All happy translators are alike, but every unhappy translator is unhappy in their own way. Beyond the countless technical, ethical, and philosophical challenges behind the act of translating a text itself, there is the translator’s relationship with their author. These relationships can be intimate and intense, a thrilling if fraught artistic collaboration. An author may balk at any suggested changes, offer too many of their own, or insist that the translator communicate what was meant rather than what is actually written. Or, worse still, the author can say nothing at all. Many translators work with the fervor of a spurned child, working through a novel without ever having the benefit of feedback from their authors. They work selflessly and by themselves for years on end, without a single piece of advice from the person who knows the text best. After suffering the deafening silence of the author, translator then weather the silence and rejection of editor after editor, armed only with the promise that one day a reader might discover your beloved author for themselves. If the book is one day published, they continue to wait, hoping that their efforts will somehow get the attention of their estranged author. But this can be hard to come by as words of love from an emotionless father. Many are spared the heartache by translating the works of authors who have already died.

And then there is the curious case of Amy Marie Spangler, translator of A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil. When Spangler set out to translate this complex and inventive first novel by one of Turkey’s most prestigious authors—itself a complex family drama that is in many ways about miscommunication—she had to account for not one absent author but two. As she explains in her translator’s preface, Spangler did not start translating Tuhaf Bir Kadın from scratch, but originally sought to shepard a pre-existing translation by the deceased Turkish poet Nermin Menemencioğlu to publication. Menemencioğlu had completed the translation all the way back in the early 1970s, shortly after Erbil first published the novel in Turkish. The only problem was that while Menemencioğlu had finished her translation, Erbil wasn’t done writing the book.

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Tuhaf Bir Kadın is a fractured story of a woman named Nermin and her relationship to the people in her world: her friends, her mother, her extended family, her father, her husband, and her class. Over the course of four sections, each of which are written using different narrative styles and perspectives, she tries to understand others and to explain herself. The sections themselves are made up of a range of voices and mediums: journal entries, newspaper clippings, streams of consciousness, and dream logic. The second section, entitled The Father, revolves around the real-life unsolved murder of the Turkish communist Mustafa Suphi, and the efforts of the protagonist Nermin’s father to piece together clues about who killed him. At the same time, the father wrestles with his own impending death, and tries to work through the evidence of his own life. As the father lies on his deathbed, his memories are mixed with random facts from the case and bits of written cultural objects, creating a type of linguistic collage that allegorizes the interchange between personal memory and national history, a genre at which Erbil would excel at in later novels.

But because the Suphi incident was a real-life case, Erbil continued to insert new evidence from the case into the novel whenever there was a new printing. Over the course of 40 years before Erbil herself passed away, the novel would come to eventually differ from the original translation. When Spangler took up the crusade of having the original translation published, she realized that there were several differences between the older translation and the updated original. As Spangler explains in her Translator’s Preface, “unable to help myself, I began comparing Menemencioğlu’s translation to the Turkish line by line and found that the English had been stylistically “smoothed out” in many ways. Knowing what a stickler Erbil was when it came to style, and how deliberate she was in the choices she made, I wondered if the translation shouldn’t be further edited.”

Spangler has the reverence and precision of the most dedicated exegetist, but she seems to have been torn between two loyalties. On the one hand, Menemencioğlu’s translation text should carry scriptural authority as it was made with direct consultation of Leylâ Erbil herself. The two undertook an extended correspondence, and Spangler had direct access to read their exchange by visiting the new Leylâ Erbil archive at Boğaziçi University. Some of these letters discuss specific editorial choices related directly to A Strange Woman. But on the other hand, Spangler is a dedicated Erbilist, and the hermeneutic of “grammatical insurgency,” as Erbil’s style came to be known, has little regard for values like precedence, authority, or entrustment. Erbil would at times go so far as to disavow loyalty to her own style. “I’m not the one who decides my writing style, it’s the people, places, geography, history, archaeology etc. that dictate it to me.” Spangler, then, seems to be on firm textual footing to make her own choices. In her Preface she lays out her justification for avoiding any stylistic choices that would betray the text’s difficulty, inventiveness, and strangeness.

Given the history of these changes, one cannot themselves help from comparing Menemencioğlu’s earlier translation to the one that has just been published. Beyond the mere curiosity of seeing how Spangler manages to satisfy contending claims, it would be a disservice to the memory of Erbil to not keep prodding. Looking closely through both versions, there are indeed numerous changes to the originally translated text. But most of them show the delicacy of a respectful proof-reader; a fussing with punctuation and a tweaking of syntax. Only occasionally does Spangler go so far as to translate an entire word differently. At first glance it seems that Spangler herself has merely “smoothed out” the text and updated it for a contemporary audience.

But one should not be misled by the seemingly innocuous addition of a comma or parentheses into thinking these changes are minor. Erbil was famously fastidious about punctuation (she is credited, after all, with inventing her own punctuation system including comma-exclamation points and triple commas as the pre-existing symbols didn’t capture the nuance of pace and phrasing to her satisfaction). The small changes in fact add up and reveal deeply meaningful things to the English-language reader about the people, places, geography, and history of the novel. To take just one example, in the Father section of the novel, Nermin comes to visit her father in the hospital.

In describing Nermin’s stoicism, the father in Spangler’s translation uses more pointed expressions. In English to go hard is harsher and more sudden than to grow hard, and the word “seems” is deleted to make the freezing of her blood a full metaphor. The entire sentence echoes the idiom “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” which suggests that Nermin approaches even the most vulnerable moments of familial intimacy with an attitude of self-reliant hardheadedness. As will be revealed in the conversation between them that follows, Nermin holds just such an attitude, and it is precisely this lack of empathy that sabotages her efforts at political proselyting.

Her father also describes her by using the proverb “a wet fox doesn’t feel the rain,” but in the newer translation it is bracketed off from the indirect discourse by the use of parentheses. Menemencioğlu’s version could be read as if the proverb is well known, the “they” being used to signal the passive voice rather than a specific deictic. But in keeping the parentheses from the original, Spangler holds on to the separation of voices, insisting that there is a specific “they” in mind who say this particular proverb. The Father section of the novel is filled with allusions to the specific climate and culture of the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. Compared to the rest of the country, this region is rainier and more forested. The proverb, then, seems to be a regionalism unique to the Black Sea, some linguistic remnant of the father’s childhood perhaps. This is very much in line with all of the dense and particular cultural references that make up the stream of consciousness in this section. The parentheses do much more to suggest the specificity of the proverb then, to make it more tangibly a linguistic remnant from the Father’s childhood, an expression coming to him now as something about his grown daughter reminds him of the stoicism and resolve of the villagers he knew in his youth.

And lastly there is the issue of the kemençe. Lying exposed on the hospital bed, Nermin’s father feels vulnerability and embarrassment which is only compounded by the fact that his own daughter sees him in this state. She sees everything, even his most private parts. There is nothing to shield him from her unempathetic gaze, nothing except euphemism. In Menemencioğlu’s version he describes her looking at his fiddle, which seems like a strange and unobvious slang word for penis. A quick reading might not take it to mean penis at all. This is because a kemençe, the word in the original text, and an American-style fiddle, are not at all the same instrument. Looking up kemençe in a Google image search will quickly reveal that it has a much narrower, and much more phallic shape. Its head looks practically explicit once the inference has been made! Besides being more overtly sexualized, the kemençe is also more regionally specific, again being an instrument associated with the Black Sea region. Like most idealistic translators, Spangler has a distaste for the coddling use of footnotes, and italicizes kemençe without ever explaining what it is. She knows that English-language readers all have access to the internet, and the only thing worse than having to include a footnote in having to use it to explain a sexual euphemism. But the real point is kemençe does so much work in the text, suggesting all at once the father’s connection to regional culture, his physical vulnerability and awkwardness, and the strange phenomenon of being medically examined by one’s own daughter, an experience that so flips the parent-child dynamic that it is the father who now is made to describe his own genitals like a child.

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Because it inevitably requires so much interpersonal interpretation, there is something of the analyst’s job in translation. A careful translator looks for the smallest tic, the smallest phrase for symptoms. The small changes in the examples above are what many would consider as falling into the realm of proof-reading rather than editing. Nevertheless, each one tells us something different about the uniqueness and complexity of the novel’s characters, and shows us the complicated and dysfunctional relationship between them. Any good Erbilist knows that even the slightest changes in punctuation can have immediate and enormous consequences for the text, especially when the text deals primarily with psychic life in both form and content.

“I firmly hold the view that since all people are all debilitated and wounded (in a society—in a world—where everyone is debilitated, to be debilitated is to be “normal”), it may not be enough to describe them in familiar sentences or to make them speak in the first-person singular. Similarly, a text that alters and plays with the structure and meaning of the sentence requires that we change the traditional use of punctuation.”

And changes in form and structure not only capture the fraught relationships between the novel’s characters. They also reflect on the relationship between author and translator. And this relationship, like that between analyst and analysand, is just as susceptible to transference. As Janet Malcolm describes the phenomenon, “the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an easy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems,” transference sounds not a little like translation. Whether conducted through intimate correspondence, or intuited through literary seance, both of the translators of A Strange Woman still had to deal with the inherent limits of using language to understand and explain their author.

And the non-diegetic relationships of the novel go far beyond that: relationships between first and second translator, translator and editor, editor and reader. As much assistance as English-language readers generally need today to read translated novels from other countries, one should have nothing but sympathy for someone who tried to market a Turkish novel translation back in the 1970s. Indeed, despite the brilliance of the novel, it seems no amount of “smoothing out” was enough for English publishers back then. It is to Spangler, and the rest of our good fortune that it was Deep Vellum who finally decided to publish A Strange Woman. Their commitment to not only translating world literature, but difficult world literature, makes them the perfect host for Leylâ Erbil’s long-awaited arrival into English. Understanding this context helps us to acknowledge that the two texts differ slightly not due to differences in skill or personal taste, but because they carry the symptoms of countless relationships of dysfunction. It is no wonder, then, that every translator finds their own way to translate those points when language fails and stumbles.