Does the Drina flow? Cultural indifference and Slovene/Yugoslav literature in Turkish

Abstract

The goal of the present study is twofold. The first goal is to identify the current status of Slovene literature in the Turkish literary system and to explore the ways in which Slovene and Yugoslav literatures have been (non-)translated into Turkish during the past 50 years. After providing a background to the scarcity of translations from the languages of the former Yugoslav republics into Turkish, the paper proceeds with pursuing its second goal and sets out to investigate a major point of contact between Yugoslav literature and the Turkish literary field by focusing on the first Turkish edition of Ivo Andrić’s famous novel, The Bridge over the Drina (Drina Köprüsü) published in 1962. The novel and the discourse formed around it will enable a problematization of a number of translational issues that have recently been under close scrutiny in translation studies. One of them is translation movements among the less widely spoken languages and the conditions that mediate literary contacts among these languages as exemplified by the case of Turkish and Serbo-Croatian. The paper will also discuss the issue of non-translation in connection with this. A second issue which will be tackled in the paper is the Nobel Prize for Literature and its influence over publishers, translators and readers, as exemplified by the interest shown in Andrić, following shortly after his reception of the prize in 1961.