There’s no question as to the merit of My Name Is Red–the interweaving of narrators is masterful, the description is breathtaking, and the mystery creates a tense but subtle suspense throughout the work. However, I don’t think we’ve talked much about the fact that this is, of course, a translated work. And while it’s clear that Pamuk is writing for an international audience and consistently brings the audience into enough of a cultural understanding that the work doesn’t feel displaced, I still find myself wondering what was lost in translating the original Turkish to English.
But My Name is Red is a particularly interesting case study when it comes to translation, since it’s a book about art–and art supposedly ought to transcend cultural divides in ways that language can’t. But neither art nor language exist in a vacuum, and my personal lack of historical context and the book’s translation make me wonder if I’m reading this through a doubly refracted lens. Of course, this is a remarkably self-aware text, and it’s difficult to imagine that Pamuk failed to anticipate foreign rights sales.
I like the fact that you bring up the lacking transcendency of the written word, as there are many languages in which- even if the translation is provided- the soul of the word is lost. I feel as though this too is an event that occurs often in the visual world as a result of the fact that as you say, art does not exist within a vacuum (despite the theory with which Rothko and his contemporaries experimented with). Many times people of one culture are unable to comprehend the visual culture of another. It is the foundation of the primitivist movement of the early 1900’s, and I can only assume that a similar disconnect in the translation of the book, as many things that would be inherent in the original Persian culture are left to be misinterpreted by the West.