Translator's Introduction to The Cellular Engineer — Web Exclusive
By Ozlem Sensoy
I was translating the collection of short stories that includes "The Cellular Engineer" when I came across this year's TWO LINES theme and two thoughts came to mind. The first and more immediate was that the heroine of this story struggles to re-live time, feelings, and memories by re-making her lost lover, cell by cell, with the aid of a Cellular Engineer. Although the method is unique, her struggle is universal: the desire to recapture lost moments and gain second chances. Our heroine bends the physical environment to her emotional environment, willing the two to merge and thus recreate what she longs for: her past.
My second thought speaks more to our responsibility as translators. The translator, like Nazli's heroine, tries to re-make, warrange, reproduce— cell by cell—the very object of his or her affection, the text. It confirms what I've always sensed to be true, that "cellular" (perhaps word-for-word?) translation is incomplete, merely the shell of the whole. As Nazli comes to understand, the "reality" of her past is created not by its physical remnants but by her mind, and it is here that she must look when she seeks to recreate past moments. Likewise, the translator must not stop at the cellular level of basic textual translation but must look for guidance to his or her own experience of the text.
Nazli Eray was born in Ankara, the capital city of the Republic of Turkey, in 1945. She has a law degree from Istanbul University and has worked as a translator and newspaper columnist. Her stories have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Urdu, and Hindu. She is a member of the International PEN and has participated in the writers' workshops at the University of Iowa. Eray's stories are often described as leaning heavily towards a dream or fantasy world. This description may be somewhat simplistic. Her work—which is often fantastic—is also deeply pensive, psychologically intricate, and always struggles to break free of time. She is an author endlessly interested in thoughts—in the mind and in the human psyche.
Translating Turkish literature presents many of the same challenges encountered in any translation, but additional difficulties arise in translating from a language and literary culture that is less familiar to English readers. Turkish is also an agglutinative language, and agglutinative structure lends itself to short, crisp sentences carrying minimum baggage but maximum load. It is altogether possible, and in fact quite common, for one word to constitute an entire sentence. Also, time in sentence tense is more flexible in Turkish than it is in English. This provides many advantages to a writer who is interested in manipulating time and tense in her works to reveal a character, especially one living in both the present and the past. In English, problems can arise when playing too consistently with tense, so I've tried to clue the shifting thoughts of the heroine in other ways as she moves from one moment in her past to another—for example, by remaining exceedingly faithful to short travel time between settings: "We got into a cab and arrived home." I hope the resulting translation is successful in drawing aside a corner of the curtain to reveal one of Turkey's best contemporary writers.
Ozlem Sensoy is an assistant professor of education at Simon Fraser University. She specializes in the field of gender and women’s studies.