Azra Erhat and the argument that translation can build a past

The usual shape of an academic career is that influence follows the post. Azra Erhat's ran the other way. She was made an associate professor of classical philology at Ankara University in 1946 and removed from the university in 1948, at thirty-three, on political grounds. Almost everything she is now remembered for came after that.

She died in Istanbul in September 1982, forty-four years ago this month. Outside Turkey her name means nothing to most readers of philosophy, which is a pity, because the work she did between the dismissal and the death makes an argument that ought to interest anyone who thinks about how cultures acquire a relationship to their own past.

The argument is roughly this. A translation is not a delivery service. It does not simply move a text from one language into another, leaving both unchanged. Done at a certain pitch, with a certain ambition, it decides where a text will live — whose furniture it will sit among, which memories it will attach itself to, whose ancestors it will seem to belong to. Erhat believed that, and she spent thirty years acting on it.

A career ended before it had properly started#

Erhat was born in Istanbul in 1915 and spent much of her childhood in Europe. Her early schooling was in Vienna; she finished at a lycée in Brussels in 1934, taking Latin and Greek there. She then read classical philology at Ankara University's Faculty of Languages, History and Geography — the DTCF, founded in 1936 as one of the new republic's flagship institutions — and graduated in 1939. She stayed on as an assistant and became a doçent, an associate professor, in 1946.

In 1948 she was removed from the faculty along with the folklorist Pertev Naili Boratav, the sociologist Behice Boran, the sociologist and historian Niyazi Berkes and the writer Adnan Cemgil. The charge, in effect, was leftism. It is one of the better-documented episodes in the way political pressure shaped academic life in the early Turkish republic, and it was not the last time the state took an interest in her. After the military intervention of March 1971 she was arrested with her friends Sabahattin Eyüboğlu and Vedat Günyol under Article 141 of the criminal code, spent four months in Maltepe military prison, was tried, and was acquitted.

Read one way this is a familiar twentieth-century story: a scholar loses the institution. Read another way it is stranger. She lost the institution and gained a readership. She earned her living outside the academy, for years as a librarian, and produced from that position a body of work that reshaped how a language holds antiquity.

What the Translation Bureau was actually for#

To see why the work mattered, you need the institution she worked around rather than in. The Turkish Translation Bureau (Tercüme Bürosu) was founded in 1940 under Hasan Âli Yücel, the education minister, with a programme that now looks extraordinary in its confidence: to render the canon of world literature and philosophy into Turkish, at speed, in reliable editions, as a state undertaking.

The context is the alphabet and language reforms of the previous decade, which had cut the reading public off from the Ottoman written past within a generation. A country whose readers could no longer easily read what their grandparents wrote needed a library, and it needed one quickly. The Bureau was that library's engine.

Erhat was one of its significant figures, working alongside Eyüboğlu, Günyol, Orhan Burian and others. Her working languages — French, Flemish, German, Latin and ancient Greek — made her unusually well equipped for it. She translated Sophocles and Aristophanes, Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, and, in time, Homer.

Why a Turkish Homer was not a routine addition to a shelf#

Here an outside reader needs some help, because the achievement is easy to underrate. English has had a canonical Homer since Chapman and Pope; the poems have been domestic furniture in English for four hundred years, and a new version — or, for that matter, a new film of the Odyssey — enters a crowded room. In Turkish, in the 1950s, the room was nearly empty. There had been partial versions — a synopsis of the Iliad in 1927, selected songs from the Odyssey in 1931 — and a prose Iliad by Ahmet Cevat Emre in 1957. There was no complete verse Homer.

That absence is not a gap on a shelf. It means there is no shared way of saying the names, no settled register for a hero's anger, no line a reader can quote and expect to be recognised. A poem that everyone has heard of and nobody can cite is not yet part of a culture; it is a rumour about somebody else's culture.

The Iliad of 1958 to 1962#

The İlyada that Erhat made with the poet A. Kadir — İbrahim Abdülkadir Meriçboyu, 1917 to 1985 — appeared in four volumes between 1958 and 1962. It was the first complete Turkish verse translation of the poem.

The division of labour was deliberate. Erhat brought the philology; Kadir, a poet of the socially engaged 1940s generation who had been imprisoned as a young man alongside Nâzım Hikmet, brought the ear. Neither could have done it alone, and the collaboration was a method rather than a convenience: the classicist held the line to the Greek, the poet found a Turkish that could carry it.

They also numbered the lines to match the original, so that a reader could follow the translation against the Greek — a small typographical decision that quietly announces what kind of book this is. Not a retelling. Not a schoolroom crib. A text you are invited to check.

The first volume took the Habib Edib Törehan science award in 1959, the third the Turkish Language Association's translation prize in 1961. More telling than the prizes is what happened afterwards: as the classicist Özlem Berk Albachten has documented, this remains the most-read Turkish Iliad, continuously reprinted, and it is the version used at commemorations at the site of Troy itself. An Odyssey, again with Kadir, followed in 1970. Homer, in other words, did not merely arrive in Turkish. He settled.

Blue Anatolia: the proposal#

The translation was the first move. The second was a claim about where the poems had come from and to whom, consequently, they belonged.

Mavi Anadolu — Blue Anatolia — was published in 1960. It gave its name to a loose movement around Erhat, Eyüboğlu and Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, the writer known as Halikarnas Balıkçısı, the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, who had been exiled to Bodrum in the 1920s and stayed. Their proposal was that the ancient cultures of Anatolia — Ionian, Hittite, Lydian, Carian, Greek — are not the property of a European inheritance from which modern Turkey is excluded. They happened here. The people who live on that coast now live among their remains, and may claim them.

Put that way it sounds banal. It was not, in 1960, and it is not now. It cut against two positions at once. It refused the Kemalist habit of treating "the West" as a destination to be reached by importing its achievements, since on this account the Aegean was not a copy of the West but one of its sources. And it refused the nationalist-conservative habit of dating the meaningful past of Anatolia to 1071 or to the Ottoman centuries, since on this account Homer was as local as anything that came later.

The case against it, put properly#

The proposal deserves the objections, and there are serious ones.

The first is historical selectivity. Scholars of the movement note that it flattens a genuinely complicated record into a usable story — a synthesis, a continuity, an "Anatolian identity" that runs unbroken from Ionia to the present. Real cultural history is more discontinuous than that — a point historians of political language have pressed hard — and much of the continuity the Blue Anatolians saw was a continuity of place rather than of people or practice.

The second is that a claim to inherit can be a way of dispossessing. If the Greek past of the Aegean coast is simply ours now, that formulation sits uncomfortably beside the actual history of the Greek-speaking populations of Anatolia in the twentieth century, and beside a population exchange that is still within living memory. To say that everything on this shore belongs to whoever lives on it is generous when it opens a culture and less generous when it closes an argument.

The third is scale. As the geographers Yazan and Bekaroğlu argue in a recent survey, Cold War polarisation kept Blue Anatolianism confined to an intellectual circle. It was, and largely remained, the outlook of a few dozen writers and their readers — sometimes charged with an elitism it never quite shook.

None of that disposes of the intellectual proposal. It qualifies it. The strongest form of the Blue Anatolian claim is not that Anatolia was always one thing, but that a place with many pasts is impoverished by being made to choose one of them.

Reading a coastline as a document#

The Blue Voyage — Mavi Yolculuk, the title of Erhat's 1962 book — has since become the name of a tourist product: gulets, chartered weeks, the Turquoise Coast. It began as something else. The voyages that Kabaağaçlı, Eyüboğlu, Erhat and their friends made along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts from the mid-1940s were a method: sail, land, walk to the ruins, read the relevant text on the spot, argue about it, sail on.

The scholarly literature on those journeys — a study in Studies in Travel Writing treats them as a project of self-definition spanning 1945 to 1969 — takes them seriously as intellectual work rather than as recreation. What they amount to is a way of reading a coastline as a historical document, with the sea as the medium of memory rather than a barrier between two civilisations. If you approach Anatolia from the water, the shape of what belongs together changes. Islands and headlands that a map divides between two modern states become a single readable neighbourhood.

Translation, commentary, geography, memory, identity#

Seen together, Erhat's books form a chain, and each link is designed to make the next one usable.

Translation first: the poems in Turkish, in verse, checkable against the Greek. Then commentary — the essays, the introductions, the letters. Then geography: Mavi Anadolu and Mavi Yolculuk put the texts back on the ground they name. Then memory: her Mitoloji Sözlüğü, the dictionary of mythology she published in 1972, is not a scholarly curiosity but the reference apparatus a reader needs before the allusions in the poems can do any work. It has served Turkish readers as Lemprière once served English ones.

And then identity, which is what the whole chain was for. The dictionary makes the translation legible; the translation makes the coastline legible; the coastline makes the claim about inheritance thinkable. Remove any link and the argument stops being available.

Whose past is the past of a place?#

That is the question her work leaves open, and it is not a Turkish question. Anywhere many cultures have lived in succession — the Balkans, Sicily, Andalusia, the eastern Mediterranean entire, and for that matter most of Europe — someone eventually has to decide what the ruins mean and to whom they speak.

There are two easy answers. One says the past of a place belongs to its current inhabitants outright, which licenses appropriation. The other says it belongs to a universal heritage administered from elsewhere, which licenses a different sort of expropriation, and tends to leave the people who live among the stones as caretakers of somebody else's museum. Erhat's answer was neither: that recognising all of a place's pasts, including the ones that are not yours by descent, makes it more yours rather than less.

That is a proposal, not a formula, and it settles nothing. It can be abused in the direction of a soft nationalism that annexes everything it admires. It can also be the only decent alternative to the two easy answers. What is not in doubt is the instrument she chose to make it with. She was told, in effect, that she could not teach. She translated instead, and reached further than the lecture room would have taken her — which is a fact about translation, and about what an academic post is worth, that is worth sitting with.