We are happy to announce that our first book is now up for sale online!
You can find our translation of Refik Halid Karay’s Gurbet Hikayeleri (Stories of Exile) on Amazon (this is a paid link that helps support our work – learn more here).
Karay wrote most of the stories in this collection when he was living in exile in the 1930s – a consequence of his journalism and satirical writing, which was often critical of the Turkish government. He spent much of this exile in Syria and Lebanon before returning home in 1938, and published these stories together in a single collection soon afterwards in 1940. Karay remains widely read in Turkey, but none of his works have been translated to English before now.
We began translating some of the stories in this collection back in 2015, long before we even thought of actually publishing them ourselves. At the time, our collective looked very different, consisting mostly of university students with an interest in languages and literature. We kept meeting ever since, and though our membership has changed since then, we kept returning to this same short story collection, and decided a couple years ago that we’d try to finish the whole thing and publish it ourselves. And so Translation Attached was born!
Though there have been many members over the years who’ve attended a couple of the meetings where we’ve worked on the stories in this book, it wouldn’t be possible to name them all, so we’ve credited the primary contributors whose continued engagement has made a significant impact on the translation. These translators are, in alphabetical order:
- Cumhur Korkut
- Elvan Tayhani Karataş
- Heather Yawney
- Ilayda Gunduz
- Karolina Dejnicka
- Nefise Kahraman
- Sena Sarıkoç Hill
- Yasemin Gamze Mangal
Once the translations were finally drafted, Karolina and Nefise stepped in as editors and worked hard to prepare the manuscript for publication, also writing an introduction, a glossary, and endnotes.
We would also like to extend our warmest thanks to the professors who provided us with the blurbs that appear at the very beginning of the book. We reached out to several academics with expertise in late Ottoman/early Turkish history to ask them if they would be willing to read our manuscript and provide a short blurb about our book that we could use on the back cover. Not only did they kindly and enthusiastically agree, but they also wrote such nice things about the book and about Refik Halid Karay in general that we couldn’t fit everything they said on the cover! So we decided to include it all in the first pages instead. These professors are UC Berkeley’s Christine Philliou, York University’s Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, University of Toronto’s Milena Methodieva, and University of Chicago’s Hakan Karateke. If you’re interested in learning about this time period, definitely check out their excellent work! Christine Philliou’s book Turkey: A Past Against History even covers Karay’s life in great detail.
And as a friendly reminder, our book launch is tomorrow at 5 pm EST at the University of Toronto – here is the link to RSVP for the in-person event, and here is the link to register for the Zoom meeting. Hope to see you there!
About our Amazon links
As an Amazon Associate page, we earn from qualifying purchases made using the links on our site. This has two benefits – one for you, and one for us. We know that though we’re based in Canada, many people who are interested in our work come from different countries, so affiliate links like this one allows us to direct visitors from certain countries to their relevant Amazon marketplace. Secondly, using these links gives us a little commission bump too – literary translation isn’t exactly lucrative (we do it for the love!), so if you’re interested in buying our books, using the links on our website is another way that you can support our work at no additional cost to you.
translation attached 