Bıçak Sırtında Bir Sanat: Çeviri ve Nurullah Ataç

Abstract

In 1940, the Ministry of National Education initiated the movement of translation of Western and Eastern classics into Turkish. One of the important names who took part in this movement is Nurullah Ataç. The translations from the modern French literature that he produced have a significant place in this new humanistic event. In this article, we study the method followed by Ataç when translating Dangerous Liaisons of Choderlos de Laclos.We present the translation conception of Ataç, who is criticized for being too free in his translations, in the light of his writings, as well as some of today’s translation conceptions close to his. And then, taking an anachronistic approach, we try to demonstrate that there is closeness between Nurullah Ataç’s conception of translation and a method, which is known as interpretative translation.In this paper, Ataç’s translation techniques and practices have been left out and only the way he approaches the problem in order to achieve an efficient translation has been emphasized. Thus, as the corpus, we reconcile ourselves to provide the first paragraph of the book subject to translation and then four sentences randomly selected, by displaying the originals and translations side by side, with no need to analyze.