by Erdağ Göknar for DUKE MAGAZINE on JULY 24, 2013: 
Erdağ Göknar
Translation is a form of intercultural exchange and dialogue. I think of it as part of a larger constellation of writing and reading practices. It is furthermore a metaphor for what I do in my teaching and research on Turkey and the Middle East (at Duke and in the Duke in Turkey study-abroad program). In my case, the authors I translate come from a little-known culture and tradition. There is a growing interest in the geopolitics and history of Turkey, but much less attention is paid to its language and culture. In translating, the challenge is to make the nuances of everyday life in Istanbul, let’s say, legible to a reader in Durham.
What many people think of as “translation” only describes the first stage of this kind of work. The lexical landscapes of Turkish writers such as Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk or the modernist author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-62) are complex. My aim is to both convey the meaning (to translate) and to create an aesthetic in English inspired by their language (to write). I do this by producing layers of text, beginning with a literal decoding and successively building up to an aesthetic language all its own. During this process the Turkish text is subsumed by an English version that is dependent on the original but also conveys its own independence as a literary work.
I consulted with Pamuk during my translation of his historical novel My Name Is Red. Often, we would debate words and phrases in his Istanbul writer’s studio. At one point, he insisted that all of the references to Allah be translated as “God,” because he claimed there was one God, which was the same in Judaic, Islamic and Christian traditions. I suggested, however, that the cultural nuances were vastly different. He wasn’t persuaded. On the shelf, I saw that he had Webster’s Third New International unabridged dictionary, the one beloved by Nabokov. I flipped through it, confirming my hunch. I pointed out that in English, there were separate entries and definitions for the two words. In the end, I relied on both “Allah” and “God” in the translation. There were many examples like this in which word-choice colored or determined cultural meaning. Once published, the translation established Pamuk as an author of world literature and was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Three years later, Pamuk won the Nobel Prize.
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Erdağ Göknar is Assistant Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, and core faculty of the Duke Islamic Studies Center. His primary focus is on late Ottoman and modern Turkish literature, history and culture. His secondary focus is on representational politics and cultural translation in the Middle East. He is co-leading the Duke in Turkey undergraduate program this summer. His latest book is Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013).