Three Pamuk's Translated by Oklap

Mavi Boncuk |  Three recent books are not translated by Orhan Pamuk’s[1] earlier translators, such as Maureen Freely (Enlightenment, Snow, Istanbul, Other Colours,) or Erdağ Göknar (Nomadologies), who were also writers and poets but by Ekin Oklap[2]. She lives in London, where she works as a literary agent.

See also: Orhan Pamuk's Translator Discusses Her Work

[1] Orhan Pamuk

Born in Istanbul, TurkeyJune 07, 1952

http://www.orhanpamuk.net/

Influences: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Yaşar Kemal, Oğuz Atay, Marcel Proust, Gustav Flaubert, Nabokov, Georges Perec, Reşad Ekrem Koçu, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alexander Pushkin

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the wealthy westernised district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the secular American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.

His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published seven years later in 1982. The novel is the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, Pamuk's own home district. The novel was awarded both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. The following year Pamuk published his novel The Silent House, which in French translation won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. The same year Pamuk went to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 to 1988. It was there that he wrote most of his novel The Black Book, in which the streets, past, chemistry and texture of Istanbul are described through the story of a lawyer seeking his missing wife. This novel was published in Turkey in 1990, and the French translation won the Prix France Culture. The Black Book enlarged Pamuk's fame both in Turkey and internationally as an author at once popular and experimental, and able to write about past and present with the same intensity. In 1991 Pamuk's daughter Rüya was born. That year saw the production of a film Hidden Face, whose script by Pamuk was based on a one-page story in The Black Book.

His novel The New Life, about young university students influenced by a mysterious book, was published in Turkey in 1994 and became one of the most widely read books in Turkish literature. My Name Is Red, about Ottoman and Persian artists and their ways of seeing and portraying the non-western world, told through a love story and family story, was published in 1998. This novel won the French Prix du meilleur livre étranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour (2002) and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award (2003). From the mid-1990s Pamuk took a critical stance towards the Turkish state in articles about human rights and freedom of thought, although he took little interest in politics. Snow, which he describes as “my first and last political novel” was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of “political novel”, telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. Snow was selected as one of the best 100 books of 2004 by The New York Times. In 1999 a selection of his articles on literature and culture written for newspapers and magazines in Turkey and abroad, together with a selection of writings from his private notebooks, was published under the title Other Colours. Pamuk's most recent book, Istanbul, is a poetical work that is hard to classify, combining the author's early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

A Strangeness in My Mind | Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık is a 2014 novel by Orhan Pamuk. It is the author's ninth novel. Knopf Doubleday published the English translation by Ekin Oklap in the U.S., while Faber & Faber published the English version in the UK.

The story takes place in Istanbul, documenting the changes that the city underwent from 1969 to 2012. The main character is Mevlut, who originates from central Anatolia and arrives as a 12-year-old boy; the course of the novel tracks his adolescence and adulthood. Mevlut gets married in 1982 and finds a lack of success in making money.

The eponymous red-haired woman of Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk’s new novel is no different. An actress in an itinerant theater troupe, she throws lightning through this story and through the young man singing it.

"The Red-Haired Woman" is recognizably Pamukian terrain: theater, fable and Turkey's trembling perch between the ancient and the modern. Its plot is simple: A well-digger, Master Mahmut, hires 16-year-old Cem to become his apprentice and search for water on the arid outskirts of Istanbul, where myth vies with dirt for purchase on the day. They rest and gather supplies in the nearby town of Ongoren, and there Cem becomes transfixed by the red-haired actress. He can think of nothing else — infatuation is a cousin to madness — and he does what impetuous youth normally do: He seeks her out.

What’s not normal here is her reaction to him. Though double his age, she welcomes his inner rumblings, the adolescent vaulting of his heart. But she has reason to welcome this, and by novel’s end, you learn that reason. Distracted by his desire for her, Cem drops a bucket on Mahmut while he digs at the base of the well. He then flees, believing Mahmut dead, and returns to Istanbul to resume his life, resolving to behave “as if nothing had happened,” which is one of the many bogus machinations of this novel. Thirty years on, after becoming a wealthy engineer, Cem returns to Ongoren to face his past and learn the identity of the red-haired woman and the repercussions of their tryst.

Oklap: The Red-Haired Woman is a novel in three parts, each of which are very different, with the third in particular a complete departure in comparison to the first two. Part 1 is all action, and that action takes place within a very short time frame and in a particular setting. Part 2 takes place over several years and constantly references other centuries, other cultures, other countries. And finally, part 3 is a long, forceful, emotional, and at times disturbing monologue. The most difficult aspect of translating the novel was in having to shift gears between the three sections to reflect these changes in tone and pace, while at the same time maintaining the coherence of the original text so that it was always clear that these were three interconnected parts of the same novel.

Nights of Plague | Veba Geceleri) is a 2021 novel by Orhan Pamuk. Its Pamuk's 11th and longest novel inspired from historical events, set on a fictitious island in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus called Mingheria.

A number of early reviewers have observed that Nights of Plague's plot is similar to Albert Camus' existentialist novel The Plague.

Its English translation was published by Knopf Doubleday in United States and Faber and Faber in United Kingdom.

In the year 1901, a ship from Istanbul arrives on Mingheria, an island plagued by the Bubonic plague.[8] This island serves as a microcosm of the declining Ottoman Empire, where diverse groups coexist but are on the brink of disintegration. The plague, in a literal sense, mirrors the empire's metaphorical characterization as "the sick man of Europe." To combat the outbreak, the Sultan dispatches Bonkowski Pasha, the empire's chief inspector of public health, followed by a Muslim epidemiologist, Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey, and his wife, Princess Pakize.

When the chief inspector is murdered, it falls upon Princess Pakize and Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey to employ methods reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes to identify the culprit. Simultaneously, Western medicine works to control the plague. However, the islanders resist quarantine measures, resulting in an increasing number of infectious bodies. Amidst this chaos, gruesome discoveries like the corpses of two individuals fused together are made, leaving questions about their relationship unanswered.

[2] Ekin Oklap: I was born in Izmir, but when I was two, my parents moved to Milan. I went to an international school where all the classes (except for Italian literature) were in English. So, I grew up trilingual, speaking Turkish at home and English and Italian at school. I moved to the UK for university about ten years ago and have been living there since. In a sense, I’ve always been “translating” myself, my thoughts, into Turkish, or English, or Italian. 

My journey as a translator began about five or six years ago, when I found out that Orhan Pamuk was looking for someone to translate the catalog he was writing for his museum. I offered to have a go myself, translated a short text as a sample, and ended up translating the catalog itself, The Innocence of Objects.