Part of
Tradition, Tension and Translation in TurkeyEdited by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Saliha Paker and John Milton
[Benjamins Translation Library 118] 2015
► pp. 107–124
Edited by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Saliha Paker and John Milton
[Benjamins Translation Library 118] 2015
► pp. 107–124
Saved by translation
German academic culture in Turkish exile
In our age, translation has become a regulative and cosmopolitan modality of our experience of shifting borders and populations on the move. At the same time, however, the power issues involved in the politics of translation give rise to concerns about the economy of equitable exchange between dominant and minor languages and the vulnerability of the lesser language to misappropriation, domestication, and depletion in translation into a high status language. On the other hand, in the condition of exile, the translation of a canonical language into the lesser-known language of the country of exile can safeguard a banished intellectual culture. The sojourn of Nazi Germany’s academic exiles in Turkey (1933–45) bears witness not only to the survival and dissemination of a banished academic legacy in (Turkish) translation but also to an avant la lettre practice of interdisciplinary cultural studies.
Keywords: exile, German-Jewish professors, Germany, interdisciplinarity, translation, Turkey
References (19)
Apter, Emily. 2005. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1977. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In Illuminationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Haywaert. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bilsel, Cemil. 1943. İstanbul Üniversitesi Tarihi. Istanbul: Kenan Matbaası.
Delisle, Jean, and Judith Wordsworth, eds. 1995. Preface. Translators Through History. Vol. 13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Roundtable on Translation.” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Edited by Christie McDonald. Lincoln and Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Heine, Heinrich. 1968. “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland.” In Heinrich Heine. Werke. Edited by Helmut Schanze. Vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag.
Hirsch, Enver. 2009. In “Fluchtpunkt Türkei. Die lange Nacht über Asyl für Deutsche in der NS Zeit.” Text by Adolf Stock. Ed. Monika Künzel. Text of Deutschland Radio Kultur Broadcast, May 1.
Hirsch, Ernst. 1982. Aus des Kaisers Zeiten, durch die Weimarer Republik, in das Land Atatürks. München: J. Schweitzer.
Kundera, Milan. 1993. “Author’s Note.” In The Joke. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Revised by Aaron Asher and Milan Kundera. New York: Harper Perennial.
. 1996. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Translated by Linda Asher. New York: Harper Perennial.
Neumark, Fritz. 1980. Zuflucht am Bosporus: Deutsche Gelehrte, Politiker und Künstler in der Emigration 1933–1953. Frankfurt am Main: Knecht.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2004. “The Limits of Cultural Translation.” In Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, edited by Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press.
Seyhan, Azade. 2005. “German Academic Exiles in Istanbul: Translation as the Bildung of the Other.” In Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stock, Adolf. 2009. Radio Interview with Enver Hirsch. In “Fluchtpunkt Türkei. Die lange Nacht über Asyl für Deutsche in der NS Zeit.” Ed. Monika Künzel. Text of Deutschland Radio Kultur Broadcast, May 1. See entry on Hirsch.
Tahir Gürçağlar, Şehnaz. 2009. “Translation, Presumed Innocent: Translation and Ideology in Turkey.” The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Translation 15: 37- 64.
Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. 2004. “Hasan Âli Yücel’e Dair Hatıralar ve Düşünceler” [Hasan Âli Yücel: Memories and Reflections]. In his Mücevherlerin Sırrı [The Secret of the Jewels]. Edited by İlyas Dirin, Turgay Anar, and Şaban Özdemir. Istanbul: YKY.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2005 “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities.” In Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Widmann, Horst. 1973. Exil und Bildungshilfe. Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.