Translational Adventure of Mike Hammer Series in Turkish: A Historical Analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to present a historical analysis of the Turkish versions of American author Frank Morrison (Mickey) Spillane’s Mike Hammer series by Kemal Tahir (F. M. İkinci) and Afif Yesari (Muzaffer Ulukaya). As private publishing houses gained impetus in the 1950s and there was a massive influx of translated works, especially in detective novel genre, hundreds of ‘fictitious’ Mike Hammer books were published in Turkey until the 1980s. For the purpose of presenting a new insight into the concept of ‘pseudotranslation,’ four books of Tahir and four books of Yesari are selected and analyzed descriptively by focusing on both textual and paratextual elements. In addition to the analysis, supporting materials such as memoirs, letters, interviews of the agents who partook in the production of the pseudotranslations are included to provide a historical background and understand under which circumstances the pseudotranslations were produced. Itamar Even-Zohar’s ‘polysystem theory’ provides the theoretical basis for the study. Even though the Turkish versions of Mike Hammer series have been scrutinized by various scholars, further research is still needed to cover all of the original works of detective fiction disguised as translations and thus to shed light on both the history of translational activity in a certain era and the development of original Turkish detective fiction.