A pilgrim's progress: Armenian and Kurdish literatures in Turkish and the rewriting of literary history

Abstract

ABSTRACTJohn Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is a narrative that has been translated into Turkish several times. Strangely, histories of Turkish literature and of literary translations into Turkish rarely make any reference to it. The fact that the early translations were in Armeno-Turkish and that they were promoted by Protestant missionary organizations might explain why they were ignored in the historiography of a field in which the contributions of non-Muslims are hardly acknowledged. In recent years, however, Armeno-Turkish literature has become a new area of study in Turkey. Young scholars, mostly in Turkey's leading private universities, have started to explore Armeno-Turkish literature and the exchanges between western Armenian and Turkish literatures in the Ottoman Empire, and have challenged the nationalist discourse underpinning traditional Turkish literary historiography. Mignon's paper gives an overview of Armeno-Turkish literary studies from the rare early republican scholarly publications on the topic to the latest postgraduate research projects on the Armeno-Turkish novel and on nineteenth-century Turkish and western Armenian dramatic traditions. His paper also discusses recent debates on Kurdish poets writing in Turkish and ‘literature in Turkish’, in contra-distinction to Turkish literature, which have opened new spaces of freedom that should facilitate an integration of Armeno-Turkish literature into mainstream Turkish literary history. Beyond academic debates on the challenges to cultural historiography and literary theory, the rediscovery of Armeno-Turkish literature and the acknowledgment of Armenian contributions to Turkish literature represent a major opportunity in the Turkish context to reassess the place of non-Muslim ethnoreligious communities in late Ottoman political and cultural history.