What drew you to translating this particular novel?
A friend of mine met the author, Ahmet Yorulmaz, in Turkey in the early 2000s and brought me back a signed copy. I started reading the book and could hardly put it down. At the time, I knew nothing about the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey and I found the book was as fascinating as it was shocking. I have wanted to translate it since then. Despite the tragic background to the story, the book has many light moments and beautifully, evocative lyrical passages. It would be hard to read it without these touches. I couldn’t help but think about how the same thing could happen anywhere; all it needs is for politicians to create a justification for some people being more deserving to live in a place than others, and before long, it becomes an immutable “truth”. The “divide and rule” tactic is a timeless global theme throughout human history, and for me this makes the book an international classic. It was also the first book I had ever read that made me think about how people lived and saw themselves before the invention of nation states.
It reminded me of reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which was part of the standard school curriculum when I was a teenager. It had a huge effect on my consciousness of the brutality of racism and prejudice. Since I first read Children of War, I have wanted to see it on school curriculums. The mission statement of the publisher, Neem Tree Press, is “We publish books that change and broaden perspectives”. I believe this book can do exactly that.
What were some of the challenges you faced during the translation?
By far the biggest challenge was that the author had passed away before I translated the novel. It’s much easier to work with a living author, so you can discuss the nuances of passages in the book and get to the bottom of ambiguous sentences. Some of the vocabulary in the book was specific to the Cretan dialect of the time, especially in relation to food. I was unable to find anyone with a specialist knowledge of the Cretan Greek-Turkish patois of the time, although I had some invaluable help from a Greek colleague. For example, there was a particular Greek food mentioned in the book that he told me was associated with mourning.
I find that the biggest struggle with any literary translation is not finding the literal meaning of words and expressions, but working out the nuances – e.g. if something has a positive or negative implication. This becomes even harder when there are cultural references that are specific to a certain region. I am lucky to have a good working relationship with a colleague who is a native speaker of Turkish and we discussed these things together. Nevertheless, nothing is a substitute for talking to the author, especially bearing in mind the geographical specificity of the book’s subject and the fact that words change meaning over different generations.
Another difficulty was getting the historical and cultural context across without burdening the reader with too many explanatory footnotes. As I was translating, I frequently came across references that would have a particular meaning for a Greek or Turkish reader, but would not be picked up by other readers unless they had a deep knowledge of the culture or history. For example, mentions of regional historical events or certain types of clothing might need to be explained, or allusions to certain historical figures or events that would not have needed explanation in the Turkish original (or Greek translation) such as Mustafa Kemal or Eleftherios Venizelos. Both the publisher and I did not want the book to seem too “academic”, so as far as possible I wove explanatory information into the text. However, in the end we decided on some footnotes and a glossary. I am pleased about that, because we have created a good historical record of the background to the book. However, I think this book can be read by anyone, simply as a good story, without having to understand every historical reference.
Can you talk about the research process for the book?
As the author had passed away before I translated the book, I had to spend a lot of time researching its historical references. If Ahmet had been alive, I would like to have asked him about certain real events, like the Siege of Crete or the Siege of Kandanos, that are part of the book’s story. But as it was, I spent a lot of time researching different historical records and interpretations of the events on Crete at the time. I wanted to reflect the viewpoint of Hassan, the main character, as the author intended, without introducing my own biases. Every country has its own national version of historical events, and unless we are exposed to other influences outside of school and mainstream media, this is the version we tend to believe. I thought about that a lot when researching for this book.
In the case of events leading up to the population exchanges, you can find the viewpoint of Greek national history, of Turkish national history, and also of British national history, as Britain (along with several other European powers) was a big player in Crete at the time. You can also find Marxist histories and local histories. It would have been interesting to see how the events were reported by the other countries involved, e.g., Russia or Italy, but that was beyond my resources. At the Istanbul Book Fair a few years ago, I found an incredibly detailed book on Ottoman Crete by Mustafa Yavuz: Girit Demokratik İhtilaller Çağında Girit (Crete in the Age of Democratic Revolutions), which was extremely helpful. The book has some fascinating extracts from contemporary US newspaper archives; they were written as events were unfolding so the narratives are not framed in a subsequent attempt to construct a “national story”. One account I read described how some Muslim Cretans arrived in Turkey carrying bits of their old house, sometimes just chunks of painted wood from a window frame. They were taken as mementos until the people could go back to their homes, but they never got to go back.
While this is a work of historical fiction, its sociopolitical and cultural milieu still seem relevant. Did you consciously set out in your translation to emphasize the political relevance of the story or is this something that emerged naturally?
There are undoubtedly obvious connections with the current political conjuncture in many countries, especially with regard to the relationship between identity and language, culture and religion. I didn’t consciously decide to do that through my translation, but I think it comes across though the authors own words, through his emphasis on the universality of “divide and rule” as a way to subjugate people and gain or maintain power. We see this mostly through the character of Kir Vladimiros, who repeatedly emphasises how, as pawns in a greater game, ordinary people are the biggest victims of their own prejudices.
I did use the translator’s notes section to draw some parallels and highlight the present-day consequences of the borders and nations that were randomly constructed in the Middle East after World War I. As I was translating the book, parts of the Middle East were wracked by war and unrest – especially Syria, Palestine, Iraq – and they still are. Even the countries of the region that are not at war are impacted by the arrival of huge numbers of refugees. There is a constant creation of new generations of displaced people trying to retain the identity of their homeland while living in another nation state, which sometimes causes friction and is exploited for political reasons. All these events are as connected to World War I as the events in Crete that formed the background to this book.
On another level, the issue of national identity, which is so much part of the book’s story, is a massive issue in the UK and many other countries right now. In the UK there has been a kickback, not just against the concept of the EU, but also an attempt to define an English identity as opposed to a more inclusive British one. However, in this age of global technology, global capital and mass migration, it seems these national stories, which are so much part of our national identities, are increasingly unfit for purpose as they exclude large groups of each nation’s population. If you look at Turkey now, this issue of the national language, the national identity, ethnicity and religion is still contentious, especially in relation to the Kurds. This book is a window onto a world where people had a different concept of identity outside of the nation state. It reminds us that we have not always had these same national identities, with their implied ethnic and religious homogeneity.
What can this book teach readers about identity, belonging, and displacement?
The book shows us how feelings of belonging and identity are created by narratives, which may or may not have any real substance. The nation state polity is a relatively new drop in the ocean of human history. Yet we grow up thinking this is the only way the world can be organised, and we accept that it is natural to stop displaced “outsiders” from crossing our borders. Looking at how things were before the world was carved up into nation states is an important step to helping us imagine different ways of organising the world, because feelings of national identity are so strong in this age that they are hard to break down Yet, the major problems that humanity is facing today require global solutions that don’t sit comfortably with our system of competing nation states; dealing with climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic are good examples.
Therefore, it’s important to show that our ideas of national identity and belonging are temporal. This book is told mainly from the point of view of a boy, Hassan, as he grows up. As a child he has an uncomplicated interpretation of events and that is one of the book’s great strengths. Hassan struggles to understand why he is having a new identity imposed on him and why the Muslims and Christians, who were neighbours for hundreds of years, are now killing each other. He identifies with Turkey, calling it his “motherland”, but at the same time, he points out that none of the “Turks” know much Turkish as they all speak Greek. He sees himself as belonging to Crete – a Cretan Muslim – saying that the only difference between the Cretan “Turks” and the Cretan “Greeks” is religion, that they are “…two peoples who had grown into each other”. In another part of the book, he also questions the very notion of this imposed “Turkishness”, as he remarks that the Ottoman sultans predominantly married non-Turkic women, so therefore, the Ottoman sultans themselves were not exactly “Turks”. Yet, the Cretan Muslims didn’t fit with the nation state ideology and became immigrants in the only country they had ever known.
In many parts of Europe, there is a widespread perception that people displaced by war or climate change would rather be in Europe anyway because it is somehow “better” than where they come from. There is a failure to see that, just like Hassanakis, people might have had good lives and status in the places they have been forced to leave, such as Iraq and Syria. When the Cretan Muslims were displaced to Turkey, purely on the basis of their religion, they were not welcomed by everyone. In fact, they were looked down on, and people laughed at their cuisine and culture, especially as most of them didn’t speak Turkish. They arrived in Turkey after it had been impoverished by years of war. Just as we still see today, immigrants and their descendants are used as scapegoats, turning deprivation into a breeding ground for prejudices that divide the very people who have everything to gain from standing together. I think the story of the book is a perfect example of this process. On a personal level, my father, who was born in a village in present-day Jordan in the 1920s has always said that he never heard anyone talk about Shia and Sunni until the last 20 years, and it comes more naturally to him to describe himself as an Arab than a Jordanian. I think that speak volumes about the different mindsets of the past and the history that is hidden from us. This is the greatest thing that we can learn from Hassan’s story.
George Orwell said; “ Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Books like this have the power to chip away at misrepresentations of the past and the present.
Ahmet Yorulmaz (1932-2014) was a Turkish journalist, author and translator. He was born in Ayvalik to a family of Cretan Turks deported to mainland Turkey as part of the Greek/Turkish population exchange decreed in the Treaty of Lausanne. He was fluent in modern Greek and translated novels and poems from contemporary Greek literature to Turkish. He dedicated himself to Greek-Turkish friendship and rapprochement. There is park named after him in Ayvalik.
Paula Darwish is an Anglo-Arab Turkish to English Translator living in the UK. She studied Turkish Language and Literature with Middle Eastern History at SOAS, University of London, and Boğaziçi University, Istanbul (1993-97). She is a professional member of the UK Institute of Translators and Interpreters (MITI). She is also a musician and performs Turkish and Middle Eastern folk music.