Lecture delivered at the Dutch Institute in Istanbul, 21 January 2008 (Turkish Translation)

Hanneke van der Heijden

I'm very happy to see so many people gathered to hear something about a novel so old. That is to say, translators and other readers, think of Aşk-ı memnu or ‘Forbidden love' as a rather old book. The novel appeared first in 1898, as a serial, in the literary magazine Servet-i Fünun. But for the historians and archaeologists among you, 110 years is, I guess, nothing more than a blink of the eye.

But after all these superlatives and figures, let me first introduce Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil to you.

Writer and historical period

Uşaklıgil was born in about 1865, in Istanbul, although he spent part of his youth in Izmir. As a son of a wealthy family, from a young age on Halid Ziya got acquainted with old Ottoman literature and mystics. But also with a more European way of life: as a child he visited theatre plays in Beyoğlu with his father. In Izmir he visited a catholic school for Armenian pupils. But his interest in this so-called ‘eastern' and ‘western' culture, is perhaps best reflected in the languages he knew: apart from his mother tongue Turkish, he learnt Arabic and Persian; French, Italian, English and German.

The years when Uşaklıgil grew up were a fierce and stormy period in Ottoman history. The Tanzimat edict (1839) had promised democratic reforms in society, and reforms were needed indeed since the Ottoman Empire was slowly falling apart. It brought a new zeal and ardour to society. Literary authors from the Tanzimat-period were involved. In their literary work, they were strongly engaged in political issues. Literature was looked upon as a way to educate the people, to raise their social consciousness.

But these hopeful dreams came quickly to an end when in 1876 Sultan Abdülhamid came to reign. The authors of the Edebiyat-ı Cedide (i.e. ‘New literature') were disappointed and embittered at the repression and censorship of Abdülhamid's rule. In their literary work, they were no longer involved in political issues, either because censorship and pressure prevented them from doing so, or because they had lost the belief they could make any difference in the fate of the country anyway. Authors from this literary movement were individualists instead, trying to find comfort in aesthetics, in art modelled after western examples.

This individualist tendency was partly also the consequence of a Western influence, esp. of French literature: many authors and artists from that period stayed, voluntarily or not, for some time in France. Starting from 1862 this led to a boom of translations of French novels, like Les miserables, Paul et Virginie, Monte Christo. These translations from French, also influenced what was written in the Ottoman Empire: new literary genres were adopted, like the novel, the short story and theatre plays, genres that had until then hardly been known in Ottoman literature. And along with these western genres, movements like romanticism, realism and naturalism came into fashion in Ottoman literature.

It was this period when Halid Ziya started to publish his first magazine articles. As many of his contemporaries, he translated some stories from French. He wrote books about other literary histories, like the Latin, Greek, French and Italian. He read French literature, mainly in French, especially authors like Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert. Uşaklıgil quickly joined the movement of New Literature, that gathered around the magazine of Servet-i Fünun. Soon he became one of its main authors. In the controversy of that time, between romanticists on the one hand, and advocates of realism and naturalism on the other, Uşaklıgil chose the realist/naturalist camp nearly from the beginning: it was not the world of fairy tales or utopias he strove to describe, but the real world. And that's the way he is known today: one of the first realist novelists in Turkish literature. From the six novels Uşaklıgil wrote, Aşk-ı memnu is thought to be the most mature. It's praised for its tight structure, the realistic description of psychological development of the characters, the realistic observation and description of the world around us, for its language, its style.

Since most of you might not have read the novel, or for that matter, remember the details from the television series, let me first give you a summary of the story.

Summary of the story

The young and pretty Bihter receives a proposal of marriage from Mr. Adnan. He is a rich man in his fifties, owner of a wealthy yalı, a big villa on the shore of the Bosporus. Adnan is a widower, and father of two children: a daughter, Nihal, and a son, Bülend. Against the objections of her jealous mother, Bihter accepts Adnan's proposal: because of material reasons, since she is eager to lead a more prosperous life than her family can afford. But also because she wants to get away from her mother's range of influence. Her mother, Firdevs, is a member of the so-called group of Mr. Melih, a family of flirtatious women, fond of dressing up and going out. Bihter is afraid that her mother's reputation will keep away any other candidates for her, and afraid to end up the same way her licentious mother did. The marriage seems a good solution.

Bihter takes up residence in the rich villa, where life passes by calmly. The villa's main inhabitants are her newly wed husband, Mr. Adnan, and his daughter Nihal, who is fond of her father. Further, there is the easygoing son Bülend, Adnan's nephew Behlûl (a notorious rake), and the French governess Mlle de Courton. Finally, there is the domestic staff, the servants, especially Beşir, a black slave, who is secretly in love with his mistress Nihal.

Bihter makes quite an effort to be a good wife to Adnan, to be a good stepmother to Nihal, to be a good lady of the house to the servants. But no matter how hard she tries, her efforts lead to nothing. The servants despise her. When one of them decides to leave, Nihal is convinced that it's a conspiracy of Bihter: it must be Bihter's goal to send away all people loving Nihal. Nihal starts behaving hostile. On top of this, Bihter discovers she doesn't feel any passion for her husband, Adnan.

She does find this passion for some time with Behlûl, Adnan's nephew who's living in the villa as well. Bihter resists, afraid that starting an affair will make her the same as her mother, but in vain. They have an affair. Nihal's confidante, Mlle de Courton, is sent back to France. Nihal gets recalcitrant. Behlûl is fed up with Bihter and returns to his mistress in Istanbul's night life.

At that point Bihter's mother, Mrs. Firdevs, suggests a demonic plan: Behlûl should marry Nihal. To Behlûl this seems a reasonable solution to get rid of demanding and insisting Bihter. He even manages to fall in love with the young and pure girl. After some hesitations, Nihal decides she loves Behlûl as well. Bihter eats her heart out with jealousy and considers to reveal everything to Adnan, and thus take revenge on Behlûl, Nihal and her mother Firdevs.

But before she can do so, the whole affair is already told by the servant Beşir, who is secretly in love with his mistress Nihal. Bent on revenge, Bihter can't stand the idea of living as a fallen woman, which will be her fate from now on, and thus she shoots a bullet through her heart. Behlûl runs away, Beşir dies from tuberculosis, but the female servant returns to the villa, and Mlle de Courton is on her way back from France. Father and daughter, Adnan and Nihal, can take up their calm, quite life again.

Interpretations

There are, in short, two storylines. The first is that of Bihter, who marries with Adnan, starts an affair with Behlûl, being threatened by the reputation of her mother, hanging over her as the sword of Damocles, finally loses everything she has, and kills herself with a bullet.

Secondly, we have Nihal, who is fond of her father, jealous of Bihter, craving for love but passing over Beşir's, finally approving to marry Behlûl, but in the end happily reunited with her father Adnan again.

Berna Moran, an eminent Turkish literary critic, interprets Aşk-ı memnu as a successful example of a naturalistic novel, a novel that shows human behaviour as determined by environment and genetic predisposition. Bihter is not an indecent woman, but an unfortunate one. But, he says, the Nihal-story line is redundant. Or even worse: it spoils part of the effect of the novel. Nihal's happy end weakens the effect of Bihter's tragedy. I'll say something on this later.

Some other critics tend to stress not so much the psychological meaning as the circles in which the story is set. They interpret the novel as a description of life in Istanbul high society circles, when the Western life-style seeps in and traditional moral values crumble away.

Of course any literary work can be interpreted in number of ways. One can look at motives and themes in the structure of the story, or at the development of the characters. One can choose a feminist or a psycho-analytical framework. Since I'm a translator, I'd like to adopt a linguistic approach. Language and style can contribute to the interpretation of a novel as well. And especially in this case: to the authors of Servet-i Fünun language was one of the core businesses. They strove for aesthetics, which they hoped to find in an adorned, elaborate style, with old words and lots of synonyms. Just as some books are action-novels, Aşk-ı memnu is a language-novel. There's hardly any action. No one in the villa has a job. Working is limited to embroidering. Even the woodcuttings Adnan makes for a hobby are left unfinished. There is no rattle and clatter of pots and pans, no noise of wash tubs and brooms. The villa lives an eternal Sunday. If there's any movement or action, it is merely described, not shown.

Thus, the novel abounds in descriptions: of the exterior and the interior, of movement and feelings. Furthermore, we have dialogues and streams of thoughts. In a while, we will have a look at all three of them.

Aşk-ı memnu is known to be a difficult novel. Tell a man in the street you are translating Uşaklıgil's novel, and he will most probably sigh: ‘Ah, Müjde Ar!' The novel in its original edition is hardly read, but the television series, with the famous Turkish actress Müjde Ar, who played Bihter, left a big impression.

It is the novel's language that frightens most readers. Let me remind you it was written in 1898, in Ottoman Turkish. Soon after, in the beginning of 20^th century, Turkish language reforms were launched: this campaign was directed at purifying the Ottoman language from Arabic and Persian elements, either words or constructions. As an effect of these reforms, young readers today are no longer familiar with Uşaklıgil's language, which is full of Arabic and Persian words and constructions. In the last decades, new ‘simplified' editions have been published. And before his death, even Uşaklıgil himself prepared a revised edition in which he replaced some of the ‘old fashioned' Persian or Arabic words by more or less equivalents to meet the requirements of the new day.

In short, Aşk-ı memnu is considered to have a difficult style, and to be honest, when we read the first pages of the novel, our heart sank into our boots, too. But to be even more honest: this is not the whole truth. A closer look at the book reveals that this so-called ağdalı, bombastic Ottoman is not maintained from the first till the very last page. Some pages are in a clearly more elaborate style than others. Now that sometimes happens in novels: the author might start in a pretentious style, get bored with it after the first few chapters, than relax and continue with a simpler style. But it's not this sort of thing in Aşk-ı memnu. To me it seems, this style serves a clear function in the novel. Let's see how this adorned language is distributed over the book.

Descriptions of nature

The psychological and relational developments in the villa are now and then cut short by descriptions of nature. That is remarkable, since the inhabitants of the villa are not very eager to go out, to put it softly. Nature and landscape are merely views, seen from the window, that is, while the person observer is sitting inside. And maybe they are right, because this outside world is usually depicted as a savage and desolate place: no charming green pastures, gentle whiffs of wind, or an agreeable winter sun. On the contrary, nature and weather conditions are always extreme and harsh: heavy clouds gathering in the sky, scary woods, full of trees that try to grasp you. Even a summer picnic more reminds of a visit to hell: the heat is scorching, the water of the river Göksu is dark and black, the grass will no doubt accommodate frogs and snakes.

In the context of the book, these descriptions can easily be interpreted as a reflection of the state of mind of the characters, especially of Bihter and Nihal. In this sense, it's noteworthy that clouds not only occur in the sky, but also in the heads of the characters. The same adorned style is used when Uşaklıgil makes psychological extensions, e.g. to give some information about adolescence in young girls, or to describe Bihter's feelings when she sees herself in the mirror naked.

Deniz, derin bir uyku sükûtu içinde gibi, yukarıdan sarı bir ateş şişesi afaka sekr veren bir zülâlin selsebilini isar eden kamerin altında, baygın, melûl bir rüya içinde uzun nefeslerle göğüs geçirerek, seriliyor; uzakta müphem gölge yığıntılariyle duran sahillerin muavveç rişelerine sokularak daha samimi köşeler, gizlenecek, siperlenecek tenha, mahfi muzlim etekler arıyor; beride, ancak siyah birer sırtı görünen Adaların, meçhul bir uçurumdan fışkırıvermiş binlerce sarı gözlerinin hain ateşleriyle bakıyor zannolunan bu mehip siyah devlerin önünden kaçarak, tâ uzaklara, bitmez tükenmez ufukların uzak enginlerine doğru imtidat ediyordu, ve aydan dökülen ziya şelâlesi ile yaldızlanarak böyle serilip uzanan deniz o uzak ufuklarda semalarla birleşiyor gibiydi; onların bu visal noktasında beyaz bir fecr hattı inkişaf ederek, parıldayan bir toz galeyanı içinde, sanki orada tutuşup yanmış bir güneşin hâlâ şâşaalı külleri savrularak, kaynaşıyordu.

Onder de maan, die als een gelige vuurfles een verkwikkende stroom licht uitstrooide, waarmee de einders dronken werden gevoerd, strekte de zee zich uit, kalm als verzonken in een diepe slaap, zwaar zuchtend als in een bewusteloze, droeve droom; in de verte likten de golven aan de rafelige krommingen van het strand, dat bedolven was onder vage schaduwen, op zoek naar beslotener hoekjes, naar rustige, verstopte, duistere kusten om zich te verschuilen en te verbergen; hier vlakbij was de zee als op de vlucht voor de ontzagwekkende zwarte reuzen, de Prinseneilanden, die ieder als een donkere bergwand oprezen en hen leken aan te staren met duizenden verraderlijk fonkelende gele ogen die uit een onbekende afgrond tevoorschijn piepten, hier reikte de zee naar de verte, naar de weidse verten van eindeloze einders, en zo ver strekte hij zich uit, zo verguld raakte hij door de waterval aan licht die de maan erover uitstortte, dat hij aan die verre horizon leek te versmelten met het firmament; op de plek waar die twee samenkwamen leek welhaast de dageraad te gloren en te versmelten in een warreling van glinsterend stof alsof de nog schitterende as van een in brand staande zon daar werd uitgestrooid.

These fragments are quite predominant in the text. Not only because of the extreme images, also because of the style in which Uşaklıgil formulates them. It's especially in these fragments that the author uses his adorned style: with long sentences, old, infrequently used words from Arabic or Persian origins, abundant synonym constructions.

Description of interior: furniture, decoration, objects and clothes

As I remarked, Servet-i Fünun authors were not engaged with society in their novels, at least not explicitly: either because of state censorship. Or because they weren't familiar enough with real life in society. Or because they didn't know how to use social life as a means to express their individual feelings.

This tendency is very obvious in Aşk-ı memnu as well: one loves to stay inside. To put it even stronger: the villa seems a kind of jam-jar, a pressure cooker in which all feelings are rapidly brought to boiling point. Thus, it's no surprise that the interior of this jar is extensively described in the novel. And there's another reason why the physical appearance of the villa is so important: the wealthy villa is one of the reasons for Bihter to marry Adnan.

Lâkin Adnan beyle izdivaç demek Boğaziçinin en büyük yalılarından biri, o önünden geçilirken pencerelerinden avizeleri, ağır perdeleri, oyma Louis XV ceviz sandalyeleri, iri kapaklı lâmbaları, yaldızlı iskemleleriyle masaları, kayıkhanesinde üzerlerine temiz örtüleri çekilmiş beyaz kikle maun sandalı fark olunan yalı demekdi. Sonra Bihter'in gözlerinin önünde bu yalı bütün hayalinin tantanasile yükselirken üzerine kumaşlar, dantelâlar, renkler, mücevherler, inciler serpiliyor, bütün o çılgıncasına sevilip de alınamıyarak mütehassir kalınmış şeylerden mürekkep bir yağmur yağıyor, gözlerini dolduruyordu.

Maar een huwelijk met de heer Adnan betekende een van de grootste villa's aan de oevers van de Bosporus, een villa waar je de kroonluchters achter de vensters zag hangen als je er voorbij voer, en de zware gordijnen, de bewerkte notenhouten Louis XV-stoelen, de lampen met hun enorme kappen, de vergulde tafels en stoelen, de witte gondel en de mahoniehouten roeiboot, die onder een kraakhelder zeil in het botenhuis lagen. Terwijl deze villa in de volle glorie van haar voorstellingsvermogen voor Bihters ogen opdoemde, werd ze bedolven onder stoffen, kantwerk, kleuren, juwelen, parels, daalde er een regen op haar neer van al die dingen waarnaar ze zo hunkerde maar die ze moest missen aangezien ze zich die niet konden veroorloven, en werd ze verleid.

The villa's interior, the rooms and decoration can be read as a reflection of the emotions of the characters, just as is the case with landscapes and weather conditions. When Bihter feels depressed, the house looks dark as well; the white room in her great-aunt's house on the island makes Nihal feel relieved. Sometimes the rooms are a symbol for changing relationships: when Adnan and Bihter get married, the door between Adnan and his daughter is closed, literally and metaphorically.

But the interior and the clothing are not only used to reflect the difference in material prosperity or mood, but also to show the cultural orientation of the characters. This is most clearly revealed in the chapter when Bihter and Nihal visit a wedding.

Göğsü korsesinden taşan şişman bir genç kadın vardı ki, Kadıköy sahnelerinde dinlenen muganniyelerin taklidini yapmak için saatlerce boğazını yırtmış, nihayet Peyker'i piyanoya geçirerek bu taklid ziyafetine bir çoban raksiyle hâtime vermişti. [...] İskemlede oturamıyarak kendisine yere bir minder kodurtan bir ihtiyar hanım vardı ki, şişman genç oynarken ikide birde vecde gelerek: ‘Oh! ömrüne bereket..!' diyor.

Er was een dikke jonge vrouw, met een boezem die over haar korset puilde, die de aanwezigen urenlang had vergast op een imitatie van de zangeressen van levensliederen die optraden in de etablissementen in Kadıköy; uiteindelijk had ze Peyker achter de piano gezet die toen met een herderswijsje een eind maakte aan haar optreden. [...] En er was een oude dame die er niets voor voelde om op een stoel te zitten en daarom een kussen op de grond liet leggen, en die om de haverklap uit enthousiasme voor de verrichtingen van de dansende dikke jonge vrouw uitriep: ‘Oh! Wees gezegend...!'

Not only do descriptions of the interior serve a different function from descriptions of the exterior, the style in which they are described is different as well: the interior is rather depicted in simple enumerations than in long and complex syntactic constructions. As the weather and the landscape, the clouds and the fields serve to indicate the emotional situation of the characters, the interior and garments on the other hand, the sofas and dresses explain the cultural orientation of the characters, and the differences between an eastern and a western style.

In this context, it's interesting to note that the French governess, Mlle de Courton, a western element of flesh and blood, is not related to western culture at all. Although present on nearly every page in the book, there is only her name and an occasional remark on her accent, to remind the reader of her French background. The couches and skirts in the novel are, in other words, more western than the Westerner herself.

As a result of the style, the language Uşaklıgil uses to depict the interior, this cultural aspect attracts much less attention than the descriptions of emotions. While the clouds cry out loud, the furniture whispers. In this respect, it's suitable to call Aşk-ı memnu a psychological novel in a naturalistic fashion, more than a novel on east-west themes.

So far as the style of the descriptions in Aşk-ı memnu is concerned, of weather and landscape, of furniture and gowns. But it's not only the dresses that speak: our characters love to chat and discuss as well. Let's have a look at their dialogues.

Dialogues

Unlike the adorned Ottoman descriptions of nature, the dialogues in the book are remarkably modern in language. They have a slight taste of old, but still they are easily understandable for any modern reader - which is also proven by the fact that lots of dialogues in the TRT television series were literally taken from the book.

[Firdevs hanım:] ‘Deminden beri size bütün lüzumsuz şeylerden bahsediyorum. Asıl size söylenecek başka bir şey var. Keşfediniz bakayım.'

[Behlûl:] ‘Pek kolay! Creme de Simon bitmiş, Beyoğluna ilk çıkışımda sizin için ondan bir kutu almak...'

[Firdevs hanım:] ‘Lâtifeyi bırakınız, rica ederim. Size dair pek ciddî bir mesele. Sizi iki günden beri bunun için bekliyorum, bana öyle çapkın gözlerle bakmayınız, bütün ciddiyetinizi takınız...'

[Behlûl:] ‘Lâkin mümkün olmayan şeyler teklif etmeyiniz, rica ederim. Ciddiyet! Siz beni hiç ciddî gördünüz mü?'

[mevrouw Firdevs:] ‘Ik zit je hier de hele tijd maar allerlei dingen te vertellen die nergens voor nodig zijn. Er is iets anders. Raad maar eens.'

[Behlûl:] ‘Heel eenvoudig! De Crème de Simon is op, en de eerstvolgende keer dat ik naar Beyoğlu ga, wilt u dat ik een pot voor u meeneem...'

[mevrouw Firdevs:] ‘Kun je alsjeblieft ophouden met die grapjes. Ik heb het over een ernstige aangelegenheid die jou zelf betreft. Daarom zit ik al twee dagen op je te wachten, en kijk me nu maar niet zo ondeugend aan, ik zou graag willen dat je in alle ernst luistert...'

[Behlûl:] ‘Maar u moet geen onmogelijke dingen van me vragen. Ernst! Hebt u me ooit ernstig gezien?'

Although the dialogues don't attract attention with their style, when you consider the book as a whole, there is something noteworthy about them. A detail maybe, something easily overlooked, unless you translate the book and look at each sentence tens of times: throughout the novel a couple of sentences that appear in one dialogue or stream of thoughts, pop up again further on in the novel, in another dialogue between different characters, or in the head of another person.

One example appears first in an outburst of Bihter: ‘Sevmek!' she cries out, she wants ‘To love!' Nihal, on the other hand, has a similar cry in a similar sentence, but in the passive: ‘Sevilmek!' Not to love, but ‘To be loved!' A tiny little sentence, but revealing, I think, an important clue on the relationship between the two female characters: while the one wants to love, thus assuming an active role, the other takes up a passive role and wants to be loved. While the active one, Bihter, ends up dead, the passive one, Nihal, ends up with her father. In this respect I don't think that in the novel, the Nihal story line is redundant, as Berna Moran claimed.

Translation

To sum up, the adorned language is especially used by Uşaklıgil when describing feelings, either explicitly or implicitly (by describing the weather and landscapes). Feelings are harsh and extreme, as is seen often in naturalistic novels. Descriptions of the interior on the other hand are much simpler in style. They not only reflect feelings, but also material prosperity and cultural orientation. Dialogues, too, are remarkably modern. Repitition of utterances gives clues on the meaning of the novel.

Now that we had a closer look at the style of the author in relation to the interpretation of the novel, I'd like to give a brief explanation on the translation of it all. How to translate a text into a language spoken so far from the Ottoman Empire - far in a geographical or cultural sense, but also in a historical one.

Any Turkish reader starting to read Aşk-ı memnu, will notice that the book is an old text. But what about the Dutch readers? Should they feel they are reading a text written 110 years ago? That is, should they notice this from the language used? And if so, what kind of characteristics of 19^th century Dutch should be chosen? Should it be notable from old fashioned grammar rules, e.g. noun cases? Or from the lexicon, i.e. should the translation abound with old fashioned words? Spelling maybe? Like writing ‘grote' as ‘groote', or ‘mens' as ‘mensch' again?

Translators differ in their choices on questions like these. And there might even be a cultural difference. I might be mistaken, but sometimes I get the impression that in Turkey the tendency is to translate old classical books in a rather modern variant of Turkish. In The Netherlands, I would say, there is no consensus on this point.

My colleague Margreet Dorleijn and I decided it would be artificial to try to use 19^th century syntax again - if we would be able to do so anyway. And also spelling would give a ridiculous flavour to the text and distract the reader. But on the other hand, we didn't want to give the reader the impression that the novel was written only a couple of years ago, either. Thus we decided to use older Dutch words where needed - but not so old that the reader would need a dictionary. We avoided English loanwords (except ‘picnic'), since most of them entered the Dutch vocabulary in more recent times. And we preferred French loans instead, which still have in many cases an air of distinction, appropriate to high society circles.

It is often thought by non-translators that the more complex the sentence is, the more difficult it is to translate. That is not necessarily true. In my experience, it can take hours and hours to find something reasonable for a three word sentence, while delicately intertwined sentences in an elaborate style get translated with an intense look. And the opposite - some of the detailed descriptions of nature did keep us busy for quite a while.

But let me also give you an example of one of the details that seem futile but asked a lot of attention, an issue on the crossing of syntax, history and culture: the distinction between sen/siz or in Dutch: jij and u - English is clearly insufficient here to express the distinction between the informal and formal 2^nd person singular pronoun. Conventions on when to use the formal or the informal term of address are not the same in Turkish and Dutch. Moreover, in 19^th century Dutch, these conventions were quite different from the way they are now. And to make it even more complex, in Aşk-ı memnu people easily switch from the formal to the informal and back again to formal. Whereas in Dutch you can switch from formal to informal, but once you use informal jij, it's very odd to switch back to formal u again. For each pair of speakers we looked at the ages of both people involved, their degree of familiarity, and for every context, whether other people were around or not. For example, Adnan and Bihter address each other with informal jij when they are alone in their bedroom: there is a big difference in age, but they're too well acquainted to use u. But when they're having tea with other inhabitants of the villa, they address each other with u, the formal term.

Then a last word on the cultural connotation of some of the furniture and dresses. As we saw, they're often used as indicators for either a more Western or more Eastern cultural orientation. This is immediately clear for any Turkish reader, but not for the Dutch readership. Let's remember the wedding scene, where the old lady sits on a cushion on the floor, and not on a couch. Dutch readers will tend to interpret this as a matter of individual preference, not of cultural orientation. We tried to overcome this problem not with footnotes, but in the text, just by adding for example an adjective to the word: e.g. hotoz - old ottoman cap. Apart from this, we will also write a short afterword to our translation in which we'll explain the cultural context of the novel.

Thanks

For most of you this must be the first visit to the Dutch Institute in Istanbul. Until a year ago, I had never been here, either. Most of the translation I made here, in the library. And while looking at the sentences in Aşk-ı memnu, many times I secretly thought of this large building as the villa on the Bosporus: the historical building of Merkez Han filled with computers and books from abroad. I saw us sitting on couches sipping from our tea, made in an antique samovar. I imagined the inhabitants of the guest rooms walking through the corridors in rustling skirts.

But although the building, the rooms, the corridors, the furniture may compare to Mr. Adnan's yalı, fortunately, there are never dark clouds gathering over it. No suffocating heat, no green water, dark as ink, running from the taps, no frogs and snakes under the carpet. I would like to thank the staff and employees of the Dutch Institute in Istanbul for providing such a huzurlu place to work.

Turkish examples are taken from Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, Aşk-ı memnu, İstanbul: Hilmi Kitabevi / Publishing house, 1962. The Dutch fragments are from a preliminary version of the translation by Hanneke van der Heijden & Margreet Dorleijn. The Dutch edition will be published in June 2008 by Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam, under the title Verboden liefde.

[1] The novel Eline Vere is not yet translated into Turkish, but one of Couperus' other novels, Stille kracht, is available: Louis Couperus, Gizli güç. İstanbul: Kanat, 2006.

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