Turkish Bridge!

The Bridge Series returns on May 2, and this time it will be speaking Turkish. This month’s readers will be Aron Aji and Erdağ Göknar, who will be discussing their translations of Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Bilge Karasu. Readers of this blog probably saw the guest post Aji contributed in March, a tribute to another great translator of Turkish literature, Fred Stark, who passed away this spring.

Aji is the recipient of the 2004 National Translation Award for his translation of Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in support of the translation of A Long Day’s Evening. Aji serves as dean of the college of arts and sciences at St. Ambrose University, and is a visiting professor at the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Translation.

Erdağ Göknar is best known for his award-winning translation of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s historical novel My Name is Red. He is also the translator of A.H. Tanpınar’s iconic novel of Istanbul, A Mind at Peace (Archipelago, 2011), and Atiq Rahimi’s haunting anti-war novella about Afghanistan, Earth and Ashes (Harcourt, 2002). He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches and teaches Turkish & Middle Eastern Studies. His translations have earned him the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award (for My Name is Red) and an NEA Translation grant (for A Mind at Peace). His critical literary study of the modern Turkish novel, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel, was published by Routledge in 2013.

I’m just back from the London Book Fair, where the guest country of the year was Turkey, so I’m filled with fresh impressions of what vibrant literature this country has produced. This should be an evening of wonderful tales.

Join these two readers on Thursday, May 2 at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, at 7:00 p.m.

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