The long transatlantic career of the Turkish spy

Abstract

An obscure text today, Giovanni Paolo Marana's novel Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, written in Paris in 1683, was a tremendously popular and influential work on both sides of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Marana's epistolary novel follows the career of “Mahmut the Arabian,” sent by the Turkish sultan to spy on the French court between the years 1637 and 1682. This article will survey the Turkish Spy's long period of circulation in the Anglophone Atlantic, from the work's first translation from French into English in 1687, to Daniel Defoe's sequel A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718) and finally to the publication in Philadelphia of Peter Markoe's The Algerine Spy (1787), a successor novel that adopts and adapts the Turkish Spy character to address the pressing concerns of postcolonial America. In the context of recent trends in transnational/transatlantic studies and the ongoing debate over what constitutes “world literature,” my argument focuses on how the translators’ prefaces attached to the various editions/adaptations of the Turkish Spy deploy translation as a trope to domesticate this nomadic and cosmopolitan text. I will argue that the repeated insistence on the spy's letters having been translated from “Arabick” reflects a search for unrecoverable origins that come to represent the common fictions of the nation itself. The translators of the Turkish Spy insist on a direct relationship between their national audiences and the Arabic original even as actual layers of translation and mediation accumulate. The unruly, rhizomatic history of the Turkish Spy makes the work both a rich case study in the territorialization of literary production in the eighteenth century and a strong candidate for inclusion in the evolving canons of Atlantic and world literature.