Source: Maureen Freely, "Seeing Istanbul Again" (NYRB, 2015)
- Title: Seeing Istanbul Again
- Author: Maureen Freely (Orhan Pamuk's English translator)
- Publication: The New York Review of Books (online)
- Date: 23 April 2015
- URL: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2015/04/23/translating-pamuk-seeing-istanbul-again/
- Type: primary (a translator's own first-person account of translating this exact book/word); credulous of Pamuk's vision, reflective about her own translation choices
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
Extract
- Freely, translating Pamuk's famous six-page single sentence on Istanbul's collective melancholy, describes how the process of translating it changed her own perception of the city: "by the time I had translated my way to the end of this sentence, the hüzün had so permeated my imagination that I could barely see through it" — her own childhood memories of Istanbul's shabby, dusty streets were effectively replaced by Pamuk's monochrome, lost-empire vision of the city.
- She frames Pamuk's writing as originating in images rather than sentences — his stories anchor in specific childhood streets, with visual details "meticulously positioned" within Turkish sentence structures that do not map straightforwardly onto English syntax.
- Reflecting critically on her own translation choices elsewhere in the book, she recalls Pamuk pointing to an omission between two paragraphs and saying "my whole life was hiding inside it" — a moment where compressing or cutting material in translation cost something Pamuk considered essential.
- She concludes that she could not exert the same authorial control over the English text that Pamuk exercised over the Turkish original.
- This is this project's first genuinely first-person account, by a named literary translator, of the specific experience of translating an "untranslatable"-claimed word into English — a stronger primary data point than most of this project's translator-practice material (contrast the lagom dissertation's third-party coding, or litost's reported-but-unconfirmed dual-translation situation).
Gaps
- Does not state in so many words whether she left hüzün untranslated (italicized, glossed) in the English text or replaced it outright — this project infers the former from secondary description (see
sources/...for the Amazon/publisher description) but has not directly read the translated passage itself to confirm the exact typographic/lexical choice.