Estudios Críticos de Seguridad

Terms and concepts were especially foregrounded within literary criticism and theory, which had become heavily dependent on importation from the West. As we have seen in 2.1.3.1., the evaluative-judgmental aspect o f criticism carried the utmost importance for Turkish critics for many decades. The task o f the critic was not only to comment on the work or to review it, but also to assess it. It was argued that the judgement and evaluation should be based on “terms, concepts and definitions” (Ozdemir 1971:729). Only with these tools could one pin down the “success and failure” o f a given work (Tansug 1959:299). It was claimed that before the early republican period Turkish literary criticism was “poor” because o f the lack o f conceptualisation, an obstacle in the way o f “clear and productive thinking” (Ozdemir 1982a:44)*^^. Terms were believed to “protect the critique from the shallow waters o f subjectivism”, because they were supposed to “bear exactness in meaning” and not to “change from one person to another, firom one environment to another” (Ozdemir 1982b:46). Exactness o f meaning

was often given as the roison d ’être o f terms (Baçkan 1973-1974:174)*^'*. Furthermore,

some o f the new terms introduced into literary criticism were already being used in various disciplines o f the social sciences, thus allegedly adding a certain ‘scientificity’ and ‘objectivity’ to criticism (Ozdemir 1971:730).

For a comprehensive list o f these terminology dictionaries see Brendemoen 1990:490-492.

However, Harun Tolasa’s work demonstrates that tezkire writers used their own terms and definitions, apparently clearly identifiable at their time and within their literary circles, but obsolete for the modem Turkish reader (1983:380).

One o f the rare voices which opposed this myth o f exactness was no other than Tahsin Yiicel. He argued that terms “do not carry a definitive and fixed meaning” on their own, they “acquire exactness only within the context they are used in” and “even this is not an absolute exactness” (1968:151).

This firm belief in the unproblematic semantic features o f terms was rooted in the deep conviction among Turkish writers, critics and scholars o f the time that language is transparent - a conviction, in its turn, derived from the initial need for the unifying force o f a single language in the young nation’s formation period. ‘Purity’, ‘fluency’, ‘a crystal-clear language’, and ‘our beautiful language’ were frequent expressions in texts written about Turkish. As the language as a whole was regarded as transparent, terms were considered to be even more so. “The light science emits is proportionate with the transparency o f its terms”, says Berke Vardar (1980:9). Accordingly, it was believed that by using terms derived from the resources o f Turkish, native speakers would achieve the desired transparency and consistency in thought (Baçkan 1973-1974:176). W hen a native speaker encountered a Turkish neologism for the first time, it was claimed, knowing the root o f the word, the suffixes'^^ used for derivation, plus the context, should ideally give him/her an idea about the meaning o f the term (Anday 1975:21).

However, this was often not the case. The number o f the suffixes (and a few o f the prefixes used) in Turkish amount to more than 190 (Emecan 1998:48). It is often difficult for a Turkish-speaker to understand which suffix corresponds to what sort o f m e a n i n g ^ F u r t h e r m o r e , terms “have also to be adjusted to each other so as to form a system” (Heyd 1954:80-81). Creating a term and leaving it to lead its own life results in the incomprehensibility and/or non-acceptance o f the term. One has to work around that

term as well, to derive the noun, the adjective, the verb, etc. from the same root, so that

this term would have a family o f its own, and gain a certain context to pursue its future (Baçkan 1973-1974:181). As Saliha Paker emphasises,

terms come to life in the way they relate to, weave a relationship with concepts, otherwise they remain lifeless words. Using new coinages, or stringing them together in a sentence does not appear to be enough for contextualizing concepts. For the creation o f meaningful discourse in the translation o f scientific or theoretical texts, i.e. for a transcreation o f discourse that preserves most o f the textual relationships o f the source text, it seems that translating

Prefixes, “a morphological class principally not existing in the Turkic languages” were used sparingly (Brendemoen 1990:470).

Brendemoen’s example may help the non-Turkish-speaking readers grasp the difficulties involved: “For denoting, for example, an instrument for seeing, gdr- [see] or goz [eye] plus a nominal suffix o f course may form new words. But how should the speaker know if this word denotes glasses, a monocle, binoculars, a microscope, etc., or if it has an abstract meaning only related to seeing? The old words have the undeniable advantage that they have entered the language one by one in a natural way, together with the object or concept they signify, and that they akeady were closely linked to thek connotation then” (1990:476). As most o f the “almost homonymous neologisms” deriving from the same root were “introduced within a short span o f years, the danger o f confusion between them [became] highly imminent” (1990:477).

terms can only be regarded as a preliminary task. What is expected to follow is the setting o f the context for the translation o f a concept, i.e. developing a lexical, syntactic context for the concept, with special regard for the associative aspects o f the term/s used to signify the concept, i.e. a context that would not be expected to be entirely alien to the reader (1995).

Given the accelerated speed with which foreign imports entered the Turkish system, these points could not always be taken into consideration. Consequently, a serious problem o f unintelligibility emerged in conceptually dense texts, such as those on philosophy, literary theory and social sciences. The type o f unintelligibility in question can be described as:

one that results from the translator’s endeavour to cope with the constraints o f a philosophical text, for example, especially with those constraints that affect lexical/ terminological choices which, in translation, make it difficult, sometimes impossible, for intelligent readers o f Turkish to parse and process sentences (Paker 1997:47).

Consequently, the phrase kavram karga§asi (chaos o f concepts) became the usual

definition o f the situation in Turkish thinking (îskender 1990:30-32; also Hizir 1985). This ‘chaos’ or ‘anarchy’ was ‘diagnosed’ already in the early republican period. In 1932, Hiiseyin Cahit Yalçm, a prolific translator o f French conceptual writing, spoke as

follows in the First Turkish Language Congress {Birinci Tiirk DU Kurultayi):

There have been times when I have not understood what I had written, in revising the Turkish o f my translations o f philosophical and scholarly works. I have had to go back to the French source texts to figure out what I had meant. There were no translational errors. I realized that I had failed in communicating the meaning because my unfamiliarity with those subjects in Turkish had resulted in tortuous forms o f statement. Every writer has drawn up his [jzc] own terminology, and a variety o f writers express the same concept using a variety o f terms. It almost seems that we speak different languages, and that is anarchy. We cannot let time decide on terminologies. Anarchy will end the day terminologies are fixed. And the way to do this is to take up a dictionary o f any European language and decide on a corresponding term in Turkish for every word in that dictionary (quoted in Paker 1997:48-49, Paker’s translation).

The belief in the one-to-one correspondence between the terminologies o f different languages did not wane in the following decades. “It is as much necessary for terms in the

philosophical discourses o f two languages to be in a one-to-one relationship, as it is not

necessary for the same two languages to be equivalent in terms o f their vocabulary” claims Hilmi Yavuz (1987:82). Towards the end o f this chapter I will come back to the implications o f this one-to-one correspondence.

The terminological work carried out within the framework o f the Language Reform, intensifying in the 1960s and culminating in the terminology dictionaries published by the Language Academy, testifies to the efforts o f rendering the Turkish language ‘fit’ for translating from the ‘m odem ’ languages o f the world. The period after 1960 is also the time when ‘modem literary theory’ was introduced into the Turkish literary system. Thus, translations o f texts on philosophy, social studies, and literary criticism and theory into Turkish inevitably became means o f testing, questioning and enhancing the capacity o f the Turkish language. Already in 1947, Hilmi Ziya Ülken (writer, translator, translation historian, and a prominent academician in philosophy and sociology) had noted that the suitability o f neologisms

could only be tested while “kneading a conceptual discourse”, and that “while we can manipulate the way we use some concepts in our own writings, in translating philosophy we have to obey the constraints imposed upon us by the conceptual subtleties and shades o f meaning encountered in the source texts (cited in Paker 1997:50, Faker’s translation)*

Translation, then, was the (re)source, the cause, as well as the main battleground for the Language Reform, and its significance continued up until the 1990s. In January 1993,

the first issue o f the joum al ‘Kuram ’ (Theory) included this passage in its preface: “This

joum al aims at enhancing the possibilities o f expression in Turkish, determining and defining the terms which proliferate in [literary and cultural theories] and enter our language, and at suggesting adequate counterparts for these terms”. The preface also indicated that the editorial board o f the joum al had decided to include a glossary at the end o f each article, if necessary. Although the economic, political and social changes

following the 1980 coup changed Turkey’s course into di§a açilma and çagi yakalama,

i.e. globalisation, which finds its linguistic form in extensive borrowings from English in daily vocabulary, especially in that o f the media (see Emecan 1998: 48, 174), the stmggle then is not completely over - at least in the field o f literary theory, among others.