A kurdish translator's badge in Turkiye-an identity card or a false id: Cevirmen as a translatorial autobiography

Abstract

The (self-)investigation of translation in the framing narrative of a novel can provide resourceful insights into the translational performance and translatorial experience in the relevant spatial and temporal background. In these cases, translation emerges as an integral part of creation, embodiment and/ or voicing of meaning and identity. Cevirmen (2018) is an autobiographical novel by Vahdettin Ince who skillfully tells his life story and constructs his identity through the works he translated. To this end, Ince intriguingly coalesces with his translations into Turkish and defines them as an ontological quest as a human pursuing a profession in translation. His self-portrayal of a translator's identity with a focus on his Kurdish ethnicity emerges as a melting pot for differences, tensions, and conflicts he experiences during the evolution of his personal and professional habitus' reverberating through his mother tongue Kurdish, and the official state language Turkish. In this study, Cevirmen is viewed as an authentic, ideological, and heavily translational piece of writing which provides insightful views about a self-made translator's evolution and his resort to translation for survival in the tense political and multi-ethnic/ lingual case of Turkiye. Filling up a micro space in translation history, the analysis voices the conflicts a translator goes through in multi-ethnic conditions; and thus, I suggest reading Cevirmen as an (un)intentional theorization on the "translator". © Peter Lang GmbH.