Delayed for forty years :|the journey of Anayurt Oteli from Turkish into English

Abstract

This study aims to answer the question why Fred Stark’s translation of Anayurt Oteli into English had to wait for 40 years to get published. I propose that approaching the question with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological conception of the field of cultural production will yield the answer I seek. I argue that a contrastive sociological study that analyzes the contexts and paratexts surrounding the novel and the actual texts reveals how agents form discourse on two levels: the textual and the meta-discursive. On the textual level, I argue that in translation Anayurt Oteli is (re-)contextualized in the American literary system, demonstrating the Turkish individual torn in between the East and the West. On the latter level, I claim that the meta-discourse on translation still perpetuates Lawrence Venuti’s (2004) postulates of fluency and invisibility. I observe that de-/re-contextualization, fluency and invisibility are dictates of a commercialized book market. I maintain that in the near future, as modes of all production change due to the ecological crisis that the earlier few centuries’ greed for economic growth has resulted in, our expectations from cultural production will also shift towards practices of sustainable, subjective and intimate nature. I argue that with such a change, our understanding of the (in)visibility of the translators and ways to foreground their presence will have to follow suit. Accordingly, I offer an alternative, ecological model that foregrounds the unwritten, human aspects of the profession. I offer the profile of Fred Stark as an example to this new ecological understanding.