Abstract
This chapter discusses the retranslations of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into Turkish starting with the earliest attempt to partially translate the work in 1912 and explores how the translation of this particular book became a site of intellectual and ideological struggle among translators and publishers. The analysis will be carried out on the basis of paratextual material, i.e. prefaces to the various translations as well as critical essays by translators and publishers. The struggle over translations of Das Kapital in Turkey releases the tension between agents involved in the translation and publication of the work as manifested both by a discussion on the issues of terminology and concepts (aimed at the formation of a Turkish leftist discourse) and on the ‘correct reading’ of the text itself. Likewise, the account of the ban on the work imposed in 1938 during the single-party regime, lifted in 1965 following an appeal by the Turkish Workers Party (TİP – Türkiye İşçi Partisi) to the Constitutional Court, serves to display how this major work has gained its ‘freedom’ from censorship relatively earlier than Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto), another seminal Marxist work.
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Notes
- 1.
Committee of Union and Progress is the principal Young Turk organization that left its mark on the politics of the Ottoman Empire from the 1890s to 1918. The Turkish name translates literally as the “Society for Union and Progress”, although reference to it as “komite” is common in its conspiratorial phases. Its members are referred to as “unionists”. Its precursor was the Ottoman Union Society, a secret circle of liberal-minded students in the imperial military medical school in Istanbul who aspired to overthrow the autocratic regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The founders were İbrahim Temo, İshak Sükuti, Abdullah Cevdet and Mehmet Reşid.
- 2.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm. Accessed 8 Dec 2018.
- 3.
All the references to the prefaces and afterwords to the various versions of Das Kapital throughout the chapter can be accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm. Accessed 8 Dec 2018.
- 4.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm. Accessed 8 Dec 2018.
- 5.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm. Accessed 8 Dec 2018.
- 6.
Bilgi also translated the second and third volumes of Marx’s work in 1976 and 1978 respectively.
- 7.
For further information on the “Navy Case” (Donanma Davası), see Karaca 2013.
- 8.
For further information, please see Çelik 2014.
- 9.
Even Kerim Sadi, who published a fierce critique of Haydar Rifat’s translation of Das Kapital in a series of brochures entitled Bir Mütercimin Hataları (1935), acknowledges Rifat’s active role in the spreading of leftist thought. Sadi devotes a section to Rifat’s Beynelmilel İhtilâl Fırkaları, which includes a detailed survey of the ideologies of socialist and communist thinkers like Babeuf, Marx, Engels, and Proudhon in his Türkiye’de Sosyalizmin Tarihi’ne Katkı (Sadi 1975/1994, 174–175).
- 10.
Sol Yayınları Publishing catalogue 2011, prepared for the TÜYAP Book Fair of 2011.
- 11.
Sol Yayınları Publishing catalogue 2011, prepared for the TÜYAP Book Fair of 2011.
- 12.
Nail Satlıgan (1950–2013) was a Marxist economist and academic who wrote extensively on Marx’s ideology and his works.
- 13.
See Muazzez Uslu’s chapter in this volume.
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Konca, İ. (2019). The Turkish Retranslations of Marx’s Das Kapital as a Site of Intellectual and Ideological Struggle. In: Berk Albachten, Ö., Tahir Gürçağlar, Ş. (eds) Studies from a Retranslation Culture. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7314-5_6
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