The annual London Book Fair, one of the world's largest, took place last week and attracted hundreds of publishers from dozens of countries for three days of discussion on this fast-changing industry. Waves of consolidation have changed the face of particularly UK publishing over recent decades with the demise of many familiar names, and the advent of electronic publishing and the market dominance of Amazon in Web-based retail and distribution seem certain to change it further. In addition to the usual rounds of negotiations over rights and the pre-publication presence at the Fair of certain much-anticipated titles, with a new biography of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher drawing particular interest, main stories this year included the implications of the tie-up between Penguin Books and Random House to create the world's largest book publisher and the on-going digital revolution, which has already had profound effects on traditional forms of publication and book distribution. However, for visitors less concerned with the changing publishing landscape or the chance to take an early look at what promise to be the new best-sellers, this year's Fair was above all an opportunity to deepen acquaintance with the literature of modern Turkey, with dozens of Turkish authors, publishers and translators being present at the Fair as part of the market focus on the Turkish publishing industry. For the past decade or so, the London Book Fair, like many others elsewhere in the world, has hosted events relating to a particular country or group of countries as a way of raising the international profile of the literatures of these countries and, it is hoped, encouraging their translation and wider distribution. In 2008, the Arab world was market focus at the London Fair, reported on in the Weekly in April of that year, and this year it was the turn of another Middle Eastern literature, with the presentation of Turkish literature to London audiences being both intriguingly similar and also rather different to that of Arabic five years before. CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATION: One of the main similarities linking the Arab market focus in 2008 to this year's market focus on Turkey was the sometimes vexed issue of translation, with the challenges of persuading English-language publishers to publish originally Turkish-language books being seldom far from the minds of the Turkish writers and publishers taking part in the Fair's various readings, events and seminars. In opening the Turkish programme, for example, Turkish minister of culture Omer Celik said that the promotion of Turkish literature and the development of new audiences for this literature worldwide was a priority of the Turkish government, as could be seen by the support provided for presentations such as the one at the London Book Fair and for the translation of Turkish literature into other languages, notably through the Turkish government supported TEDA programme. On a less official level, the Turkish writers and critics who had traveled to London for the Fair seemed to agree that the speedy and reliable translation of Turkish literature into English and other languages was vital if the country's literature, and its intellectual production more generally, was to find readers abroad. However, there were also other issues that bore on the reception and distribution of Turkish literature abroad, they said, though some of these at least could also be assimilated to the larger umbrella issue of translation. Opening the series of author seminars organised by the British Council in association with the Turkish Publishers Association, the Turkish Association of Press and Publishing and the Turkish National Organising Committee, British academic Maureen Freely, the English-language translator of the work of the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, said that one of the things that most intrigued western readers of Turkish literature was how the country's writers were responding to Turkey's growing influence in the world and the changes that had been taking place within Turkey itself. Western readers sometimes had a rather restricted view of Turkish literature, the Turkish writers speaking at this first seminar said, often falling back on a set of orientalist clichés about Turkey and the wider Middle East. However, the one thing that characterised contemporary Turkish literature was its engagement with the “cataclysmic transformations” that Turkey had undergone over recent decades, meaning that western publishers would be doing their readers a disservice if they insisted on seeking out coffee-table books serving up comfortable stereotypes about the country instead of translating the work of contemporary writers. The title of this first seminar, “Writing in a Changing Turkey,” underlined this process of change and transformation, as did the wording used for the Turkish market focus as a whole, which emphasised “Turkey in all its Colours.” According to Turkish novelist Muge Iplikci speaking at the seminar, literature in Turkey today was shedding many of the vices of the past, including some of those sometimes associated with Pamuk. Writing that had explored “feelings of belatedness in the face of western modernity,” taking refuge in a “romantic pride in the past,” was giving way to literature less concerned with self-exoticisation or with winning the admiration of the West, she said, meaning that Turkish writers were coming into their own and exploring themes and issues not necessarily scripted by the past. The question of the identity of Turkish literature was also taken up by Mehmet Yashin, a poet and novelist, who complained of what he called the trap of self-orientalisation that had sometimes afflicted Turkish writers. This had led to writing that consciously or unconsciously saw the country through the eyes of the West and served up a menu of past glories and present decline, the weight of religion, the oppression of the state and an all-pervading melancholic tone. It made up a sort of “fashionable kitsch,” Yashin said, that appealed to western audiences and reintroduced Turkish nationalism “through the back door.” Whatever the merits of this concoction might be, what he wanted to see instead, Yashin said, was a Turkish literature that was both more forward-looking and more alive and that more adequately reflected the contemporary reality of the country. Such a literature, he said, would also foreground issues surrounding the modern Turkish language, which had been “militarised and masculinised” since the foundation of the republic after the First World War in line with the centralising tendencies of the Turkish state. Contemporary Turkish writers, Yashin said, concerned to rediscover aspects of the country's history and society that had been pushed to the margins by decades of military rule, could not help but explore the riches of the Turkish language, notably through their experimentation with the country's dialects, with gendered language, and with the Ottoman, Persian and Arabic elements that had been expunged from modern Turkish. A model here might be the Irish writer James Joyce, Yashin suggested, who, writing on the margins of the imperialist British state, had “made a cosmopolitan language out of English” by pushing it outside its island borders, eventually recasting it altogether in the fantasy language employed in Finnegans Wake. While Yashin did not seem to be suggesting that modern Turkish should be deconstructed in the manner of Joyce's subversion and subsequent reconstruction of English, he did manage to produce a picture of resurgent Ottoman and minority identities fighting it out in poetic language and in so doing undermining the inherited military and masculine emphases of the institutions of the Turkish state. FROM TURKISH TO ENGLISH: Speaking later on the Fair's first day at a seminar on Turkish literature in Britain, Muge Gorsay Sokmen, founder of the Metis publishing house, said that the situation of Turkish literature in English had been transformed by the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to Orhan Pamuk in 2006 and by the interest generated by the ongoing Turkish accession negotiations to the EU. The increasing interest on the part of western publishers in Turkish literature after the award of the Nobel Prize to Pamuk recalls the similar effect that the award of the Prize had in 1989 when it was given to the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, with many Arab writers benefiting from increased foreign interest as a result. However, while the award of the Nobel Prize to Pamuk had been important in stimulating western interest in Turkish literature, Gorsay Sokmen said, just as important had been the deliberate promotion of Turkish literature abroad by Turkish publishers with the support of the country's government. One way in which this had been done was through the selection of works in Turkish that could be presented to publishers abroad, and this method was in evidence at the London Fair, where the Turkish pavilion was groaning with catalogues giving details in English of the yearly Turkish production in literature, the social sciences, history and other subjects. Another method had been through financial subsidies provided by the Turkish government for the translation and publication of works originally published in Turkish abroad. While not all of the literary translations into English had been supported by the Turkish government's TEDA programme, which also covers translations into a variety of other languages, notably Arabic, there had been a clear upward trend, Gorsay Sokmen said, with only one title from Turkish being published in the UK in 1990, but 12 appearing in 2012 and 42 from 2006 onwards. A greater range of British publishers had also published works translated from Turkish, she said, though foreign literature in the UK remained a niche market and the larger publishers were unfortunately mostly interested in best-sellers. One of the challenges facing Turkish writers hoping to break into the UK market was to know what English-language publishers wanted, she said, though this could turn out to be a double-edged sword, as it could for writers of any foreign literature. Turkish writers could be accused of “not being Turkish enough” if they did not deal with issues thought to interest readers of English, or of not being “international enough” if they were not thought to have “something to say to the rest of the world.” In this context, the role of translators was crucial, Gorsay Sokmen said, because these could help to introduce Turkish writers to foreign publishers and proselytise on their behalf. Nevertheless, the notorious insularity of the UK market had proved a challenge for Turkish writers and publishers, as it has for many Arab ones, since whereas some 200 titles translated from Turkish have appeared in Germany over the past two years alone, only a few dozen have appeared in English. Both Amy Spangler, a literary agent in Istanbul, and Bejan Matur, a Turkish poet and critic, complained of what they called the pressure exerted by western publishers to reduce Turkish literature to a source of anthropological or sociological information on the country from which it comes in their contributions to the same seminar. Publishers do not like to take risks, Spangler said, and many of them are more comfortable with works dealing with the kind of themes treated in western journalism, among them the role of women in Turkish society, human rights issues and the country's Kurdish minority, than they are with literature that asks above all to be read as literature. TURKEY IN ALL ITS COLOURS: Among the pleasures of the London Fair's Turkish market focus was the opportunity to discover writers who may have been previously unfamiliar. While Orhan Pamuk was not present at the Fair – was there a feeling he had been over-exposed? – many lesser-known Turkish writers were in evidence, many of them discussing intriguing and possibly unexpected works. A panel discussion at the Fair on new trends in Turkish literature identified the transformations that had taken place in the Turkish literary scene since the 1980s, with some 800 novels now being published in Turkish each year and experiment occurring in genres such as science-fiction and fantasy that had previously been thought of as out-of-bounds to Turkish writers. According to the speakers on this panel, Omer Turkes, Feridun Andas and Omer Lekesiz, Turkish literature had been becoming more expressionistic and individualistic, less obviously political, or rather political in new ways, and while this had meant that it had been losing its concern for social function and its self-appointed role of analysing society and social trends, it had also become more heterogeneous and quirky as a result. Nowhere did this seem to be more the case than in a seminar on contemporary Turkish literature that specifically emphasised the literature's new-found diversity. Turkish writer Fethiye Cetin, for example, spoke on the new forms of self-recognition and self-discovery that had come about in the wake of the slow dissolution of traditional Turkish nationalism, in evidence in her memoir My Grandmother, apparently now being translated into Arabic. Meanwhile, Mario Levi, the author of works on what he called the “historical layering” of Istanbul, spoke on the need for a “new conception of Turkish identity” that would emphasise multiculturalism and diversity. In the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Cetin said, the rulers of republican Turkey had sought to impose a monolithic Turkish identity on the human remnants of what had previously been a multicultural empire, obliging religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities to recast themselves in the mould of Turkish nationalism. Now that Turkish nationalism was itself being recast as a result of the changes of the past few decades, previously hidden histories and identities were once again emerging, among them those of individuals who had been obliged to camouflage themselves in the colours of the dominant religious and ethnic identity. It was only when she was very old that Cetin's grandmother had told her that whereas the family had had to present itself as Turkish and Muslim in order to meet the requirements of Turkish nationalism, in fact she had been born both Armenian and Christian. This had set Cetin thinking about issues of Turkish history and identity and the ways that these were interwoven with family memory, indicating that what had once seemed to be the “prison” of monolithic Turkish identity in fact contained the echoes of a previously multicultural and multilingual empire. Speaking on the same panel, Turkish novelist and newspaper columnist Perihan Magden spoke about her novel Ali and Ramazan, a work which approaches the issue of diversity from a sexual angle by describing the lives of gay young people in Istanbul. While Magden's work has apparently been criticised for its frankness in Turkey, the author remained unrepentant, if rueful. It was easy to write “scandalous” novels in contemporary Turkey, she said, because the authorities there know that very few people read them. Overall, anyone attending the Turkish market focus events at this year's London Book Fair is likely to have been struck by the range and variety of the writers attending and the impressive industry of the Turkish National Organising Committee in mobilising the funds to arrange sample English translations and synopses of much of the material on display. According to the Turkish poet and novelist Mehmet Yashin, speaking at the seminar on “Writing in a Changing Turkey,” the audiences at presentations of contemporary Turkish literature in the West sometimes have an “annoying habit” of asking authors questions about their views on Muslim fundamentalism, military rule, prisons and censorship, as if the writers were there to answer the kind of questions that would be better directed at the Turkish government. “In France, they always ask whether Turkey is a European country,” Yashin said, possibly hoping to deflect any such question from his English audience. In the event, the questions at the London Fair mostly had to do with Turkish literature and not with politics. It seems certain that many of those present will have gone away resolving to read more of this in English translation after what was a particularly rewarding three-day showcase of Turkey's contemporary literary scene.
