Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel (1895‒1968) was a woman intellectual, journalist, and translator who wrote on politics, society, and culture and translated political and gender-related texts in the early republican Turkey. Although Sertel translated many works that would otherwise have been unknown to Turkish audience, her translation activities have not received much recognition among researchers. This paper attempts to reposition Sertel as a translator and culture entrepreneur who played a seminal role in political and intellectual life in the early republican Turkey. With a particular reference to Itamar Even-Zohar’s culture theory, it explores Sertel’s agency as a translator within the context of the state-sponsored “culture planning” in the early Turkish republican period. Sertel’s translation activities took place in a context where the cultural institutions of a modernizing single-party regime deployed translation as a tool for facilitating the enlightenment of a nation in the making. Although Sertel enthusiastically supported the early republican reforms and the state-sponsored culture planning in the 1930s, her attitude towards the regime and its enlightenment project was not invariable. This study particularly demonstrates how Sertel sought to import and incorporate egalitarian, feminist, democratic, and class-based concepts and ideas into the state-sponsored acculturation project through translation, which she believed was an important tool to influence political and cultural movements in a country undergoing rapid modernization. Sertel’s translation of August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, for instance, is one of the earliest book translations on gender, patriarchy and socialism in Turkey. By means of translation, Sertel also intended to express what she could not openly speak as regards fundamental sociopolitical issues in Turkey, as well as what the dominant ideologies excluded from discursive arenas. As a result, this paper seeks to reposition a woman translator who conformed to various aspects of the early Turkish republican regime’s cultural planning yet aimed to integrate leftist and feminist perspectives into Turkish political literature.