Content area
Abstract
James Joyce is widely known for his radically experimental sense of style. What makes his works so difficult and complicated is rooted in the fact that he is one of the most prominent figures of literary modernism. Marking his transition from realist to modernist literature, it was his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(1916) where he started to challenge traditional norms of writing in both form and content. Moreover, among Joyce’s works, it was the first unabridged translation and the first novel translation into Turkish. Therefore, the discussion around Joyce’s introduction to the Turkish culture repertoire as a modernist writer was held around this particular work.
This interdisciplinary research pursued a sociocultural approach to translation within the historical context by combining Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory. Firstly, genesis of the habituses of human agents were reviewed as the first Turkish translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was initiated by the owner of De Yayınevi and Yeni Dergi, Memet Fuat, and done by Murat Belge in 1966, exactly fifty years after its publication. Secondly, the position of the literary field within the field of power was scrutinized. Accordingly, in the 1960s, there was a relatively free atmosphere in Turkey due to the new constitution and the rights and freedoms it provided. It was found out that the rise of the left during that period paved the way for the establishment of De Yayınevi and Yeni Dergi and then the radicalization of the left led to the closure of them. Thirdly, the structure of literary field itself was examined to demonstrate the general dynamics and tendencies and to contextualise De Yayınevi and Yeni Dergiin a wider frame. When the publishing activities and policies of them were scrutinized in the light of paratextual and extratextual materials, it was revealed that Memet Fuat put a specific emphasis on modernist works, whether indigenous or translated. Thus, they both addressed a special kind of audience with their mostly translated modernist content of which Joyce’s work was a part and operated with an intellectual mission rather than commercial motives. In this respect, Memet Fuat engaged in deliberate culture planning activities with a specific agenda that aspired to keep up the Turkish reader with the modern contemporary world. Finally, despite criticism and ostracism he received, by actively promoting modernist literature in a time when social realist literature dominated the literary field and offering new options to the Turkish culture repertoire by mainly publishing translated works in the 1960s, Memet Fuat emerged as a controversial agent of change.
