12. The Copy and the Fake

AT A CONFERENCE IN Seattle, we met the professor of Turkish letters Dr Hurriyet Ozbey. She delivered a paper about a hitherto-unknown Turkish man of letters, Takvor Sarkis, a translator who helped popularise American detective fiction in Istanbul's literary circles in the 1940s and 50s. Rather than translate the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Jonathan Latimer, Erle Stanley Gardner or Raymond Chandler, however, Sarkis chose more obscure novelists to translate, writers of dime store novels like Lee Romaro, Phillip de Souza and Marvin Nickelbaum - writers who made their living writing advertising copy and technical manuals and defense department press releases; writers who have since fallen into complete oblivion everywhere outside Turkey, where they are still fondly remembered; workaday writers who, other than in Turkey, never garnered much of a readership even at the peak of their careers; writers whose novels never became films, except in Turkey.

Dr Ozbey told us she became interested in the work of Takvor Sarkis when she came across, in a second hand bookstore in Chicago, a Marvin Nickelbaum novel - Murder in an Elevator, his best, or at any rate his least bad. It was a slim volume of some 180 pages, in a conventional font, with the usual garish cover. Her own memory of the translation of Murder in an Elevator (Asansörde Cinayet in Turkish) - a detective novel you are still likely to find, tattered and yellowed, on the bookshelves of many older Istanbul bibliophiles - was that it was a much heftier tome. She undertook a comparison of the two novels - the original and the copy - and soon realised that the resemblance between the two was only superficial. Sarkis' Murder in an Elevator was not so much a faithful translation as a complete rewrite of the Nickelbaum's Murder in an Elevator: although the title is the same, the plot is also more or less recognisably the same, and the principal characters have the same names, in almost every other respect the translation elaborates on the original and indeed improves it. Minor characters become major characters, and new characters appear, each of them finely wrought. Plot holes in the original are filled, and new plot points introduced, with the effect of ratcheting up the suspense by several notches. Whole chapters are devoted to baroque backstory or to long philosophical conversations about criminology and justice that never appeared in the original. Themes barely discernible in the original are taken up and expounded upon, resulting in a transformed, almost-new novel drenched in a sense of melancholy, loss and faithless horror, so that it could truly be said that where the original is forgettable pulp, the translation is, according to Dr Ozbey at least, a modernist milestone. Older Turkish cinephiles may well remember the screen version of 'Asansörde Cinayet', released in 1957, although it was, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment - much closer in effect to the original than the translation. What's more, said Dr Ozbey, she has since tracked down several more Sarkis translations and discovered a similar pattern: all his translations are masterful improvements on the original.

Dr Ozbey told us she would like to write a biography of Sarkis, but her research has revealed very little about him other than that he was orphaned early in life, remained a lifelong bachelor, worked as a journalist for a variety of Turkish and Armenian language newspapers, and - like all Istanbullus - was a cat lover (cats appear often in his 'translations'). Dr Ozbey is convinced that Sarkis is only the second literary translator (after Edward FitzGerald, translator of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam) who can also be said to be, by means of his translations, a writer of major importance, to such an extent that she is seeking a translator to translate one of Sarkis' books - perhaps Asansörde Cinayet - back into English.