An Epistolary Novel in the Turkish Literary System in Translation: Lady Susan

Abstract

Jane Austen, one of the acclaimed and centrally positioned authors of both English and world literature, is known for her strong female characters, her reflections on the relations between the upper and upper-middle classes of the society she lived in, with sharp observations, as well as her use of language contributed significantly to the development of the novel genre. Austen’s works continue to exist at a high readability level both in the English and Turkish literary systems. Her works in the Turkish target system acquired a solid position similar to the source system. This study aims to examine Austen’s lesser known epistolary novel Lady Susan (1871), and its two different translations. The research questions of the study consist of how the main features of the epistolary novel and the traits of the ‘intriguer’ protagonist who is a master of using manipulative language, are included in the source system and how all these characteristics of the work are translated in two Turkish translations. The epistolary novel provides its readers with the opportunity to easily understand the real motivations of the letter writers who are at the same time characters in the novel. The analysis demonstrates how the author handles the arguably Machiavellian personality traits of the protagonist, which is also the focal point of the novel. In this context, this study has two purposes: the first is to examine the basic features of the text in terms of the epistolary novel and the second is to reveal how the author’s style is translated with possible ‘shifts of expression’. Therefore, Anton Popovic’s concept of ‘shifts of expression’ is used in the analysis of the translations.