The same wind in eight languages
The questions translators asked showed me the parts of the novel I didn't know about myself.
There are seventeen names for the wind in The Wind Gatherers. All eight translators got stuck in the same place: dul.
It is the name given on parts of the Black Sea coast to the windlessness that falls half a day before a storm and turns the sea into a mirror. The German translator rendered it as a compound; Greek turned out to have a word of its own; the English translator gave up, kept the Turkish and added a footnote.
A translator's questions are an X-ray of a novel. What they taught me above all is this: a word's untranslatability shows how local the knowledge it carries is. That is exactly where Rıza is right. Measurement is universal; the name is local.
A short letter every two months
News of new books and printings, signing dates, and now and then an unpublished page.