As the starting bell rang last Thursday afternoon, 20 women from across the city seated themselves around a long rectangular table to discuss the latest selection of the Kuzguncuk district’s book club.
It was around 1:30 p.m. when Sevin Okyay, a Turkish writer and translator, entered the room. She sat at the head of the table and smiled at the book club women.
For that session, book club manager Nur Anamur had chosen an older book by Okyay, “My First Novel.”
Everyone was curious to meet the writer and translator; they called it an inspiring experience. They were excited and motivated. Everyone had different questions and comments.
The goal of the book club that day was not just to discuss an Okyay novel, it was more than that: It was to better know Okyay, getting to know her writing and her translations more intimately. In short, the aim was to discover a writer and a life and add a meaning to this life while also thinking of one’s own life in another way.
Okyay’s “My First Novel” is a quasi-autobiographical book in which she depicts her childhood. She tries to tell the story of the streets, people and districts of Istanbul in her book. The hero of the book, a 10-year-old girl, draws the picture of Istanbul and the people living within from her naïve perspective.
What was Okyay’s aim while writing this book? “When I was 10, I was a real kid,” she said.
“I was not a kid like a grownup. I was naive and I was aware that some things were forbidden for me. So I lived with the mystery and joy of the town. I was not locked up at home all the time; I lived and breathed the streets of Istanbul.”
However, even being a small child has some responsibilities, according to Okyay. She says at the beginning of the book: “I am a grownup kid right now; I am 10 years old, which means I will write in my notebook. But I will not let just anyone write in this notebook. I will write it and it will become a novel.”
It is easy to understand the pureness of childhood with this book; however, it is also impossible to discover the mysterious ways of being a child simply by reading. In order to discover it, one has to become a child again.
But Okyay has succeeded. For a moment she has stopped thinking like a skeptical, experienced and wise grownup and put herself into a young child’s shoes.
The next subject for everyone was translation errors in literature – Okyay is the person behind the Turkish translations of the Harry Potter series.
In fact, it would be fair to say that she rewrites the books. “In order to create the Turkish versions of English phrases and proper nouns, I read the book once and then start to translate it,” she said.
Sometimes Okyay and her son discuss how to translate the proper nouns in Harry Potter. “It is tiring and takes lots of time,” she admits. But she still enjoys the process of translating books.
The hardest experience for Okyay as a translator was the translation process of a book entitled “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.”
“There were many names, and one has to know or have read all the books where those imaginary names were written in order to deftly translate them.”
As the book club’s session was coming to an end, the women clustered to ask about one of the most important problems in terms of translation: translations resulting in garbled or unreadable texts.
The book club members spoke of reading many unreadable texts rendered that way because of translation problems, especially mystery and detective novels. Okyay said some of the bad translations are re-translated by good translators to make the books readable. However, she added, that is not enough.
The only thing left unsolvable was the problems in translations. The rest of the book club meeting was full of hope, life, new discoveries and curiosity. It was obvious that some Istanbul women prefer to talk about books, literature and translation instead of going around chatting and shopping.
The Textile Arts Association organizes Kuzguncuk’s book club. The association has also organized women’s quilting groups for interested Istanbul women.