Translation and ideology: a study of paratexts of Turkish translations of the Kurdish Mesnevi Mem û Zin in the Republican period

Abstract

Mem û Zin, the masterpiece of the seventeenth-century Kurdish poet Ehmedê Xanî, was translated into Turkish in both the Ottoman and Republican periods. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the paratexts accompanying the Turkish translations of Mem û Zin that were produced from Kurdish source-texts in the Republican period, so as to examine the impact that ideology can have on translation. Translations of Mem û Zin in much of the Republican period encountered censorship and repression. However, the same text was translated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, a representative of the state, in 2010, thus suggesting the strong relationship between ideology, politics and translation. To examine this relationship, the thesis retrospects the Kurdish issue in Turkey in its various linguistic, social, academic and literary dimensions. After that, the theoretical framework is presented and, in particular, the salience of Lefevere’s concept of rewriting is emphasized. As for the methodology, paratextual analysis and critical discourse analysis are deployed in an attempt to reveal the ideological motives behind the translations. With these methodological tools, I analyze the book covers and prefaces of Mehmet Emin Bozarslan’s translation (1968, 1975 and 1990), Namık Açıkgöz’s translation (2010) and Kadri Yıldırım’s translation (2010) and book-length translation criticism (2011). The thesis concludes that the Turkish adventure of Mem û Zin offers a striking case of the link between ideology and translation, while analysis of the paratexts for various Kurdish-Turkish translations demonstrates the role that paratexts can play in creating new images of authors and works.