Translating Ottoman Turkish into Turkish: linguistic hospitality as a politics of intralingual translation

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur proposed the concept of linguistic hospitality as a labour of translation between discrete national languages. But in the instance where what is designated as foreign was once intimately part of one's own language, linguistic hospitality becomes a potential project for reconciliation within a single language. This article examines Halid Ziya Usakligil's 1938 intralingual translation of his seminal novel Mai ve siyah (Blue and Black, 1896-1897) occasioned by the Turkish republican script and language reforms that intentionally produced a linguistic schism in order to divorce the Turkish nation from its cosmopolitan Ottoman past and forge a purified national language. A comparative analysis of the Ottoman Turkish and the Turkish versions of his novel demonstrates that, in defiance of enforced national forgetting, Halid Ziya's project points to an alternative literary language enriched by its plurilingual past.