Valaki le tudná nekem fordítani ezt a szöveget?

It began seven years ago in 2002, during an idle conversation over lunch. My

longtime friend and schoolmate Orhan Pamuk had just completed what he described

as his first and last political novel. As we gazed at the crowds reveling in Istanbul’s

first snowfall that winter, I asked whether he thought the book might bring him

trouble. He laughed in that offhand and reckless way I had noted in so many others

who had challenged Turkey’s fiercely defended myths over the years. He was not at

all concerned, he said. Judges don’t read novels.

In those days, few people outside Turkey were interested in its literature.

Though Pamuk had won prizes all across Europe and was respected in literary circles

in London and New York, he had yet to crack the Anglophone market. So later that

year, when I agreed to translate “Snow,” my first aim was to recreate the narrative

trance that makes the novel so hypnotic in Turkish.

In truth, I needed a break from the disruptions of freelance journalism and the

heartache of my own novel, which, after four years of neglect in my effort to raise

four children and perform a very demanding job, had been shunted aside. Set in

Istanbul, my novel featured an American narrator whose Turkish classmates had been

implicated in a political murder following the 1971 coup. Though they had survived

torture and prison, my characters had gone on to challenge Turkey’s national myths,

live dangerous lives, and categorically refuse to explain themselves. Pressed with a

direct question, they took long drags from cigarettes and composed evasive answers.

What a relief it was to escape into another writer’s world and immerse myself

in questions of language. The details proved to be all-consuming, as the distance

between Turkish and English is great. Turkish is an agglutinative language, which

means that root nouns often carry a string of 10 or more suffixes. Add to that the

Language Revolution, which began in the 1930s with the aim of replacing all words

of Arabic and Persian origin.