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Untranslatability and the Geopolitics of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Emily Apter
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Extract

When erich auerbach was living in Turkey, exiled from Germany and helping Kemal Ataturk set up a humanities curriculum at the University of Istanbul, he wrote a much-discussed letter to Walter Benjamin on 12 December 1936 in which he alluded to his dislocation as a European humanist trying to orient himself in relation to a Turkish-language politics that radically estranged prior print cultures:

Man hat hier alle Tradition über Bord geworfen und will auf europä-ische Art einen - extrem türkisch-nationalistischen - durchrationali-sierten Staat aufbauen. Es geht phantastisch und gespenstisch schnell, schon kann kaum noch wer arabisch oder persisch, und selbst türkische Texte des letztvergangenen Jahrhunderts werden schnell unverständlich, seit die Sprache zugleich modernisiert und am Urtürkischen neuorientiert ist und mit lateinischen Buchstaben geschrieben wird.

Type
Theories and Methodologies New Geographies of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 1: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , January 2019 , pp. 194 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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