Retranslating in a Censorial Context

The various Turkish (re)translations of H. C. Armstrong’s biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Grey Wolf , were undertaken and published by competing individuals and institutions with quite different political orientations and motivations. As such, the Turkish (re)translation of Grey Wolf demonstrates particularly well how complex and multicausal the phenomenon of retranslation can be and how instances of retranslation may be linked to power relations, ideology, and censorship within a target culture. Exploring the various translations against the backdrop of their respective socio-political agendas and mindful of censorship conditions operating at that time, this chapter reveals that the retranslations established controversial dialogs with the first translation and introduced competing interpretations of, and contexts for, the source text into the target culture. Grey Wolf , moreover, was not just retranslated, but also republished in different reprints and revised editions. A comparison of these variants lays bare the competitive tension among all of them and, as such, underlines the need for a discussion on the vaguely defined space separating retranslation from other forms of “reprocessed” or “recycled” texts.