Pseudotranslation as Passage into History: Murat Gülsoy’s Gögeler ve Hayaller Şehrinde as Transmesis

Abstract

"The use of pseudotranslation as a textual strategy in the Ottoman and Turkish literary fields has been explored from various perspectives by Turkish translation scholars, often as part of an investigation of the ideological and political entanglements of translation and of cultural conceptions of translation....Based on a textual and peritextual analysis of the novel, as well as printed and personal interviews with Gülsoy, I will discuss the writer’s motives in writing a book that reads like a translation and in foregrounding translation as a self-reflexive tool. This exploration touches upon a rarely studied aspect of pseudotranslation and provides an analysis of an apparent paradox: the use of pseudotranslation, essentially in the form of a literary forgery, to circumvent expectations of realist historical fiction and create a more self-aware reading experience."