Memed, My Hawk, Mèmed Le Mince and İnce Memed as metonymies and rewritings

Abstract

This article aims to comparatively analyze the first translations of Yaşar Kemal's first novel, İnce Memed (1955), into English and French, and examine the role of these translations in establishing the author's international reputation. Mehmed my Hawk (1961), translated into English by Edouard Roditi, and Mèmed le Mince (1961), translated into French by Güzin Dino, were published in the same year and pioneered the way Yaşar Kemal was known as the world-renowned most important Turkish writer until the end of the 1980s. The comparative analysis of these two translations into English and French using paratextual and textual analyses shows that similar and different strategies are used in the translations. Strategies such as summarizing, omissions and/or additions used and the paratexts presented together with translations moved İnce Memed and Yaşar Kemal beyond being a writer and his first novel, and transformed them into figures that represent metonymically Turkish literature. These two translations have been well-received by critics and readers in the Western world. Reviews of Yaşar Kemal's style and his novel, which they see as a universal epic narrative, played an important role in reshaping the author's reputation in Turkey. Review articles and criticisms that were published abroad were used in Turkey, especially in the paratexts of his novels. In this article, how these first translations of Yaşar Kemal affected the author's position in the source culture and how his identity as the epic narrator, highly influenced by the oral culture, was rewritten through these translations will be investigated.