There is the mother tongue. There is the other tongue. And there is that bridge that takes each important story ever told from one to the other, journeying it beyond geography, culture and time—the bridge that is the translator. I make an attempt at understanding the fine science and art of translation from one of its finest practitioners across the world—Maureen Freely—who has been Orhan Pamuk’s English voice for many years. More power to what we believe is the craft that makes great literature accessible, understandable, relevant and immortal forever.
How did you begin your journey in translation and how has your practice evolved since? You grew up in Turkey—what about the language fascinated you at first?
My journey into translation began when my family moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Istanbul in 1960. I was eight. In the international school that was connected to Robert College, the university where my father had come to teach physics, they taught us French every day, but very little Turkish. So for me the language swirling around me in the city itself was not a string of words but of gorgeous musical notes, choreographed by its speakers with gestures of great warmth.
What have been some of your most memorable translations?
If you are asking which translations remain most powerfully in my mind, I must of course begin with Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. This was the first of the five books I translated for my old friend. But I also loved and continue to love Istanbul: Memories and a City, which narrated a city and a generation that was familiar but also so very illuminating. Like The Black Book, which I also translated, it changed the way I looked at my own past. I have done a number of co-translations. Alexander Dawe and I have translated three classic works of the 20th century: Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute, Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat, and the collected stories of the great Sait Faik Abasiyanik, entitled A Useless Man. With John Angliss I have translated two novels by the wonderful contemporary novelist, Hasan Ali Toptas: Shadowless and Reckless. There is another splendid contemporary writer, Sema Kaygusuz, whose stories I have translated alone. I have, additionally, translated several memoirs and oral histories by Turkish descendants of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. These, too have changed my life.
I’m particularly interested in your experience of translating Orhan Pamuk’s work. Can you tell me more about it? Your translations often go on to define other translations of his work, which is a huge responsibility that you carry out to the world.
Orhan and I have known each other since high school. We lost touch, though, after I returned to the US for university. We reconnected when I found his first novel to be translated into English on the shelves of the Independent on Sunday, London. I was writing for its book pages at the time. In the first years, I gave him lots of literary advice. When he first asked me to translate Snow, I not inclined to say yes. I was not a professional translator! When I did agree, it was because, having seen a few other samples under consideration, I saw what I could do. My aim was to try to convey in English the music of the Turkish, and also to recreate the narrative trance that I, as a fellow novelist, felt so strongly in his writing. I was working on my own fifth novel at the time, and it was set in Turkey, and I kept bumping into walls with it, and I thought it might be interesting to leave it behind for a time and immerse myself in this extraordinary and extraordinarily Turkish novel. My other aim was to go over my final draft with Orhan, as there were liberties I needed to take here and there that I wanted him to be okay with. And also, he would have a chance to correct my mistakes!
You wear many hats—journalist, novelist, professor, translator, president of English PEN. How are all your roles connected, and have the others played a part in your craft of translation?
The best thing about getting older is that each strand of your life weaves into the others. Somehow or other, I have always lived by the word. By writing novels, for example, I learned how to build an alternative world. When I sat down to translate, I sank easily into the depths of someone else’s. By translating the works of a writer who was politically controversial, I learned how important it was for writers to be able to compose their thoughts and words in safety. And how important it was for them to express them openly, no matter what the consequences. And how important it was for organisations like PEN to support them. And READ them, too! Listen to what they had risked their lives to say!
“My own approach is to try and be a shadow novelist. Having sunk into the depths of those created worlds beneath the text, I then try to recreate the spatial, emotional, intellectual, and [most important] musical effects that I understand the authors to have deployed to bring their words to the surface, and to life.”
With so many nuances and much that is said between the lines, how do you make sure a story is found and not lost in translation?
My own approach is to try and be a shadow novelist. Having sunk into the depths of those created worlds beneath the text, I then try to recreate the spatial, emotional, intellectual, and [most important] musical effects that I understand the authors to have deployed to bring their words to the surface, and to life. What I can say is that translation, being highly technical, frees up the imagination in an extraordinary way. It is like daydreaming while driving. So long as you stay on the road, your mind can go anywhere. It travels, and it learns.
Can you take me through your creative process?
Not sure I can! What I can say is that translation, being highly technical, frees up the imagination in an extraordinary way. It is sort of like daydreaming while driving. So long as you stay on the road, your mind can go anywhere. It travels, and it learns.
Tell us about a translator's relationship with the author.
Well, with Orhan on a good day, it was as good as it gets. On a bad day, no comment. After we parted company, there were a few years when I definitely preferred authors who were no longer with us. That said, wherever possible, it is important, and very wonderful, to sit with an author and go through the text line by line, word by word. Such an education!
What is next?
I am halfway through a novel, my fourth to be set in Istanbul. It follows a complicated post-Ottoman family that (while not in any way taking part in the slaughter) benefitted substantially the genocide. Follow the money!
Perhaps the most important thing I learned from Orhan was the importance of writing dangerously.