Finding the English for cariye

by Greg Key 

For the past six months or so, I have been translating Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslam (The Women of Islam), originally published in Ottoman Turkish in the early 1890’s. In the process, I have revisited work I did four years ago when I translated selections from the same book for Zeynep Çelik’s anthology Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient. Now translating Fatma Aliye’s book in its entirety, I am consulting my earlier work, and I am having thoughts about the some of the choices I made. Prime among these is the rendering of the term cariye.

Cariyes were, in the words of Booth & Shissler 2023, “enslaved female attendants” (336), and were commonly found in elite households of the late Ottoman era. They are a constant presence in Nisvan-ı İslam, taking the coats and personal effects of the visiting European ladies, and standing at the ready to fetch various items for the narrator. A loanword from Arabic (جارية jāriya, pl. جوارٍ jawārin), cariye is commonly glossed as ‘female slave’ or ‘concubine’. In my original translation four years ago, I first rendered cariye as slave girl. The volume’s translation editor, the eminent Aron Aji, pointed out that slave girl had connotations that were perhaps not consistent with the intentions of the author, though he acknowledged that cariyelik was objectively a form of slavery. I agreed, and we went with his suggestion to retain the Ottoman term, spelled as jariya. In the published version, the first occurrence is accompanied by Aron Hoca’s footnote: “Commonly translated into English as concubine or slave, this term refers to a social institution with specific rules and traditions, as explained by Fatma Aliye.”

Four years later, as I re-translate the text in full, I find myself uncomfortable with this decision. Leaving a culture-specific word untranslated implies that it has no equivalent in the target language; to that extent jariya makes sense. However, Fatma Aliye devotes many pages of the first chapter to a rationalist defense of the institution. In this context, using the original word creates a kind of translational subtext: This is a culturally specific concept; please allow the narrator to explain. This amounts to an implicit endorsement of her characterization, which is biased and unreliable in many respects. As Booth and Shissler write, “There is a whiff of the ‘peculiar institution’ in the Ottoman original…, with the familial aspects emphasised in ways that obscure the true nature of the relationship, which is a master–slave relationship” (360).

This brings us back to the problem of a suitable English rendering of cariye. Slave or slave girl, as I originally had it, might be justified on several counts. Apart from the reasonable position that it was a kind of slavery, the author herself might not have objected to the term. Throughout the chapter, she refers to cariyes as esir (‘captive, slave’) and kul (‘slave’), and to the condition as esaret (‘captivity, slavery’). Furthermore, as I have learned from Booth and Shissler’s chapter, the word is translated as esclave in Olga Lebedeva’s 1896 French version. Lebedeva was a personal acquaintance of Fatma Aliye, and her translation was officially supported by the Ottoman state. It is therefore quite likely that Fatma Aliye (who was fluent in French) knew of and had no objection to the term esclave. 

Additionally, slave girl is the choice made by the translators of Samipaşazade Sezai’s novel Sergüzeşt (The Adventures of a Slave Girl: An Ottoman Novel), where the term cariye also features prominently. As translators İci Vanwesenbeeck and Burcu Karahan explain, “the novel opens with the transaction and dealing of very young Circassian slave girls, therefore, it made sense to capture the dark side of the business (Sezai’s forte in the novel), and also align the wording with the title” (personal communication).

I agree that slave girl makes sense for Sergüzeşt. But Vanwesenbeeck and Karahan’s comment highlights the importance of making choices that are appropriate to the tone of the specific work and to the author’s intent. Aron Hoca’s observation still stands with regard to Fatma Aliye, who is painting a very different picture from Samipaşazade Sezai. For the modern English-language reader, slave brings with it numerous associations, not all of which are in keeping with the tone of Nisvan-ı İslam.

As to other alternatives, indentured servant isn’t bad, though this too has specific connotations in the context of US history. And obviously concubine would be far worse, as an exoticising and sexualized term that does not suit the narrator’s depiction.

After wrestling with the problem for some time, I have hit on a term that I think fills the bill: bondmaid. The Oxford English Dictionary flags it as “Now archaic or historical”. In the 1989 edition of the OED it was defined as “A slave girl”, but in the current edition this has been revised to “A woman or girl who is held in slavery or is otherwise obliged to work without payment, e.g. as an indentured labourer.” The average reader has probably never encountered the term, so it does not bring strong connotations with it, yet the compound is transparent enough. A potential objection is that the OED’s definition stipulates “without payment”, while the narrator of Nisvan-ı İslam emphasizes that masters paid their cariyes a monthly salary on top of providing for their basic needs. But again I would point out that Fatma Aliye herself called them esir and did not apparently object to the French translation esclave, terms which also commonly denote unpaid laborers. 

The editors at Translation Attached have agreed to the choice, so in the new translation cariye will be rendered as bondmaid.