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Can retranslation be considered a teleological act pertaining to the close rendering of the ST? Do ageing translations drive retranslations? Is the ideological struggle over the appropriation of a particular field the main drive behind retranslation? Although these questions have intrigued TS scholars since the “retranslation hypothesis,” this book offers a distinctive answer by investigating them in a complex web of relations amongst texts, institutions and agents.

This is a book about retranslation. It is a book about what retranslation means and about what it means to speak of retranslated works at a particular time and space. It argues that retranslations are constituted by a particular kind of cultural and institutional praxis that exists at a particular point in time. This praxis changes and evolves as people come in contact with others, thereby giving rise to retranslations. It is reflected in technology, institutions, and in the articulations of values held by particular societies. Retranslations are the bearers of such cultural and institutional praxis; they are constituted by it in the historical process.

This book aims to join critical reflections on the notion of retranslation and the issues raised by retranslated literature. TS scholars have come to a number of different kinds of issues about the nature of retranslation in many different ways from many different directions. This book came to them through the study of retranslation as the focal point that unravels the historical and synchronic dialogue amongst texts, institutions and agents. It does not take long for readers to recognise that retranslations are a lot more complicated than translations and that retranslation history can complement translation historiography. Moreover, retranslation is often shaped by beliefs about gender, ageing and the market, amongst other things. Since Özlem Berk Albachten and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, illustrious TS scholars and the editors of this book, repeatedly draw attention to the complexity of retranslation in their works (see for instance Tahir Gürçağlar 2009, 2011) and in a number of conferences, especially Retranslation in Context I and II at Boğaziçi University in 2013 and 2015,[1] they have decided to renew critical efforts on the subject. But as with so many projects, what started as a relatively straightforward analysis of retranslated literature in the Ottoman and modern Turkish societies ended up as a speculative analysis of retranslation in multicultural contexts, using a variety of methods, such as paratextual and norm analysis. This is to elucidate the dominant effect of ideology on macro and micro translation decisions, thus conceptualising retranslation as an “evolving and rich phenomenon” (p. 2), a major theme shared by all participants.

The book is composed of 11 chapters in total, which are complementary to each other, thematically placed under four parts. Part I analyses ideology and censorship in retranslation in different social and cultural contexts. Part II explores paratexts in the context of retranslation. Part III brings new insights to the field, including methods and concepts in the study of retranslation. Part IV sheds light on the relevance of bibliographical data for mapping the history of retranslation.

Part I consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 by Andrew Samuel Walsh is a comparative and contrastive study of 10 versions of selected verses from Federico García Lorca’s celebrated poem, Oda a Walt Whitman,[2] to demonstrate how (re)translations generally followed the currents of their time on homosexuality; in a sense, they were subjected to the current social attitudes and legislation. Walsh shows how earlier translations were much more likely prone to self- or externally imposed censorship than later ones, which operated in different socio-linguistic structures. This influenced the ideological status of the poet from “antifascist martyr to Queer Studies icon” (p. 23). Chapter 2 by Nathalie Ségeral examines two French translations of D. H. Lawrence’s controversial novel, Women in Love,[3]Femmes Amoureuses,[4] a product of collaborative work between Maurice Rancès and Georges Limbour, and more recently Amantes[5] by Pierre Vitoux. Ségeral explains how the cultural norms of the time and target readership brought forth two different translations. While the 1932 translation is circumspect about homosexual allusions, the 2000 translation is overly explicit about them. Especially interesting is how the publishing and academic markets promoted the retranslation in 2000. Chapter 3 by Ceyda Özmen explores the (re)translations of H. C. Armstrong’s (1932) controversial biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,[6] the founder of the Turkish Republic. Özmen makes clear how (self)censorship, used as the dominant strategy, characterises all retranslations, thus revealing the enormous impacts that the figure of Atatürk, as well as the socio-political developments, had on the retranslation process. This enhanced the visibility of Armstrong in Turkey yet also contributed to the reproduction of particular discursive powers derived from different understandings of Kemalism.

Part II incorporates two chapters. The first chapter by Arzu Eker-Roditakis studies three different versions of the Turkish novel Güz Sancısı[7] in Greek as a series of transmedial translations: an interlingual translation, an intersemiotic retranslation and a “hybrid” text. The last one sits at odds with the previous two in that it is an amalgam of both of them. It essentially gave rise to a new reception for the translated novel, thus calling for a reconsideration of mainstream categories, such as retranslation, novelisation, and re-edition. The second chapter by Zofia Ziemann looks into two “untypical” translations of Bruno Schulz’s short stories; in a sense, they are in fierce competition with each other as well with the already-established authority of their predecessor. This competition unfolds through the use of extratextual, rather than textual, factors. Thus, Ziemann sets forth how extratextual factors can influence the perception/reception of the (re)translations. Her analysis calls for research into the role of extratextual materials in the development and validity of preconceptions about the (re)translations.

Part III comprises four chapters. Judith I. Haug’s chapter offers a novel contribution to the study of retranslation, with an analysis of an inaccessible orally transmitted ST, that of musical tradition. She sheds light on 17th-century Ottoman art music, namely: MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Turc 292, a notebook collection of notations compiled between 1640-1675 by ʿAlī Ufuḳī, a Polish-born musician and interpreter of the Sultan. Since Haug considers the transmission of an oral language into the TL written music a translation, she produces a critical edition for contemporary audiences as a retranslation. In so doing, Haug reflects on her role as a retranslator, focusing on identity, editorial procedures, visibility, cultural factors and audience expectation. The co-authored chapter by Müge Işiklar Koçak and Ahu Selin Erkul Yağci examines how retranslations are received in Turkey to highlight the changes in the readers’ habitus over a span of 80 years in Turkey, attending to two periods: 1930-1966 and 2011-2017. While the first period is characterised by the prevalence of readers’ letters in magazines, the second period features the rise of online platforms as an open source of communication, where retranslations are debated, questioned and reviewed. The authors argue that readers’ habitus continue to influence and shape the literary field yet is constantly evolving due to technological development and the expansion of the literary field. This indicates how readers operate as “indispensable agents in the retranslation process” (p. 143). Julieta Widman’s chapter applies Aubert’s (1998) Modalities of Translation Method (TTM) to two English translations of Clarice Lispector’s A Paixão Segundo G. H.[8] by Ronald W. Sousa and Idra Novey, published in 1988 and 2012 respectively. It illustrates how a quantitative method could provide an empirical ground for comparative analysis of retranslations. The application of this method is useful because it generates quantitative data appropriate for statistical analysis, thereby reducing, to a large extent, the risk of subjective judgments in comparative analysis. The last chapter in this part by Mehmet Şahin, Derya Duman, Sabri Gürses, Damla Kaleş and David Woolls explores plagiarism in 28 retranslations of Madame Bovary[9] into Turkish. They propose a software-based methodology to detect plagiarism in retranslation, which is both quantitative, through document comparison, and qualitative, through the analysis of the translator’s decisions at both the textual and paratextual levels. Their analysis uncovers how plagiarism, especially after the 1970s, infiltrates the structure of Turkish society: it is “a part of [a] quasi-institutionalized, organized, and structured whole” (p. 189). This is an unpleasant conclusion, especially for serious translators, who want their intellectual rights protected. Therefore, the authors call for a closer investigation, using software-based tools, to detect plagiarism on a larger scale.

Part IV includes two chapters. The first chapter by Piet Van Poucke assesses how studies on literary retranslation could complement translation history, concentrating on the earliest translations and retranslations of Russian literature into Dutch, 1789-1985, such as those of Catherine II, Pushkin, Turgenev, Pisemsky, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. It argues that retranslation plays a central role in the canonisation of foreign works in a particular time and space. Interesting is how early translations were driven by three distinct motives: the literary quality of the work, economic considerations and ideological and political factors. Equally important is how biographical sources can be useful in bringing about features that remain otherwise hidden in translation history. The second chapter, co-authored by this book’s editors Özlem Berk Albachten and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, explores the importance of translation bibliographies in translation historiography, with a focus on an online bibliography of retranslations published over 900 years in both Ottoman and Turkish societies. It addresses the challenges encountered in the process of building a bibliography of retranslations, such as the blurred boundaries between (re)translation, (re)edition, plagiarised (re)translation, authors, editors, and so on. These challenges are beneficial since they engender a number of critical studies on ideology, popular culture, translation policy, censorship, etc. Ingenious as they may be, enumerative bibliographies are only setting the scene for further research.

Although analysing the role of ideology in retranslated works is the main aim of the study, nowhere is this concept defined, nor is it clear in what sense the authors speak of the “ideology of translation” or the “translation of ideology.” Ideology is however used in this book in the limited sense, more specifically, in the context of political beliefs and developments, thereby reducing the concept to its political aspects. In so doing, ideology is not called into analysable mechanisms or diverse ideological effects, that is, the diverse contextually produced effects, whether religious, political, economic, moral, and so on. Instead, it is absorbed into the more general study of political beliefs and assumptions, thereby overlooking the rich tradition of ideology (see discussion in Eagleton 1991), which would have contributed to broader discussions of the concepts of ideology and retranslation.

Just as retranslation is not a phenomenon separate from the general mechanisms of social understanding, neither is ideology, which is an effect produced by such mechanisms when they are placed in a particular context, time, and space. It should be noted that such a limited understanding of complex concepts is not peculiar to this book, but it is prevalent in the field of TS, where scholars often borrow ideas, notions, and theories in order to deepen their understanding of translation. While such an interdisciplinary exchange is laudable, it also results in cursory research vis-à-vis the nature of those borrowed concepts (see discussions in Kinnunen and Koskinen 2010; Tyulenev 2014). The problem lies in the common-sense usage of these terms, whose meaning is often implied, rather than defined.

Overall, this is a reader-friendly book suitable for both TS scholars and colleagues in other fields, such as comparative literature and literary history. It provides many insights into the complexity of retranslation, tending to submerge retranslation into the larger forces of society, history, and culture. It accounts for the uniqueness of retranslation while drawing the connection between historical tradition and cultural understanding. It shows that retranslation means existence in a historical tradition with all its institutions and agents, which therefore must be understood within and by means of this tradition. The level of explanation and analysis makes it possible to view this edited book as stimulating for it lays the groundwork for further research into the notion of retranslation.