Introduction

The drive towards a “power turn” in Translation Studies (henceforth TS) led to reframing many conventional notions in translation theory, and the status of translator, and helped reevaluate the traditional oppositional binarism in the act of translation. The transfer between source text (henceforth ST) and target text (henceforth TT) was previously dominated by the concepts of literal vs. free translation debate, regardless of the labels employed, i.e., sense for sense vs. word for word, alienation vs. naturalization, overt vs. covert, instrumental vs. documentary, domestication vs. foreignization. With the onset of deconstruction, however, the power turn enhanced our understanding of the contact zones emerging in the act of translation and (re)interpretation of situations of cultural encounter conditioned by presumed hegemonic relationships. Furthermore, it encompassed detailed research into boundary breaking-perspectives through transgressing commonly-held, authoritative interpretations regarding the cultural identity definition of translation, and processes of text production.

The pioneering study of the cultural politics of representation of the East through the lens of the West, Said’s Orientalism (1978/1985) set forth a new era in postcolonial studies. His concept of orientalism was based upon binary oppositions such as self-other, colonizer-colonized, East-West, hegemonic-nonhegemonic, and this enabled him to illuminate orientalism as “a kind of western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient” (1978/1985, p. 95) in the unidirectional narrative of the West within literary, scientific texts, travel writings and anthologies of 19th century. Positing a “rethinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West,” Said (1978/1985, p. 350) put emphasis upon a highly polarized world order in contrast to merging diversities.

In contrast to Said, in the discursive paradigms of colonial rule, Homi Bhabha (1994) in his seminal work, The location of culture, adopted a deconstructive approach by problematizing the politics of representation and identity through underscoring de-centered, hybridized spaces. This involved decomposing Said’s binary oppositional framework by shedding light upon the ‘liminal space’ negotiation of cultural identity namely an interstitial passage between fixed identifications:

It is in the emergence of the interstices–the overlap and displacement of domains of difference–that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender,etc.)? How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2)

In other words, Bhabha postulates a pluralistic, vague, ambivalent in-between space for the representation of identity outside of the essentialist binary oppositions in cross-cultural interaction. He points out “a space of liminality, in the ‘unbearable ordeal of the collapse of certainty’” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 214), where cultural identities cannot be reduced into presumed, irrevocable, apodictic cultural traits. Instead, he underlines an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (1994, p. 5) and paves the way for a hybrid production–rather than just the reflection of cultural meaning.

Hybridity, third space and the other phenomena postulated by Bhabha, have radically altered the criteria and processes in translation as a liminal space of interactive encounter which encapsulates re-contextualization and meaning production. This inevitably destabilized the existing fundamental views concerning translation strategies and the disposition of translator, ST author, ST and TT. Consequently, TS calls into question the established categories of culture and identity (self/other), and act of translation is characterized by the concepts of location as contact zones (Pratt, 1992), “third space” (Bhabha, 1994) and production as “mediated space” (Wolf, 2008). Hence, this contact zone, the third space, is a liminal mode of articulation, a way of depicting a productive space whence new possibilities can emerge, and challenge established categorizations of culture and identity.

Approaching liminality as translation phenomenon, in other words, moving this anthropological and postcolonial theory away from the transition process toward the translation process, resonates with exploring the situation and management of liminal positionings in the act of translation, which attracted the attention of translation scholars over the last two decades (Wolf, 2000, 2008; Cronin, 2000; Simon, 2011; Bennett, 2012; Inghilleri, 2017; Guldin, 2020; Kaya, 2021). This phenomenon concerns the change of status of translators and interacting cultures. In its application with translational experiences and conditions of cultural contact, the theory of liminality focuses on socio-cultural processes of change where the translator, as a liminal persona, becomes a part of a new structure, framed as a sort of deviation from the established orders and the denial of predefined stages. Translators are in a contested zone between source culture and target culture in their betwixt and betweenness. Each individual translator, as a counter hegemonic agency, subjectively experiences, to different extents, linguistic and cultural liminality.

In line with the foregoing considerations, in this study we problematize dynamics of cultural overlappings in the ‘liminal, in-between’’ space through multiple contextualizations, and to posit the location of the translation, translator and translated text in this paradigm. The primary aim of this study is twofold: to explore the extent to which the concept of liminality can be instrumentalized to explore the boundaries at the intersection of cultural studies and TS, and to systematically apply this concept to various concrete cases of liminality in cross-cultural context with a particular focus upon English translation of Çalıkuşu, a Turkish cult novel of transformation written early 20th century.

Translation of Çalıkuşu, the great epistolary novel of the early 20th century, provides a very pertinent example of liminality phenomenon in the translation context, through which different layers of liminality enable us to explore the theoretical premises and empirical implications of this interstitial grey space. In addition to its fruitfulness in terms of liminality, the historical and cultural importance of the novel, coupled with the little attention that its translation received, makes it a non-negligible subject matter for TS. The book was translated into English under the title The autobiography of a Turkish girl in 1949 by Sir Wyndham Deedes, a Turcophile, British army general. It is far-reaching not only as very first Turkish novels to be (interlingually) translated into English (Deedes, 1951; Paker & Yılmaz, p. 2012), but also as a work that has exceeded temporal boundaries with its intersemiotic translations, such as film and TV series adaptations, including a highly popular prime time TV series aired as recently as 2013, underlining the significance of the novel in popular culture in Turkey up until the near past.

Betwixt and between: understanding and translating liminality

Liminality is a concept used to denote a boundary-breaking attitude, an unsettling situation “in which nothing really matters, in which hierarchies and standing norms disappear, in which sacred symbols are mocked at and ridiculed, in which authority in any form is questioned, taken apart and subverted” (Thomassen, 2014, p. 1), and something or someone in an in-between place or moment. The concept of liminality was postulated by ethnographer, folklorist, and social scientist Arnold Van Gennep more than a century ago to analyze the middle stage in ritual passages. His Rites of passage published in 1909 detailed the description of territorial passages in a variety of cultural contexts through designation of boundaries and his distinction of three-stage nature of ritual passages. To denote the time when individuals dwell in in-betweenness, namely, between the stable and transitory structures, Van Gennep coined the concept of ‘liminality,’ a term originating from the Latin limen, and standing for threshold, boundary, or passage between two places. Considering its etymological roots, Van Gennep (1960) employed the term to underscore the intermediate condition located between stable and transformed structures.

His three-fold structure consists of the following components;

  • preliminal rites (or rites of isolation or separation): This stage involves the isolation of an individual by breaking with previous practices and routines.

  • liminal rites (or transition rites): This middle stage connotes initiate’s ambivalent state (when the transition takes place), the passage to the intermediary social zone in a transitional process, the so-called limbo.

  • postliminal rites (or rites of incorporation or reagregation): This stage stands for initiate’s re-incorporation into society with re-innovated social status, as a ‘new’ being.

Having elaborated on his predecessor’s insights, almost half a century later, the British cultural anthropologist Turner (1991) expanded the boundaries and deepened the meaning of liminality, as a concept in anthropology. ‘Betwixt and between’ is a phrase employed by Turner to indicate the essence of his theory of ‘liminality,’ a key theoretical issue of the framework he developed to analyze transition stages in tribal, sociocultural systems. For Turner:

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. (1991, p. 95)

In other words, liminality involves temporary disunion from fixed social structures through namelessness, absence of possession, freedom from all laws, norms or rules of social order, and any prejudices such as those related to sex, class, race and wealth.

Homi K. Bhabha’s reinterpretation of the concept of liminality with his deconstructionist lens illuminates the ‘liminal’ negotiation of cultural representation in The location of culture (1994). From this perspective, “culture can no longer be seen as an agency securing tradition and identity, but is characterized by the confluence of plural codes and different discourse practices, thus constituting a network of symbols and meaning” (Wolf, 2008, p. 12), paving the way for in-betweenness, ambiguities and plurilingual universe of discourse through hybrid constellations.

Bhabha associates hybridity with liminality as follows:

Hybrid hyphenations emphasize the incommensurable elements as the basis of cultural identifications. What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out’, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference–be it class, gender, or race. Such assignations of difference–where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between–find their agency in a form of a ‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is an …interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and needs of the present. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 313)

Hence, liminality, “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 56), requires hybridity “a difference ‘within’, a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 19) as natural artifact of cross cultural mediation. In a similar vein, Sherry Simon postulates that:

Both translation and hybridity have become key terms in accounting for the ways in which divided, recovered or reconstructed identities are configured within the wider cultural forums in which they wish to participate. In this sense, both translation and hybridity are alternatives to ideas of assimilation (loss of identity) and multiculturalism (the multiplication of discreet and separate identities). Both translation and hybridity emphasize the disjunctive and provisional nature of affiliation, taking the form of interlingual or mixed expression. (Simon, 2011, p. 51)

In other words, liminality, as an unsettling situation, marks a stage of production and identification of a third space. It stands for a location, which destabilizes the core coordinates of TS, and prepares the ground for hybridization as translation strategy against the norms of conventional language transfer.

Bhabha’s liminal, ‘third space’ of cultural enunciation resonates with Bakhtin’s concepts of double-voicing through which a double-voiced discourse, an intentional dialogized hybridity, is inserted into the text, and of ‘carnival/carnivalesque’ as a utopian dimension, but not a space of deterministic transformations. The concepts of ‘carnival’ and the ‘carnivalesque,’ coined by Bakhtin (1984), are employed to denote positive spaces of cultural leveling, which offer liminality, in which hierarchical relationships are temporarily suspended or at least questioned. In the light of dialogism, furthermore, Bakhtin (1981) posits an encounter of different entities and perspectives, which brings about the creation of a space where identities and dispositions are (re)defined and (re)negotiated.

In addition to these, liminality is about the change of status of translators and interacting cultures. In its application to translational experiences and conditions of cultural contact, the theory of liminality concerns socio-cultural processes of change where the translator, as a liminal person, promotes linguistic and geographical relocation in a liminal space of connection and interaction. Hence, the translator as a liminal persona displays a fluid state of being far beyond orthodox oppositional and essentialist categories defining the dynamics in the outer world, and in translation. This results in a constant engagement in negotiation and mediation in processes of translation. In this respect, the concept of communitas, which becomes evident “through its juxtaposition to or hybridization with aspects of social structure” (Turner, 1991, p. 122), can provide some insight into the experiences of a translator who finds himself in hybridity, a liminal phase in which orders and structures are deconstructed during the cognitive task of translating. Various kinds of communitas are formed when groups of translators enter a liminal phase simultaneously. These both constitute the components of antistructure, and refer to an unstructured community in which members are equalized. In tune with this framework, the notion of liminality is primarily framed as unparalleled with the mainstream binarism model, and thus is instrumental in redefining the roles, and challenging cultural dynamics and disposition.

A concrete support for this positioning is found in the statements of Tymoczko who elaborates on in-betweeness of the translator by underlining that

Particularly employed by progressive and engaged writers on translation theory and practice, translation has been characterized as a place or a space in between other spaces. The locution between has become one of the most popular means of figuring an elsewhere that a translator may speak from–an elsewhere that is somehow different from either the source culture or the receptor culture that the translator mediates between–as well as the culture the translator lives in–an elsewhere that is often seemingly not simply a metaphorical way of speaking about ideological positioning, but that ipso facto affords a translator a valorized ideological stance. (Tymoczko, 2003, p. 182)

.

Kumar and Malshe’s (2005) elaborations on the reflection of Bakhtinian perspective upon translation activity enable further integration of dimensions of liminality with TS. For Kumar and Malshe (2005, p. 120), the phenomenon of double-voicedness encourages translators to go against the grain, opening up new avenues for employing “‘ethnodeviant pressure’ along with ‘ethnocentric’ impulses to create a dialogic ambience between the source text and the target-language readers,” and to reveal how ‘both-and’ options can replace essentialist binarism in interlingual translation.

In line with our literature review, there is a straightforward case that liminality phenomenon provides a potential for meaningful insights in explaining socio-cultural processes and (re)defining translational dispositions. We, thus, argue for the idea that application of this anthropological phenomenon to a new reading of translated texts foregrounds relevant socio-political and historical discourses, and gives them space for scrutinizing and negotiating the concept of culture and identity within the “realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (Turner, 1967, p. 97). Liminality also suggests a nonconformist approach to TT production, freeing the translator and TT production from stark binaries of self and other, centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized, domestication and foreignization, and harbors hybridity which allows cultures to be conceptualized as different and multifarious.

In tune with this framework, we will focus on types of liminality in the form of contextual, intratextual, agent-based and strategy-based liminality.

Types of liminality in the context of Çalıkuşu

Contextual liminality

Contextual liminality of Çalıkuşu operates on several intermingled layers. First serialized in 1921 and published as a book in the following year, Çalıkuşu’s publication story began during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Written while the Ottoman Empire still existed, the events in Çalıkuşu unfold against the backdrop of its last years, nevertheless, this does not necessarily imply that it was a novel of the Ottoman culture. On the contrary, the novel served as a means of validating the ‘sick man image’ of the Ottoman Empire (see Kuran-Burçoğlu 2007 for more on the ‘sick man image’) by highlighting its problems in its last years with an Ottoman orientalism, linking an implicit recognition of Ottoman failure with an appreciation of European success and superiority. According to Eldem:

Oxymoronic as it may sound, Ottoman Orientalism has a very strong logic behind it. From the moment Ottoman elites decided that Westernisation was the only or most efficient way to catch up with Western material success–a phenomenon that can be dated back to the early decades of the 19th century and which gained momentum after the Tanzimat (Reorganisation) Decree of 1839–they had implicitly agreed to one of the most basic tenets of Orientalism: that the East was essentially different from the West, that it was essentially stagnant and lacked the capacity to change without an exogenous stimulus. In this sense, as long as modernisation was conflated with Westernisation, a latent or overt admission of Orientalist tropes was practically inevitable. (Eldem, 2010, p. 27)

Seyhan (2008, p. 5) similarly argues that Güntekin was among the early Republican era writers who dedicated themselves “to the task of building the new nation; to the success of its educational and social reforms; and to the Enlightenment ideals of scientific progress, equality, and emancipation from the terror of myth and superstition.” Its popularity both during the Ottoman period and republican period shows Çalıkuşu was an in-between novel of transition. Indeed, it was mostly known and beloved for its sentimental love story, in which Feride, a cheerful, entertaining and extraordinary Turkish girl flees her aunt’s house in Istanbul after discovering her cousin/fiancé Kamran’s affair with another woman and then, embarks on an adventure in Anatolia as a teacher driven by her idealism. It is, however, essentially a cult novel which mirrors various social, political and educational issues set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

Liminality is also salient regarding the reflections on the ideological orientation of the novel. One can suggest that Deedes’ translation was an attempt to introduce the Ottoman Empire and its Eastern culture, familiar to him through his time spent there, as a result of a Western intellectual construct of essentialist otherisation. This stands in stark contrast with the legitimizing and persuasive role that the novel played in the period leading to and during the process of Westernization and modernization triggered by the establishment of the Turkish Republic. As mentioned, the novel not only implied the defects of the Ottoman Empire but also offered a Western and modern alternative through Feride, whose character foreshadowed the establishment of the new republic. In the light of all these, from the Turkish perspective, Çalıkuşu, according to republican ideology, can be read as a symbol of Occidentalism, while from Deedes’-a Westerner’s-perspective, its translation was meant to serve as a means of narrating an Oriental culture. This very state of simultaneously being representative of the Orient and the Occident perspectives emphasizes a realm of possibilities, namely, the context-dependent liminal position of the novel. To discuss this position further, one needs to pay attention to temporal considerations. The publication year of English rendition of Çalıkuşu is 1949, 26 years after the Westernized Turkish Republic had replaced the Ottoman Empire. Yet, Deedes presented this context to the British audience as something novel, i.e., Turkish people and places which Deedes knew so well and sought to introduce to the Western audience ironically no longer existed. This state of being neither obsolete/absent nor new/present, arising out of Deedes’ decision to translate the novel at this particular point in time, also points at a position of liminality.

From the viewpoint of spatial context, taking place in an Eastern country which could clearly benefit from its aspiration to Western ideals, the novel is located in a liminal zone that encapsulates both the East-albeit with its problems-and the West. Despite its affinity to the West and westernization, the conceptualization of republican Turkey as a metaphorical bridge between East and West, ‘where Asia and Europe meet,’ is a pervasive currency that indicates both its geographical and cultural in-betweenness. This adds an extra layer of contextual liminality to the novel, because while its translation is meant to be a work representing the East from the Western perspective and vice versa, its setting and the accompanying culture are in fact ‘neither here nor there’ but rather in an in-between Western/Eastern position.

Intratextual liminality

Another means for highlighting liminality in the novel is to stage the cognitive liminality of protagonist Feride. She is a liminal persona, a go-between figure who suffers under a double instability, she belongs to neither East nor West; not a strong or brave woman, but rather, an adventurous wanderer, who burns all her bridges and leaves home as a result of heart-break. As a young woman with European education from Istanbul, in the northwestern part of Turkey, Feride seems to represent the ultimate in Westernization when it comes to women of her time. However, following emotional trauma, she leaves her modern, Western home and moves deeper into Anatolia, to the East. There, backward villagers constantly watch her, judging and criticizing her every move. It appears that the Eastern village life is not a place that Feride can fit in, and yet Istanbul can no longer be her home, as it is full of bitter anguish. Thus, she falls into a limbo, a liminal place: she can take shelter in neither East as its culture and norms are not compatible with her own, nor Istanbul-the epitome of the West and the modern-as it has become emotionally grueling. In the light of van Gennep’s three-fold structure (1960), we can argue that Feride, in her adventure in Anatolia, is betwixt and between, and flounders in liminal rites.

With her youth, Western education, modern outlook on life and unfamiliarity with Islam, Feride can be read as the embodiment of the secular Turkish republic waiting to be established, and its coming reforms aiming at Westernization and modernization. In juxtaposition to Feride, the irrational, conservative, backward and religious villagers can be construed as an epitome of the Eastern setting, i.e., the Ottoman Empire. During the early years of the Turkish Republic, republican ideology would employ this readily-available, influential literary figure as a role model in the nation-building process, as an encouragement for young public-spirited republican women to travel “to remote corners of Anatolia to educate the poor and disenfranchised children of the young nation” (Seyhan, 2008, p. 67).

Agent-based liminality: positionality of Sir Wyndham Deedes

Sir Wyndham Deedes, the translator of the book, was known for his fondness of Turkey, Turkish people and language, which he himself confirmed in his foreword to his translation of another book, Akşam güneşi, by Güntekin and his personal letters (Deedes, 1951; Bendit, 1958).

The time he spent in Turkey reorganizing the Turkish gendarmerie as military officer in the 1910s allowed him in-depth engagement with Turkey and Turkishness, to the extent that he was later accepted as an authority of knowledge in Turkey, and was selected as an intelligence officer in the Dardanelles campaign (Bendit, 1958). Beyond being considered such an authority, Deedes’ was further recognized by acquaintances as an insider of the East. Sir Barker (1958), with whom Deedes worked at National Council of Social Service, for instance, suggests that “indeed he [Deedes] was of the East as well as of the West” (p. 49). Similarly, Presland (1942) argues that even after Deedes came back to England, he “[knew] the Near East so well that it [was] as familiar to him as Kent” (p. 62). These statements also serve as affirmations of Deedes’ in-betweenness in terms of the West versus the East, although Deedes himself does not seem to openly identify himself with the East.

Deedes seems to have had a genuine interest in Turkey and Turkish people, which is evident in his book, A Few facts about Turkey, and translations of three Turkish books, i.e., The autobiography of a Turkish girl and Afternoon sun by Güntekin and A village in Anatolia by Mahmut Makal. Furthermore, in his foreword to Afternoon sun, Deedes explicitly states that during his time in the Ottoman Empire, he had “taken an abiding interest in that–oh! so lovely–country and its attractive people” (Deedes, 1951, p. v). In the same foreword, Deedes (1951) suggests that Güntekin, portrayed “places [he] seemed to know and people [he] seemed to have met” (p. v) in a lively manner and by using beautiful Turkish, which were the reason behind his interest in Güntekin’s works. In addition, he explains in the foreword that his translation of Güntekin’s works was motivated by his curiosity about whether they “would interest the British public” (Deedes, 1951, p. v).

On the surface, these statements merely echo the Turkish scholars of Güntekin’s work in the appraisal of his language and gift of painting realistic pictures of the people and country, and thus hint at a selfless promotion of Güntekin’s works on Deedes’ part. However, through these statements, Deedes also declares (1) his first-hand experience of, and familiarity with the Turkish culture, people, and lands, i.e., his “intimate and expert knowledge of the Orient and of Orientals” (Said, 1978/1985, pp. 223–224) gained as an insider, and (2) his curiosity to find out if his own understanding of Turkey, its people and of Turkishness would resonate with his compatriots. By presenting, through translation, Turkey as he knows it, Deedes transfers certain images of Turkey familiar to him, while filtering out less familiar images. Thus, introducing his version of the Orient to the British audience through his translations of Güntekin’s works, Deedes–intentionally or unintentionally–“authoriz[es] views of it” (Said, 1978/1985, p. 3), which is a form of Orientalism.

Strategy-based liminality in translation: hybridity

Having a pivotal role in intercultural communication, as Klinger (2015, p. 10) stated, in the form of both “a medium and object of representation,” which occurs in third space, i.e., a situation of in-betweeness, translation creates a microcosm of ‘culturally diverse,’ interdependent co-existence within source culture and target culture liminality. Liminality brings about hybridity, which results in a site of resistance, negotiation, merging, mediation and bricolage, and also “the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 37). In this respect, liminality of translation creates a common ground for the “Third Space of Enunciation” (Bhabha, 1995, p. 209) and offers generative potential beyond the ‘either/or’ limits of dualities.

Culture specific items

In their study, Kansu-Yetkiner and Aktener (2020) dwelled upon micro-level analysis of Deedes’ English version of Çalıkuşu, concentrating on strategies employed in the translation of proper names, code-switching, loanwords, terms of address, idiomatic expressions and culture-specific references, and the influence of these on building of the Turkish image presented to the British audience. The study clearly revealed that from his in-between status central to the formation of new cultural meaning on the boundary, Deedes employed a hybrid translation strategy, producing a hybrid text retaining the familiar and the alien at the same time. The different translation strategies employed ranged from transliteration and naturalization (proper names), transcription and substitution (culture specific items), free and faithful translation (idiomatic expressions) to paraphrasing (terms of address) within the text, as well as adding a brief glossary for 13 Turkish terms immediately preceding the main text.

This glossary and multiprocessing of its content and other culture specific items within the text function as the testimony of his hybrid style. In other words, the glossary was not exhaustive of all the Turkish words within the main text. Additionally, some Turkish words are explicated within the TT through different strategies. For instance; “nargile,” which was naturalized as “narghile” and translated as “A Turkish pipe or hookah” in the glossary, is explicated within the English text as “narghile (hubble-bubble).” This seems to confirm Carbonell’s argument, that in the translation of exotic literature, the translator “usually positions himself/herself before the translated work and intervenes in introductions, glossaries and footnotes” (2004, p. 30). Such interventions as glossaries aim for “a clarification, balance or softening of situations that might be understood as alien” (ibid., p. 31). In a similar vein, as suggested by Fagan (2016, p. 57) existence of this glossary, signals “materially engaging readers in the process of transculturation. Rather than easing translation for monolingual readers, these glossaries force readers to reflect on the process and politics of translation itself.” In this way, Deedes tried to create “an ambiance of experiencing the original” (Chittiphalangsri, 2014, p. 61) and produced a hybrid text situated in a third space where lingua-cultural contexts are not simply transferred, but negotiated and mediated. Deedes’ overall translation strategy, thus, holds a liminal position located outside of the stark binarisms, such as foreignization and domestication. “More explicitly, as a member of Anglophone society and an experienced observer of Ottoman culture, his hybrid locus is well represented by his merging of translation strategies, textual and cultural norms in his translated text” (Kansu-Yetkiner & Aktener, 2020, p. 168).

Integrated with the abovementioned previous work, this study opens up new avenues in the concept by examining the intersection of liminality with other decisions, such as title and structure change, constituting potent adjunct in hybridity of a text.

Title change: fact or fiction?

“Çalıkuşu,” literally translated as “Wren” in English, is a reference to protagonist Feride’s nickname, reflecting her wild and rather mischievous nature. In his English translation, Deedes switched from Çalıkuşu to “The autobiography of a Turkish girl,” with deeper implications regarding the cultural reception of Orientalism.

To begin with, the word “autobiography” urges the reader to construe Güntekin’s novel as a documentary report of a life rather than a story created from the imagination of the author himself. According to Collett, “documentary report” causes reader to make the assumption that narration in an autobiography is to “possess a truth value” which can be correlated to a verifiable and falsifiable reality outside of the text (1989, p. 343). That is to say, through the word “autobiography,” Deedes’ repackaging presented the work as a real-life rather than a fictional story to the British audience. The presentation of the fictional story as true events matches Deedes’ claim in his foreword to Afternoon sun that Güntekin portrayed Turkey and its people so realistically that he felt like he knew them well. Similar to Burton positioning his The book of the thousand nights and a night as a book of anthropology (Shamma, 2005), Deedes in a way repackages a work of fiction as an anthropological study of a Turkish girl, albeit without openly stating this, as Burton does. By repackaging Güntekin’s work as an autobiography and drawing parallels between the people and places narrated in Güntekin’s works and the people and places he encountered during his time in Turkey, Deedes gives the impression that the events in the book are in fact a recount of his own participant observation as an insider in Turkey. This seems to echo Carbonell’s (1996, p. 82) analogy between ethnographers and translators, who both aim for “making sense of the foreign […], rendering the foreign familiar, and striving to preserve its foreignness at the same time.”

As to the phrase “Turkish girl,” it can be suggested that Deedes aimed to present Feride, an exceptional Turkish woman not at all representative of Turkish girls at the time, as a typical Turkish girl. From an imagological point of view, Beller (2007, p. 5) suggests that “the partial representation” of different countries, peoples and cultures codified in literary texts “represent[s] the whole.” Considering this, and the fact that, through the shift in the title, Feride is repackaged as any Turkish girl for the British audience, she becomes a prototypical hetero-image of, and a bold generalization of Turkish women, and a metonymic character in the TT.

Moreover, through this title, Deedes created an image of a Turkish woman who is not too unfamiliar to the British audience, in that she is a modern girl unfamiliar with Islamic customs, with a French education and an interest in the West, and one of the best examples of women characters of the early twentieth-century Turkish novel who were “liberated” and seeking “the right to work out [their] own destiny” (Burian, 1951, pp. 327 − 28). However, at the same time, by using the word “Turkish” in the title, Deedes also underlined that the girl in question is not a Westerner, but the ‘other’ and the ‘exotic.’ In this sense, it can be suggested that in the TT Feride is an in-between character, neither too alien nor too familiar to the target audience. This seems to corroborate the analogy of the ethnographer in that, simply through a title change, Deedes retains the foreignness in the text, while also rendering it familiar. In addition, Feride can be described as an example of what Renate Wasserman calls, “innocent signifiers” of Turkish women, whose otherness is “controlled” and even “subdued” (Wasserman, 1984, p. 132). It is not clear that Deedes aimed to exhibit the exotic to the Western audience in a colonialist manner, yet it does appear that, through this title change, Deedes constructed an image of Turkishness and of the Other in the manner of an Orientalist. On the other hand, while Feride is repackaged as a hetero-image representing the prototype of Turkish women, considering her traits mentioned above, it is highly questionable whether Feride was in fact an auto-image of Turkish women within her own culture at the time.

Lastly, it is interesting to note the resemblance between Deedes and Feride in terms of in-betweenness. The in-betweenness that Deedes constructed for Feride is highlighted by contrasting her otherness through the title change with her similarities to the Western people. Deedes, as mentioned in the previous section, similarly holds an in-between position, due to lack of clarity over his position as a translator, whether motivated by promoting Turkey in good faith as an insider, or authorizing certain views of Turkey as a Eurocentric, Orientalist outsider. It does seem that in changing the title, Deedes assumed an Orientalist position, authorizing hetero-images of Turkishness. However, the title change itself resulted in in-betweenness in the reception of the translation.

Textual reorganization: the final chapter

There are striking differences between the ST and TT in terms of narration in the last chapter. The source text Çalıkuşu consists of five chapters, all fictionalized as Feride’s diary entries except for the last chapter. The last chapter is recounted by an unknown heterodiegetic narrator and includes a letter by one character and an extract from Feride’s diary. Likewise, in the TT the first four chapters consist of Feride’s diary entries. However, the narration in the fifth chapter begins with an editor’s note which states that in order to clarify the end of Feride’s story, a postscript written in her diary, and three letters from different characters are enclosed. The postscript and one of the letters are the English translations of the same parts included in the last chapter in the ST. The other letters are parts of the narration of the unknown narrator. That is to say, in the translation, parts of the narration are fictionalized as letters.

Additionally, it is essential to note that parts of the fifth chapter in the ST are omitted from the fifth chapter in the TT. These changes beg the question “why?” As discussed earlier, the word “autobiography” in the title created a perception in the reader of events being real. Within an autobiographical narration based on real events, the presence of an unknown, heterodiegetic narrator would be unlikely, since an autobiography of a person is intrinsically written by the same person and may optionally include a paratext by an editor, publisher or translator. Considering this, it can be argued that Deedes may have substantially restructured the fifth chapter in order to omit this unknown, heterodigetic narrator and thus, as explained by an anonymous reviewer of the translation, to create a TT that is more akin to an autobiography than the ST (also see B.E., 1949, p. 51).

However, this is not the sole explanation. The unusual nature Kamran and Feride’s wedding in the ST is likely a highly unfamiliar event to the British reader. At the end of the ST, the reader learns that Aziz Bey, Feride’s uncle-in-law, shows parts of Feride’s diary to the Cadi (a judge in a Muslim community), who then performs Kamran and Feride’s wedding ceremony in her absence. That is to say, Feride does not learn that she is married to Kamran until after the fact. Such a marriage is highly unfamiliar for the Western reader in the late 1940s. While restructuring the last chapter, Deedes omitted this part in the TT, either to render the whole story less foreign to the target audience or, as suggested in the abovementioned book review (B.E., 1949, p. 51), to diminish the last chapter’s over-sentimentality. However, it would be naïve to suggest that Deedes merely sought to create a text that resembles autobiography for the sole purpose of curbing foreignness and over-sentimentality in the text, without any ulterior motive. As discussed previously, by translating Çalıkuşu, Deedes authorized a view of the Orient that was familiar to him, and filtered out unfamiliar views in an Orientalist manner. Similarly, Deedes’ restructuring of the final chapter can be construed as a method of filtering out the unfamiliar, and thus solidifying the views of the Orient authorized by him. Discussing “orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” as suggested by Said (1978/1985, p. 3), it can be suggested that such a translation choice, seemingly consistent with the title change and shaping and repackaging the type of the TT, is actually a means of claiming an Orientalist authority over the Orient.

Conclusion

In this paper, drawing upon anthropological theories of liminality with a cross-cultural lens, we consider this concept as a useful heuristic approach in illuminating the linguistic and cultural processes and critical dispositions lying behind a translation activity. Liminality formed a complex multilayered and multifaceted area which calls upon an enlarged idea of translation. As much as liminality theory aims for the deconstruction of essentialist categories, it has made the translation a medium of representation, the “Third Place of Enunciation” (Bhabha, 1994), which moves this anthropological theory away from the transition process toward the translation process.

Bearing all these in mind, the layers of liminality in Çalıkuşu and its translation into English are elaborated, although it is not possible to fully separate each from the others. Çalıkuşu is a typical in-between novel, in that it focused partially on, and was written in a transition period which witnessed the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Taking place in the backward East and serving as a tool promoting Westernization and modernization for the yet-to-be-established Republic of Turkey, the novel is neither of the East nor of the West, but rather in a liminal zone with its characterization, narration, (re)organization, both as a ST and TT. Translated into English during the Republican era, the novel was a means of introducing to the West the Ottoman Empire, an Orient which no longer existed. Not only did the book portray a world that no longer existed, it was in fact one of the many symbols and tools promoting Westernization in Turkey, and the end of the Empire. The novel, therefore, is liminal in terms of its concurrent representation of the East and West from different standpoints.

This study reveals that taking a liminalist approach can break down essentialist barriers and pave the way for the development of hybridity consciousness, which can be mapped onto translation processes and the role of the translator in TS. In contrast to traditional fixity of polarized identities postulated in normative theories of translation and translating, the concept of liminality has the potential to bring about a reconceptualization of the notion of cultural and linguistic hybridity in translation context. We hold the belief that this study will provide a point of departure for further studies and poses a challenge to the presumed binarisms in translation.