Narratives of Evolution:
Translating Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) in the Turkish Context
Despite the longstanding prominence of evolution in Turkish political discourse since the late Ottoman Period, no complete translation of Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) works in Turkish was available until the late 1960s. Following the late 1960s, many of Darwin's titles were (re)translated multiple times. Among them, Darwin’s magnum opus, On the Origin of the Species (1859) has been (re)translated by eight different translators and (re)published by eight different publishing houses. In addition to (re)translating and (re)publishing Darwin's On the Origin of the Species (1859), the agents of translation authored numerous supplementary materials, both peritextual and epitextual (Genette, 1997), about Darwin and various aspects of his theory of evolution by natural selection. This brown bag talk focuses on the Turkish (re)translations of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859), specifically on the narratives the agents of translation produced around the Malthusian elements of Darwin’s theory. These narratives will be studied within the framework of the model of analysis Mona Baker (2006) introduced for studying the circulation of narratives by translators and interpreters and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998) theory of action.
Baker, M. (2006). Translation and conflict: A narrative account: A Narrative Account. Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9780203099919
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason, on the theory of action (R. Johnson, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1994)
Genette, G. (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (J. E. Lewin Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1987)
Gespräch findet statt am:
15.04.2024
14h00 bis 15h00
Ort UR 33.1.108