A critical study on Pınar Kür as author-translator: authorial and translatorial styles in interaction

Abstract

The present thesis has two main goals: to explore interactions between Pınar Kür’s authorial and translatorial styles and to test the extent to which corpus methodology can be employed in the stylistic analysis of literary texts. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the texts in the corpus, which consists of Bitmeyen Aşk (1986), Bir Cinayet Romanı (1989), Geniş Geniş Bir Deniz [Wide Sargasso Sea] (1982), Dörtlü [Quartet] (1985), Karanlıkta Yolculuk [Voyage in the Dark] (1989), and Günaydın Geceyarısı [Goodmorning Midnight] (1990), demonstrate that there are various interactions between Kür’s authorial and translatorial styles. The study reveals that certain aspects of style would not be detected without a qualitative analysis despite the benefits provided by corpus software. The discourse analysis of the essays about author-translators in the journals Tercüme, Yazko Çeviri, and Metis Çeviri shows that author-translators were well-esteemed and expected to translate literary works into Turkish in stylistic similarity to the source texts particularly in the 1940s. The results of the investigation on Kür’s ‘habitus’ and the reception of her works in the fields of Turkish literature and literary translation show that Pınar Kür has considerable symbolic capital as an author-translator. The thesis further explores the agency of the author-translator positioned in the intersection of the Turkish literary polysystem and the system of literature in Turkish translation and identifies influences of her authorial habitus on her translatorial habitus and vice versa.