Do you also work alongside him or are you left alone? Pamuk’s previous translator Maureen Freely has spoken about long, argumentative sessions translating alongside him on Büyükada, an island off Istanbul, arguing over almost every sentence.
So the two are completely different kind of books. It is more philosophical in a way I suppose you could consider parts of it almost a thought experiment. “The Red-Haired Woman” had its own challenges. It is almost Dickensian in terms of detail, which presents a different sort of challenge. “A Strangeness in My Mind” contains a multitude of characters and voices that pop up throughout the novel. That corresponded almost exactly to the amount of time it took to translate them: It took just over four months to translate “A Strangeness in My Mind” and two months to translate “The Red-Haired Woman.”īut apart from the length, they are very different books.
In terms of comparing the two novels, one is half of the length of the other. But that was a comparatively short text and very different to the novels. I also translated a catalog that Orhan wrote five or six years ago called “The Innocence of Objects,” about his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. “The Red-Haired Woman” is the second Pamuk novel you have translated, after “A Strangeness in My Mind,” which was published in English in 2015. The idea of translating a thought or a text into another language is something I’ve always been familiar with. So I’ve always lived with more than just one language and in a way I’ve always translated things throughout my life - in a much less difficult, more day-to-day context.
I was born in Turkey and grew up in Italy.
I’d never studied it or even done it before. I don’t have a background in translating. Did you have a background in translating or did it just come out of the blue?
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