Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil was an interesting guy to say the least. He was not only one of Turkey’s top literary innovators,  responsible for some of the countries first novels like Mai ve Siyah and Aşk-ı Memnu, he was also an elite business man and a politician. He served as the secretary to Sultan Mehmet V, during the run up to the first world war and had a ring side seat to not only the politics of the day, but the closed world of the palace. You can read my full review here. It was translated by Douglas Scott Brookes and he was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book and the translation process.  

Luke: What was it that originally drew you to this project? 

Douglas: Some thirty years ago I attended the Turkish Language Summer School at Boğaziçi University and passed Dolmabahçe Palace every day. Those towering walls fascinated me—what was behind them? Çırağan Palace was a burnt-out ruin then, but one could tell that under the soot it was beautiful. As for Beylerbeyi Palace—incredible. And so I became pretty much hooked on the Ottoman monarchy of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on trying to understand the structure of the Imperial Family of that era. This is maybe a bit unusual in Ottoman studies, since most Ottomanists (not all!) concentrate on earlier centuries. Simultaneously I became fascinated with the Ottoman language of this era.

But very little had been written about the Ottoman monarchy of that last era in any language outside Turkish, with the result that the monarchy remains pretty much unknown in the world. Gradually the realization dawned that perhaps I needed to write on the monarchy of this era myself, including translating first-hand accounts into English.

About fifteen years ago I was translating the memoir Babam Sultan Abdülhamid, by Abdülhamid’s daughter Princess Ayşe. In it she mentions Halid Ziya’s memoir, since he had paid his famous call on her father in exile. That was where I discovered the book. The princess was not flattering about it, which made both the memoirist and his book even more alluring: what was going on here? 

The library of the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, has the original edition of Halid Ziya’s memoir. Trying to read it was darned hard going at first, for reasons I’ll explain below, but it didn’t take long to realize this was a phenomenal work that begged to be translated. Doing a bit of research on the book, it seemed well known and admired in Turkey but completely hidden from the rest of the world. I was hooked.

Luke: For those of us who might not be overly familiar with Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil and his work, could you briefly lay out who he was and why his account of the late Ottoman world is important?

Douglas: Halid Ziya Bey (1865-1945) is one of the shining lights of Ottoman literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He published stories and poems in literary journals of the 1880s and 1890s, but what first made his name was his period novel Mai ve Siyah (Blue and Black) in 1897, followed by his masterpiece, Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love), in 1900—which has become the sensational soap opera of recent Turkish television. Much influenced by contemporary French literature, in style and theme, he broke new ground in Turkish letters. He could still be called the greatest Turkish novelist of his era.

What makes Halid Ziya’s memoir important is: 1) his position at the palace enabled him to meet most of the figures of the era; and 2) his skills in observation and character development bring us colorful insights into the wide spectrum of personalities he encounters, from the sultan and grand viziers down to the eunuchs and office boys in service in the palace. The latter two, for example, would almost certainly not have made it into a standard chronicle of the day. 

In other words, far from a dry recitation of history, the master novelist engages his audience in his colorful characters and scenes. He guides us through the palace with wit and charm and poignancy, and as though he were talking to an old friend.

Luke: The book is compiled from a vast memoir that Uşaklıgil wrote. Can you tell me a little bit about the selection process and what sections made it in and what was edited out? 

Douglas: When pondering how to conduct the translation I concluded the goal was to illuminate life in the Ottoman palace of this era in general and the personality of Sultan Reşad in particular, since neither of these topics is well known.  This meant omitting digressions into purely personal tales of the author’s own life, and descriptions of events or people that did not relate to his work at the palace, as well as the occasional repetition of something he’d already described. Even with that, the vast majority of the memoir made it into the translation.

Luke: Talk to me about the translation project. What difficulties did translating Ottoman Turkish present? Which loan words from Persian and Arabic that don’t exist in modern Turkish were challenging for you? 

Douglas: First of all we should clarify that the original text, from the 1930s, was of course in the Latin script and not the Arabic. By this time Halid Ziya was writing in somewhat more colloquial language than he had in, say, Aşk-ı Memnu back in 1900, although even that novel was written with a fair amount of Turkish vocabulary that renders it relatively more accessible to today’s readers than, say, an Ottoman government decree of the day. My guess is that he chose to write his memoir in a style more similar to the way he spoke, in order to be understood rather than to impress.

By saying he was writing in a slightly simpler style in the 1930s, basically I mean he had reduced his use of the izafet, the Persian grammatical construction that uses the letter “i” to link two nouns or a noun and an adjective. It’s still there, mind you; for example, for the phrase “to the smallest degree” he wrote hadd-i ekalle instead of today’s en az dereceye. But he was not invoking the golden High Ottoman phrases that delight us in Aşk-ı Memnu, such as vaz-ı lâkayd-ı vakurânesi for “her air of dignified indifference.” Today it might be rendered as kayıtsız vakarı, although I daresay even that would throw more than a few Modern Turkish readers. Not nearly as pretty, either.

Nevertheless, the way he spoke still contained a great number of words derived from Persian and Arabic. He was an educated Ottoman gentleman, after all, and simply assumed, no doubt rightly at the time, that his readers would understand him perfectly. And so Halid Ziya sent me scurrying to the dictionary frequently. But for any reader who loves High Ottoman words and has some knowledge of Arabic and Persian, this is a kind of gift from him. 

As one example, here’s a noun that stumped me for a while: tenemmüv. Clearly an Arabic verbal noun. But it’s not in the 1890 Redhouse Ottoman-English dictionary, heaven knows it’s not in the 1974 Redhouse Turkish-English, and it’s not in my Persian-English dictionaries. Finally I found it in the Arabic dictionary, where the basic meaning is “growing, developing.” That fit the context. Wish I had thought to look first in Devellioğlu’s Osmanlıca-Türkçe dictionary of 1962, because there it is, gelişip büyüme indeed.

To an extent, it’s the atmosphere these old words create that lifts Halid Ziya’s writings into a special realm.  İstanbul’un asırdîde kirleri, literally “Istanbul’s centuries-witnessing dirt.” Perverişgâhıymış, “was its place of nurture.” It’s a pleasure to read his memoir aloud because of these beautiful words, even if one perhaps isn’t quite sure of their meaning.

But it really wasn’t so much the vocabulary that threw up roadblocks, it was the long sentences. English prizes short(er) sentences, for clarity’s sake, but Turkish, like German, tends to longer sentences. Perhaps it’s a remnant of the days (until 1880 or so) before punctuation in Ottoman; or perhaps it’s a way for the author to demonstrate skill with words. Halid Ziya’s style was to launch chapters with a sentence that rolled on and on, forming an entire paragraph or even most of a page. Often at first reading I’d come to the end of such a behemoth and murmur, “I have no idea what he just said.” And so with my red pen I’d mark the subject(s) of that sentence, then the verb(s), then the direct and indirect object(s), and use parentheses to mark off subordinate clauses. It’s illustration of the adage that to make a translation is to give a text the closest reading it will ever get. After that the struggle with unknown vocabulary could begin. This entire process, for each such sentence, could easily take two or three hours. But the pleasure when finally wrestling it into flowing English was sublime. Mind you, in English it might be in two or three sentences.

There’s long been debate in translation studies about how “foreign-sounding” a translation should be; how much should the translated text sound somehow like the source language? The perceived wisdom is that foreign-soundingness is feasible only for languages that already have an established relationship. For English readers this means French and Spanish; so it’s okay to leave Bonjour or Por favor in your translation and assume your readers will understand. Needless to say, this doesn’t work for Turkish. But I wanted Halid Ziya to sound like he was a Turk, which means including occasional Turkish words and terms where appropriate. Eventually I adopted the idea of writing the translation as though Halid Ziya were fluent in English and making the translation himself. That allowed me to include Turkish words or phrases, followed by the word/phrase in English, as though Halid Ziya were explaining the word to his English readers. Here are examples:

Hayırlı was the word he used, “auspicious.”

He put the clothing back in the box, closed the lid, and said to me with a malevolent look, “You . . . should treat us with respect.” Siz bizleri tevkir etmelisiniz. He used these very words. I hear them still.

Gasping, and hoarsely, he said, “Hikmet-i rabbaniye!”—the wisdom of the Almighty!—by which he meant he had been granted a divine favor on this day.

I think this approach increases the Turkish flavor of the translation without torpedoing the flow of the text. More than that, in the last two examples it seems imperative to retain the Turkish phrases, because the speakers did not say them in English, they said them in Turkish.

This technique paid off in the long passage in which Halid Ziya ponders how he should address ex-Sultan Abdülhamid, whether he should say Zât-ı Şahaneleri, Zât-ı Haşmetmeabları, or perhaps Zât-ı Hazret-i Şehriyarîleri. I couldn’t leave these untranslated, because the reader would be left in the dark about why he was struggling to find the right title to use. For the same reason, translating them into English was no option, because unlike the rich spectrum of Ottoman royal titles, English has only “Your Majesty,” which would hardly help the reader. And if I translated them literally without including the original title, they would sound ludicrous, but they do not in Ottoman. So I had Halid Ziya add the English translation of each title after the Turkish phrase, and this worked well, I think.

Another technique to increase the Ottoman spice in the translation was with the photos that accompany the text. Most came from Ottoman illustrated magazines of the era, so I included the original captions in the Ottoman script, translating these in my own caption under the image.

A related concept is to use English vocabulary appropriate to the era of the memoir, 1909-1912. This came up, for example, when Halid Ziya mentions being on the telephone and hanging up (as we’d say today) at the end of the call. Something about that verb seemed anachronistic for 1911. I spent weeks pondering what did sound right, until finally one evening I was reading an Agatha Christie short story in which she wrote, “He replaced the receiver.” That was it! So then, for Halid Ziya, “I replaced the telephone receiver with an uneasy feeling.”

Luke: There are a bunch of details about Istanbul and Ottoman state that I didn’t know before reading the book and I think some people will find surprising. What parts of Uşaklıgil's memoir did you find surprising while you were studying and translating the text? 

Douglas: It was fun to encounter Halid Ziya’s reaction to Ottoman palace culture, many aspects of which he found amusing, tedious, or just plain strange, even though he himself was a local gentleman of the era. No doubt plenty of today’s readers will feel the same as he. 

Most unexpected was his sympathetic portrayal of the personality of Talat Pasha, nowadays condemned in the world at large as architect of the Armenian Genocide. It’s hard to know what to do with this. Is it that details of Talat Pasha’s role in this catastrophe have come to light in only the last two or three decades, and were not common knowledge in the 1930s? Probably.

Also eye-opening was to read Halid Ziya’s description of the reaction of the people along the route of the royal tour through the Balkan provinces in 1911: that they were delirious (çılgın, in his word) with joy at seeing the sultan. Quite poignant, considering the catastrophe poised to overtake these people in the Balkan War of the next year.

Luke: These days, Mehmed V has a reputation in Turkey as being a bit of a weak and feckless sultan who led the empire into ruin. Uşaklıgil is much more sympathetic. I think that in many ways he didn’t see the sultan as his intellectual equal, but he respected the way that he comported himself in office. I also think that in Mehmed V, Uşaklıgil saw the kind of sultan that would be an ideal figurehead and symbolic leader in a reformed Ottoman Empire. Do you think I’ve correctly understood the view that Uşaklıgil took of the Sultan? 

Douglas: Yes, you have it right. Halid Ziya gives a balanced portrait of Mehmed V, pointing out the sultan’s possible defects as well as his strengths. He is quite clear on putting to rest the negative gossip making the rounds about the Sultan, and comes to conclude that he performed the role of constitutional monarch perfectly. He also points out several times that as a constitutional monarch, Mehmed V had no role in governing the country—that was now the role of Parliament and the Grand Vizier. As such, how could he be accused of leading the empire into war and ruin, when he had no part in political or military decision-making? This seems to be the point Halid Ziya expects his readers to draw.

One might summarize Halid Ziya’s view of Mehmed V’s character in his telling readers of the sultan’s words when facing serious surgery in 1915: “If I am to become a hindrance to the country and the people, may Almighty God see that I do not rise from this operating table.”

Luke: There were many sections of the book that were fascinating. In particular I found the meeting between Uşaklıgil and Abdulhamid to be really revealing. Uşaklıgil saw Abdulhamid as a tyrant and he saw himself as part of a reform movement that would make Abdulhamid’s style of politics impossible in the future.  I wonder if you have any thoughts about this moment and what it symbolised for the Ottoman Empire? 

Douglas: In this passage, when Mehmed V sent Halid Ziya to pay a call on the deposed Abdülhamid in Salonica, we have several points being made: 1) Mehmed V’s Sufi-like forgiveness and courtesy in organizing this mission, despite all the petty cruelties he’d suffered at his brother’s hands; 2) the extreme care the Imperial Family took to show respect to the ruling monarch; 3) that the years of Hamidian oppression were over, and a new constitutional monarchy reigned in Turkey; 4) Abdülhamid’s innate dignity, charisma, and superb statesmanship; 5) the unsolvable dilemma Halid Ziya faced when trying to judge Abdülhamid’s role in Ottoman history.

Luke: When exactly was Uşaklıgil writing these extracts and to what extent do you think his views on the Sultan and other important Ottoman figures like Enver Paşa were influenced in hindsight?

Douglas: Halid Ziya was writing this in the mid/late 1930s, so some 25 years after his time at the palace. The clear sense one gets is that he genuinely liked Mehmed V all along, and valued his understanding and support of the new Constitutional era in Turkey. Enver Pasha, on the other hand, seems to have started out as just another up-and-coming young officer in Halid Ziya’s eyes, but then declined swiftly in Halid Ziya’s hindsight after World War One, given the catastrophes Enver caused.

Luke: This is a really interesting book and I can see the value both for historians and for people interested in Ottoman and Turkish history. However, I do think that it is strange that this book gets translated and his novels, for example Aşk-ı Memnu and Mai ve Siyah, that are regarded as really important stepping stones in Turkish literature still remain untranslated. I wonder if you had any thoughts on this? 

Douglas: I agree! My guess is that he’s never been translated for the same reason that not a whole lot of academics specialize in the Ottoman Empire: until the last couple of decades there hasn’t been that much interest in the Ottoman world. Also, the complexities of the Ottoman language have scared many away from trying to master it.  

Back to your question, things happened this way because a translator (me) who was interested in the Ottoman monarchy and who translated non-fiction came along and fell for this memoir. Inspired by Halid Ziya’s writing, I’ve begun translating Aşk-ı Memnu—it will be the first work of fiction I’ve translated, and it’s great fun. Turkish fiction, not to mention Ottoman fiction, are not exactly hot topics for which publishers are clamoring. Maybe by getting Halid Ziya’s name out there in the English-speaking world through his memoir, the way will be somewhat paved for Aşk-ı Memnu?

Luke: What other books that are available in English could you recommend that also deal with the late Ottoman Empire and might be useful further reading after finishing On the Sultan’s Service? 

Douglas: On late Ottoman culture and history:

Zilfi, Madeleine C. Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: the Design of Difference. 2010

Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. 2008.

Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. 2000.

On the Ottoman Imperial Family of the 19th and 20th centuries:

Brookes, Douglas Scott. Harem Ghosts: What One Cemetery Can Tell Us about the Ottoman Empire. 2016.

Brookes, Douglas Scott. The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. 2008.

Saz, Leyla. The Imperial Harem of the Sultans. 1994.