Selânikli Tevfik – writer, journalist, translator

Abstract

The last four decades of the nineteenth century were a period when, as a result of increased investment in education as well as closer contacts with Europe, Ottoman Turkey and the provinces of the Empire registered a significant growth in the reading public. Newspapers, journals and books began to be published, sold and read in large numbers partly because, in addition to providing news, views and items of public education, they also published Turkish novels in the original and European novels in translation, in instalments. Several newspapers and journals that began publishing in Turkey in the second half of the nineteenth century were still on the market till the start of the First World War and their editors were usually well-known literary figures, such as Selânikli Tevfik, the subject of the present article. Tevfik was a journalist, an author and poet, a competent translator and an all-round man of letters. His life and works are presented in the article in the context of the period in which he lived. Selânikli Tevfik was a prolific Ottoman literary figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, he is primarily remembered as one of a sizeable group of hardworking individuals of his generation who, while producing proficient and creative works of different literary genres in Turkish, had also become fully competent in European languages, mainly French. These writers wished to narrow the gap between the European and Ottoman literary environments of their period by translating popular novels into Turkish and publishing them in book form and/or instalments in Ottoman newspapers and journals. Selânikli Tevfik means Tevfik of Salonica [now Thessaloniki], and his full name was Mehmed Tevfik. He lived in an age when surnames were not legally enforced in the Ottoman Empire and thus some attention is required to distinguish him from other writers or well-known people with similar or almost identical names. 1 Not much is known about the life of Selânikli Tevfik; the year of his death is 1910, and his date of birth is almost always given as 1860 though, as will be seen later, it is highly likely to be 1857.