Research Information System
Translation, Interpreting and Culture: Old Dogmas, New Approaches (?), Nitra, Slovakia, 26 - 28 September 2018, vol.1, no.1, pp.10-11, (Summary Text)
Meryem was raped by her uncle, a sheikh in a dervish order, and condemned to death for shaming the family in her village. Her uncle's son, a soldier in the army, was asked to carry out the "honor killing" in the name of the family. Meryem’s sole choice was to escape this harsh reality of the village or to stay and wait for the day to be killed in front of the family members. In an instant, she left her home and took a refuge in the city where her path would be interwoven with the destinies of some other people, good or evil. From this on, migration can be defined as a forced or voluntary move from one place to another in order to seek better opportunities for life, in Meryem’s case, for survival. This study aims to focus on representations of female identity in the English translated novel "Bliss" with acomparison to the original Turkish version of the novel "Mutluluk" by Zülfü Livaneli, one of Turkey’s most prominent authors. In the first part of this presentation, the notion of forced migration by the women threatened by “honor killing” in and around Turkey will be discussed. In the second part, reflections of this notion will be contrastively analyzed through socio-cultural and intertextual references playing a crucial role in constructing the patriarchal background in both novels. In the last part, paratextual elements regarding the perception of the novel in both readerships will be presented with examples from different media. Consequently, it has been realized that the migration is a very complex phenomenon taking different forms in various socio-cultural environments, and that it has both a sexuality bound characteristic and a cross-cultural peculiarity in the case of the novel “Bliss.”
Key words: Forced migration, female identity, modern Turkish novel, Zülfü Livaneli.