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RECENT SCHOLARSHIP SHOWS that Jane Austen's readers are by no means confined to the English-speaking world. Her work reaches far and wide, and Turkey is no exception.1 Jane Austen's novels are read and loved by Turkish readers. Those Turkish readers proficient in English can read and appreciate Austen's novels in their original, of course. As is well known, the editions available to readers of English spread over a wide spectrum, from cheap paperback editions that provide only the texts of the novels without introduction or notes, all the way to the heavily annotated editions with almost as many pages of auxiliary material as the texts themselves. For the readers who can read Austen only in Turkish, unfortunately, choices are not that numerous.
By 2005, five of Austen's six novels (the exception being Northanger Abbey) had been made available in Turkish translation though these translations left much to be desired. That year, Is Kultur, an established publishing house in Turkey, decided to initiate a new series of world classics. Pride and Prejudice, as one of the most beloved books of all time, would be the first to be published in the series. Pride and Prejudice had first been translated into Turkish in the early 1950s; however, that edition was long out of print. A second translation by the prolific translator Nihal Yeginobali (b. 1927) has been in print since 1968. In Turkish the novel came to be known by the title Yeginobah gave to that translation, Ask ve Gurur (Love and Pride). The interest in Austen awakened in a new generation of readers, especially through film and television, however, begged for a more accurate, thoughtful, and informed translation, preferably titled as the author intended.
In this essay, I will give a sketch of how a brand new translation of Pride and Prejudice took shape, and what my role, as an editor, was in this process.
The general editor of the Is Kultur series commissioned the new translation from Hamdi Koç, a prominent novelist and translator well known for his translation of Shakespeare's Pericles. With a degree in English Literature, Koç was familiar with the social and historical context of the work. He was to translate all six novels. As he began working on the translation of...