Invited sojourners: a survey of the translations into Turkish of non-fiction left books between 1960 and 1971

Abstract

Faring forth by critiquing those metaphors of and approaches to translation which are orientated by difference-centred theories, this thesis starts by turning this negating critique into an immanent path. The present study focuses on another metaphor of translation which may have a utopian blossom with an endeavour to learn from "others" in order to explore the alterity in "ourselves" and also to comprehend the commonalities that we have with others, in terms of the translation of non-fiction left books between 1960 and 1971, which can be seen as a certain concrete representation of such an ideal. If we leave aside the 1930s, left books were translated tenously in the early Republican history until the 1960s. But when the door was opened with the 1961 Constitution and the stimulation of international dynamism and internal social struggles emerged, the rate of production of such books began to escalate when compared with the past history of the Left in Turkey. In this direction, first of all, the translated books that were produced by the left movement in the early Republican period are browsed. Then the left books that were translated in the 1960s are subjected to a quantitative description. Following these two overviews, the contours of the translated literature are examined critically in terms of a product and problematic based framework. What are exposed afterwards are the sources of the political movements that could not find a representation among the political configurations of the time and accordingly were excluded from the canon, and also art criticism which increasingly was scaled down to the back of the political agenda.This thesis points at a tendency for the dissident translation activities to inspire or contribute to some theoretical debates revolving around "nativity" in the first part of the decade, but also indicates a proclivity for a direct subordination to problems of political strategy and search for models in the following years. The study comes to an end by putting forward the observation that the intellectually occlusive effect of translation, whose ambiguous character has been frequently emphasised throughout the whole thesis, began to generally overbalance at the end of the period.