to you. I had already so many images in different languages, but I knew that for an exhibition, I needed more focus. I decided to tell a story taking the Turkish language at its heart. Looking at my archives, I realised I had been collecting images showing the Turkish language across cities I visited since the very beginning. As I looked at all these images, I understood this was some sort of ‘yearning’: for a language and everything it brings and means to me, and so: ‘Yearning for Turkish’ was born.

The exhibition started with the following words of mine:

There is a language I was born into

a language my mother, my father spoke to me in,

they still do

a language I use every day uniting with my many others

moving, I see it everywhere I go

a language I translate from.

When I walk in cities,

I see

I feel

I imagine

this language.

It is the language of my heart

that I yearn for, constantly.

The accompanying image for this short introduction was one I took when I was on a train from Brussels to London. While we were in movement leaving the station, I captured it as I saw a Turkish flag hanging down a window of a big building. A flag may not be considered a word or a sentence to translate, but in my mind, it worked on many levels because the image itself offered the possibility for multiple interpretations.

This is a way, for me, to reclaim urban spaces and my many cultures and languages through my own imagination, and through workshops and activities, I invite others to explore and create their own stories.

I would like to share three examples from the exhibition to illustrate how the reclaiming process can take place.

The first photograph was taken in Copenhagen. It includes an actual Turkish word: pınar, and the accompanying text is titled ‘Homesick’:

When I was a kid growing up in Brussels, we would go rent movies with my parents in the Turkish neighbourhood. Twenty-five years later, I wander the streets of gentrified Vesterbrø and I find myself surrounded with VHS and Betamax again. Only, the videos are now flowers, and the golden Pınar Video sign a trophy of gentrification.

Pınar means spring or source in Turkish, it is also a female name.

I imagine a tiny Danish version of myself inside the shop, picking a movie with her parents. Instead of mixing Turkish with French while speaking, she mixes her parent's tongue with her perfect Danish. Every week, they laugh, cry and fall in love at the pace of Turkish melodrama and comedy, easing the gentle pain of homesickness one VHS at a time.

The second photograph was taken in Wales, and neither of the words appearing on it, ‘Slow’ and ‘Araf’, is a Turkish word, at least not in this context. The accompanying text is titled ‘Purgatory’:

I am in a bus that left London five hours ago. It is late, and I am sleepy and nauseous. As we ride across a forest, I see the words ARAF and SLOW appearing and disappearing under the vehicle’s nervous headlights. I start wondering if I am dreaming or if my nausea is playing tricks on me. I blink, once, twice, thrice...

You see, araf in Turkish means purgatory.

And the third example was taken in Athens and has no Turkish word at all in the picture. It has only the words ‘Not all who wander are lost’ and includes a little girl in the corner of the frame. The text bears the same title as the graffiti.

It was the first time I had been to Athens. As I was wandering the streets, I came across a shop called Flâneur. Almost a personal invitation to enter. The owner Giannis welcomed me, warmly. All around were locally hand-made works. Each of them with a story. As we talked about travelling and our cities, I told Giannis I was born in Turkey. “My grandfather is from Kayseri,” he said. His uncle found the family home back in Turkey ten years ago. He added that he would like to go someday. His grandmother was from Antalya. They met in Greece, at that time, refugees would stick together – they had no other choice, he added. We talked about the relationship between Greece and Turkey, about our common history. Then Giannis said he was very sad about what is happening in Turkey, “I hope things will get better”. Me too. “And I hope better days will come to Greece as well.” “We are so close to one another, aren’t we” said Giannis. “Yes,” I nodded, “we are very close.” Closer than we ever think.

As you can see, all these experiences are a result of my biography.

I use my languages, my heritage, the stories of my family, to feed into what I do as a literary translator on and off the page.

The books, poetry, essays, comics I translated come from Turkey, Algeria, the UK, France… They all start with an urge in me. I want to share a specific work because I believe it will change the way we think about my home country, about people with multiple identities, about feminism, and much more.

I also apply my love, knowledge and passion for literary translation throughout the programmes I do for the Read My World International Literature Festival in Amsterdam.

In 2018, I started curating programmes around literary translation for the festival, such as a translation slam inviting two literary translator on stage discussing their translations of a similar poem – because they both make different choices and their reasons and process is a story in itself worth listening to, or a Poetry Translation Workshop inviting the general public who don’t even know the source language to engage with poetry they have never heard of before, with the help of a literary translator.

I also worked on a programmes around Turkish SOAPS, leading to this video of interviews we did in the street on Java Straat. Because I strongly believe in the role of popular culture in enriching our vocabulary and imagination.

Recently, I wrote this piece, “uncaring” as a response to the debate around Amanda Gorman’s translation into Dutch and other languages in the Western European publishing sphere. It was the result of my biography and of why I translate.

All our knowledge, from the most intellectual work and readings, to popular culture, and our own families and other spaces where rich vocabularies exist, matters! When you translate, you use all that:
You Translate with Your Biography .

Literary Translation is creativity.

Literary Translation is resistance.

Literary Translation is activism.

Literary Translation is our common space.

Literary Translation is imagination.

I want to end my talk with a poem I wrote a few years ago, inspired by Fatima El Tayeb’s book European Others, which I have quoted from in the beginning of my talk.

frozen in migration
for Fatima El-Tayeb

i am unspectacular

yet never commonplace

in your imagination

a curious contradiction

i am not transient

for your convenience

in your education

not even a mention

i am suspended in time

with no accent

except in your perception

always under dominion

at no time curious

consistently suspicious

you stow me in a place

of your own comfort

you not noticing

i have been here

for six decades

does not make me invisible

i will generate my own journey

above your vocabulary

remain in existence

not just an appendix

to your imagined curriculum

i will create

new idioms

new expressions

i was frozen

in migration

i will now melt

into your conscience

and stay

THANK YOU!

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