The story behind translating stories

 It all started because of the pandemic…or perhaps because of one of us teaching language and culture in a graduate program some time ago with student enrollment from many a nation of the world—Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Taiwan, Iraq, Colombia, China, Türkiye, and of course from here, the US, our great-hearted, adoptive country. What an inspirational cultural palette! What a unique setting for sharing varied cultural values. Or maybe it all started with that person’s keen interest in cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphors in particular—the ubiquitous metaphors we all live by, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) put it.

One thing is certain, irrespective of the beginnings: this translation proved possible because it had its roots in the translators’ hard and committed work, their friendship and mutual trust, and their determination to gift the American readership with a new lens to figure out the world.

The intense political discourse during the 2019 American election season and the subsequent unleashing of a violent and little-known disease which shortly thereafter engulfed the world caused some people to feel they lived in the midst of a madding world. It was only normal for some to distance themselves from the alarming news by touching base with friends and family more often, by purposefully looking for soothing journeys either in the world of fiction or in that of motion pictures. So, there was this movie, Kara Para Aşk (Black Money Love), with its young and talented actors, exhibiting great chemistry with each other and masterfully expressing all emotions and states of mind through their eyes. Eyes are commonly referred to as windows to the soul, and the actors—especially the male lead actor—illustrated that skillfully. Who is he?

What’s his name? The Internet helped: he’s Engin Akyürek, and he’s a writer, too! Born in Ankara, in October 1981, a mere few days prior to the birth of a very dear family member of one of us two. What a coincidence! Reading the collection of short stories Sessizlik became ever more of a lure. Both of us read the collection and both of us were enthusiastic about translating it. A yet unknown, to the English-speaking readership, young author whose stories stuck in our heads…

We won’t claim that the rest was history…we’d rather confess that the long and vivid discussions around meanings, implicatures, metaphors, idioms, the beautiful flow of the discourse used by Akyürek morphed into precious memories for us. In our mind’s eye, we would see the two boys born in October of 1981 and the protagonist playing soccer or marbles together, hiding their summer reading books, building a snowman and undergoing the full experience of the joy of its creation and the misery caused by its subsequent demise, the tears running down their faces when the curls in their hair were snipped off before the start of the fall semester…if only the physical and fictional boundaries had not been there.

As for “the rest is history,” dear readers, it is up to you to build it up, on your own—by climbing, one by one, the branches of the nicely grown tree of Akyürek’s work and tasting the special flavor of the fruit it yields. Let’s just meet in stories…

DLK & AE