Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Architec t ure
i n T r a n s l at i o n G e r m a n y,
T u r k e y,
& the
Modern
House
A r c h i t e c t u r e i n t r A n s l At i o n
Architecture
i n t r A n s l At i o n
esrA AkcAn
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction M o D e r n i t y i n t r a n s l at i o n 1
Translation beyond Language 6
The Theoretical Possibility or Impossibility of
Translation 9
Appropriating and Foreignizing Translations 15
The Historical Unevenness of Translation 17
The Ubiquity of Hybrids and the Scarcity of
Cosmopolitan Ethics 21
1 M o D e r n i s M f ro M a b ov e
a Conviction about its own translatability 27
New City: Traveling Garden City 30
New House: Representative Affinities 52
New Housing: The Ideal Life 76
From Ankara to the Whole Nation: Translatability
from Above and Below 93
viii contents
2 M e l a n C h o ly i n t r a n s l at i o n 101
The Melancholy of İstanbul 107
A Journey to the West 119
The Birth of the “Modern Turkish House” 133
3 S i e d l u n g i n s u b a lt e r n e x i l e 145
Siedlung and the Metropolis 148
Siedlung and the Generic Rational Dwelling 175
Siedlung and the Subaltern 195
4 C o n v i C t i o n s a b o u t u n t r a n s l ata b i l i t y 215
Untranslatable Culture and Translatable Civilization 215
“The Original” 218
Against Translation? The National House and Siedlung 233
5 to wa r D a C o s M o P o l i ta n a rC h i t e C t u r e 247
Ex Oriente Lux 249
Melancholy of the East 252
Weltarchitektur—Translation of a Treatise 263
Toward another Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture 277
Epilogue 283
Notes 291
Bibliography 337
Sources of Illustrations 375
Index 383
Acknowledgments
F
or books that take as long to prepare as this one, writing
the acknowledgments means going through a labyrin-
thine memory lane with circuitous routes of research,
doubt, writing, erasing, rewriting, editing, and reediting.
During the very early stages of conceiving this book I had the
opportunity to discuss my ideas with incredibly gifted and
helpful people. Among these I would like to start by men-
tioning my deep gratitude to my doctoral advisors at Colum-
bia University, Kenneth Frampton, Andreas Huyssen, and
Mary McLeod. If it were not for Ken’s curiosity and love for
architecture, Andreas’s commitment to theory, and Mary’s
scholarly rigor, this book would not have taken its current
form. Before arriving in the United States, my professors at
Middle East Technical University, Emel Aközer, Kemal Aran,
Ali Cengizkan, Ünal Nalbantoğlu, and Haluk Pamir, were
inspiring in shaping my initial interest in Turkish modern-
ization. During my studies at Columbia I was exceptionally
fortunate to discuss parts of this work with Joan Ockman,
Edward Said, and Gwendolyn Wright, as well as Jonathan
Crary, David Eng, Reinhold Martin, Grahame Shane, and
x Acknowledgments
I
n a newspaper article that was by no means particularly un-
usual, a Turkish reporter informed his readers in 1935 about
a housing project in Germany, which the German architect
and urban planner Hermann Jansen suggested be used in Tur-
key for modernizing the country’s residential architecture.
The Turkish reporter praised the project for the same reasons
that were cited as prewar garden city ideals in Germany: de-
tached low-rise houses in private gardens; ample green space
between buildings; hygienic urban space; rational, functional
houses; orderly streets; a unified neighborhood; function-
ing infrastructure; affordable construction; and so on.1 This
article expresses a view common among professional Euro-
pean and Turkish architects at the time: the design of a group
of houses in Germany could be repeated in Turkey, according
to Jansen, who sent the project to the officials in the Turkish
government for their consideration. Additionally, the Turk-
ish journalist considered it appropriate, even ideal, to apply
a housing project designed for Germany to a site in Turkey.
Both the reporter and Jansen seem convinced that modern-
ism was smoothly translatable.
2 introduction
Jansen was only one of the few hundred professionals connecting Ger-
many and Turkey during the first half of the twentieth century. When one
maps the influential German- and Turkish-speaking architects and urban
planners who migrated or traveled back and forth between Europe and
Turkey in the early twentieth century, at times moving even farther east
and west, the scope of interactions between the two regions will be evi-
dent. After founding the Turkish Republic in 1923 by overthrowing the
Ottoman Empire, the Kemalist state invited numerous experts from the
German-speaking ally countries to assist in the construction of the coun-
try’s modern cities, buildings, and architectural schools, a process very
similar to the one in today’s China, Gulf States, and ex-Soviet nations.
In the first decade of the republic, most of the architects designed their
projects for Turkey while remaining based in their home country, com-
municating through countless translated letters. Their visions were meant
to infiltrate the lives of the Turkish nation from the largest to the small-
est scale. The prewar garden city model, for example—which developed
in Germany partly as a result of a dialogue with British architects and
authors—was applied not only in the capital of Ankara, but in master
plans all over Turkey, such as in collective housing neighborhoods for the
new government officials and in residential villages for immigrants ar-
riving after the exchange of populations with the Balkan countries. Indi-
vidual houses for the new leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and other elite
officials increased the popularity of flat roofs rather than pitched ones,
plain stucco façades rather than ornamental patterns, transparent surfaces
rather than wooden shutters, winter gardens rather than courtyards, and
fashionable modern furniture rather than built-in divans. However, even
in the most obvious examples of the official westernization program, the
results were never a direct copy of what happened in German modernism,
but significantly modified visions. They were transformed during trans-
lation, to use the term to be elaborated on in this book. But this term
involves much nuance, since these translations varied from excessive do-
mestication to abrupt intervention, and since they were set in motion
by multiple agents, including invited foreign professionals, their clients,
state officials, and Turkish architects—all of whom had varying opinions
about the translatability and untranslatability of architecture. Meanwhile,
a group of authors and architects in İstanbul initiated an alternative path
to modern architecture in Turkey through both a welcoming of transla-
tion and a productively melancholic appreciation of the existing wooden
houses in the city. The German-Turkish connection was intensified after
the National Socialist (Nazi) regime came to power in Germany in 1933,
introduction 3
which forced many German architects and city planners into exile in Tur-
key, where they occupied a variety of intellectual and political positions.
Although some stayed in Turkey as promoters of National Socialism and
its classical, monumental architecture, others who had fled from the Nazis
fought against this propaganda in Turkey. Most of these architects took
part in educating the new generation of Turkish architects and collabo-
rated with local professionals—a dialogue that had an impact that lasted
beyond the period of their sojourns in Turkey. Translations in the opposite
directions from Turkey to Germany also existed, although exposing and
criticizing asymmetry and inequality in modern cross-cultural encounters
is part of my intention. While in Turkey, many German architects and
planners outlined the future of postwar Germany and came to influential
posts afterward; some returned to Europe and advocated new positions
in urban design based on their migrant experience. After the 1960s, gen-
erations of Turkish immigrants moved to Germany and left their traces in
the migrant neighborhoods. To summarize, such cross-cultural exchanges
in the twentieth century mobilized by immigrants, exiles, travelers, inter-
national students, officials, and collaborating local architects significantly
transformed the urban and residential culture in Germany and Turkey.
The acknowledgment of earlier cross-cultural relations in a globaliz-
ing world has motivated this book. The routes of Turkish- and German-
speaking architects are analyzed here, but maps of such cultural circu-
lation for other countries would be similar. Moving from one place to
another during this process are not only people (exiled, immigrating, or
traveling architects and international students), but also capital, ideas (ar-
chitectural movements and theories), technologies (reinforced concrete
and equipment for kitchens and baths), information (including graphic
standards), and images (drawings and photographs). These circulations
and their transformative effects have been so ubiquitous during mod-
ern times that one can hardly think of any pure “local” architecture that
is produced at a place completely closed to other locations, or any pure
“global” building produced in some abstract space outside the influence
of local conditions. Rather, the diverse types of continuous translations
have shaped and are still shaping history, perpetually mutating definitions
of the local and the foreign.
This book explores the concept of translation to explain interactions
between places. Bi- and multilateral international transportation of
people, ideas, technology, information, and images generates processes of
change that I am defining as translations—a term I particularly find acces-
sible since it is a common experience, whether one has translated between
4 introduction
t r a n s l at i o n b e yo n D l a n G uaG e
it is the translator’s infidelity, his happy and creative infidelity that must
matter to us.—J o r G e l u i s b o r G e s , “The Translators of the Thousand
and One Nights” (trans. Esther Allan)
Baudolino, the main character of Umberto Eco’s novel with the same
title, was born with a peculiar gift. He could learn to speak any language
after practicing a few sentences with a newfound companion who spoke
it. Not burdened by the multiplicity of languages as ordinary humans
are, Baudolino could have been the perfect peacemaker: he could have
easily bridged the gaps between any two groups of dissimilar tongues, re-
solved any misunderstandings, and enjoyed communicating with people
in whichever language they spoke.4 Can Baudolino’s talent for languages
serve as a metaphor for translation in nonlinguistic mediums, such as the
introduction 7
visual arts and architecture? Does something similar operate in the visual
medium, which also seems, at first sight, to be emancipated from the bur-
den of multiple languages? Although a linguistic text needs to be con-
verted for reception in another language, no such conversion is required
for visual culture. The visual original does not need to be transformed in
order to circulate across geographical space. Can those who operate in a
visual medium adjust themselves easily to the norms of any locale, just like
Baudolino, and are they able to represent themselves equally well in any
place in the world? Is there something liberating, limiting, or deceiving
in the easy transferability of the visual image—in its relative universality,
in the facile communicability of its denoted meanings—that bypasses the
multiplicity of languages and hence the difficulty of lingual translation?
If we disregarded, for one moment, the connoted or culturally coded na-
ture of images,5 we would have to conclude that the smooth transporta-
bility of visual culture from one place to another, in comparison to the
linguistic, has facilitated its flow on a global scale and has thus accelerated
the hybridization of different populations around the world. Although
I understand the point of view that such connections are only shallow
interactions between countries, this book nevertheless points out their
potential in constructing dialogues. However, the visual medium is not
devoid of connoted meanings, and, as I hope the following chapters illus-
trate, cross-cultural conversations have hardly been untouched by the po-
litically charged hierarchies that have shaped the world. They have, thus,
been neither smooth nor egalitarian. It takes a Baudolino, the historian
who lies, to claim that one could speak in all languages. Yet it also takes a
Baudolino, the historian who is deeply concerned about the future of the
world, to set this as a human aspiration.
The definition of translation includes any act of changing from one
place, position, condition, medium, or language. As etymologists point
out, using the word commonly to mean a conversion between languages
is only a modern phenomenon. Despite the paucity of working theories,
translation has been an integral part of architectural design. Translations
in architecture can be discussed in relation to converting from drawing to
building, from diagram to project, from one place to another, from a dif-
ferent discipline to architecture, and from text to visual image.6 I explore
here translations involving the movement of entities from one location
to another, and their impact on the built environment. Naturally, transla-
tions in architecture engage both the linguistic and the visual, since the re-
ception of one or more architects’ texts, concepts, and theories in another
8 introduction
t he t h e o r e t i C a l P o s s i b i l i ty o r
i M P o s s i b i l i ty o f t r a n s l at i o n
Deny translation . . . then you must be consistent and deny all speech.
translation is, and always will be, the mode of thought and understanding.
—G . G e n t i l e , “Il dritto e il torto delle traduzioni,” quoted in George
Steiner, After Babel
rida, is an unlikely but necessary task that allows for—but at the same
time reveals the obstacles in—linguistic exchange. Translation therefore
has a utopian dimension. Despite recognizing the impossibility of abso-
lute translation, promoters of translation aspire toward the coexistence of
incommensurable languages.34 They prevent the exclusion of the foreign
text from the local language, even though the foreign text should not be
completely sustained within its norms. A utopian dimension, albeit a dif-
ferent kind, exists in the revised Benjaminian translation as well. Here,
the translator’s task is to construct the greater language that prepares a
shared foundation for all languages. For Derrida, utopia is the dialogue
between untranslatable languages. For Benjamin, it is the aspiration that
all languages will be compatible with the “pure language,” without being
forced under one hegemonic language. The premise for Derrida is the ir-
reducible heterogeneity of languages, whose radical alterity can only (and
should not therefore) be obliterated through violence. The premise of
Benjamin, on the other hand, is the future possibility of a shared frame-
work, however abstract it may be. These two trajectories are both differ-
ent from the premise of smooth translatability to be implemented from
above. Chapter 1 of this book further introduces the potentials and limits
of these three different positions on the theoretical possibility or impossi-
bility of translation: the premise of translatability from above (the Kemal-
ist project), untranslatability, and the aspiration for translatability from
below.
Let me leave the indeterminable question on translatability unre-
solved. As Derrida pointedly asked, “How can one dare say that nothing is
translatable, and by the same token, nothing is untranslatable” anyway?35
The theoretical possibility or impossibility of translation will gain a new
dimension after introducing the historical and geopolitical dimensions
of an act of translation. In any event, this debate was meant to illustrate
that translation is the very medium that exposes not only the formal but
also the epistemological and ethical dimensions of cultural interactions.
Is there anything untranslatable in architecture? What are the conse-
quences of defending unbridgeable gaps between different artistic tradi-
tions? Conversely, what are the consequences of absolute translatability
as a premise—that is, what would be the result of the belief that ideas and
images can flow freely and smoothly between different places? These are
questions worth exploring in order to understand global modernism, and
I suggest that we try to answer them by enhancing the terminology of
architectural translation.
introduction 15
a P P ro P r i at i n G a n D f o r e i G n i z i nG t r a n s l at i o n s
when you translate you should go as far as the untranslatable; then you
catch sight of the foreign language and the foreign nation for the first time.
—J o h a n n w o l f G a n G v o n G o e t h e , Maximen und Reflexionen
tors enrich the receiving language with new concepts and forms, rather
than freezing it within existing norms, as Ataç would argue. The diffi-
culty of translation between any two languages need not indicate the
gaps of the receiving language, as Güntekin claimed, but the contem-
porary distance between the two languages, which can and must be re-
duced through translation. This makes it all the more necessary to treat
translation as a “medical injection on language,”41 as a medium in which
a language opens itself to another and “expands” ( genişletmek) itself.42 In
Köni’s eyes, foreignizing translations transcend the limits of Turkish and
enrich it by exposing it to a different language. In his own words, trans-
lated into English, “the aim of a translation should not be to look like an
original text written in the receiving language. This would mean that the
translation had remained within the confines of the receiving language,
which would be a limited benefit for this language.”43 Instead, a transla-
tion better “serves” (hizmet) its own language, even if it sounds awkward,
when it “creates an acquaintance between languages, brings them closer,
builds a ‘change’ in their relation, . . . [when] it earns on their behalf some-
thing they did not have.”44
This debate over what I will call appropriating and foreignizing transla-
tions is indicative of a crucial concern in the practice of translation, which
has not been limited to Turkey. When Friedrich Schleiermacher expressed
the choice that had to be made between “moving the reader towards the
writer as much as possible” and “moving the writer towards the reader as
much as possible,” he crystallized a very common dilemma among trans-
lators.45 A similar choice repeatedly arises in architectural translations as
well: should an architect appropriate the foreign in the local as much as
possible in order to maintain continuity in the existing context, or inten-
tionally preserve its foreignness as much as possible to implement a radi-
cal discontinuity? Throughout this book, I define appropriating transla-
tion as the tendency to assimilate or absorb a foreign idea or artifact into
the local norms and foreignizing translation as the tendency to resist do-
mestication, to expose the differences between two places, and to intro-
duce a new idea, a discontinuity. Needless to say, every actual translation
exists somewhere between these two ends of the spectrum.
How does one assess the results of this choice between the ends? Any
moment of translation brings one face to face with what was previously
considered the other, the foreign, the outside. Depending on the context
and mode of transformation, a translation may move the world one step
toward what might be called clonialism—the spread of sameness—under
one hegemonic power; at other times, it may introduce a new and foreign
introduction 17
idea to a given context, or strengthen the local norms at that given mo-
ment if the imported object is assimilated. On the one hand, the premise
of absolute translatability may trigger the total assimilation of one place
in another. On the other hand, the belief in untranslatability may draw
sharp and fixed borders around places.
Rather than a predefined formulaic conclusion about the theoretical
possibility of translation, or the choice between appropriating and foreign-
izing translations, I suggest that the evaluation ought to take ethical and
political dimensions into account. As far as the history narrated in this
book is concerned—that is, when we are curious about translations be-
tween one place deemed Western and another one deemed non-Western
in a modern moment—we cannot disregard the unequal relations operat-
ing during this process. For instance, in the Ataç-Köni debate mentioned
above, how can one disregard the perceived “poverty” of Turkish exposed
in Güntekin’s essay? Both literary and architectural translations establish
contact zones where different locations interact with each other.46 These
are zones of exchange; but they are zones filled with uneven relations,
geopolitical hierarchies, tensions and anxieties, which in turn foreclose
translations’ potential to be a prerequisite for a cosmopolitan ethics. Both
the indeterminable dilemma between translatability and untranslatability
and the choice between appropriating and foreignizing translations thus
need to be contextualized in their geopolitical dimensions.
t h e h i s to r i C a l u n e v e n n e s s o f t r a n s l at i o n
to rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first
step in all legal murders.—r o l a n D b a r t h e s , The Poetics of Imperialism
(trans. Eric Cheyfitz)
“I have to get used to the idea that I am made to torture myself and
never be happy. This is why I am incapable of following today’s absurd
world. . . . In the last ten years, European products colonized Turkey. This
destroyed Turkish art. If this continues, we will be completely absorbed
by Europe. . . . Show Turkishness with pride. Don’t take anything from
Europe. It does not have to be beautiful for them.”47 One may not expect
these words from Sedad Eldem, the sophisticated son of a privileged and
modernized Ottoman family who spent most of his childhood in Euro-
pean cities, and who grew up to be one of the most influential architects
of the twentieth century in Turkey. It may be easy to deride the guileless-
ness of these claims that a young architect scribbled in his diary during a
18 introduction
t h e u b i q u i ty o f h y b r i D s a n D t h e
s C a rC i ty o f C o s M o P o l i ta n e t h i C s
less times before having the confidence to put iron in concrete based on
the previous experiments of his foreign colleagues; an architectural stu-
dent might have slept in run- down hostels for countless nights to observe
what his peers had done with this new technology; and then a contractor
might have searched around the world to find the proper insulation ma-
terial, so that a flat roof terrace could be built even in a rainy and gloomy
climate, making the rare sunny day remarkably more joyful. Thanks to
the ubiquity of translation, there are architectural hybrids everywhere.
As long as we define a hybrid as an artifact whose sources can be traced
back to different places, there is hardly anything more common than an
architectural hybrid. Coming back to the difference between linguistic
and visual translation, linguistic creolization—in which a fusion tongue
emerges from the mixing of existing languages—might be scarcer in his-
tory, but there has been no shortage of architectural hybridization.
Can we say that the same is true for cosmopolitan architecture?
Neither of the countries discussed in this book were cosmopolitan, even
though they were wide open to foreign influences, and even if some of
their thinkers and artists vocally embraced the cosmopolitan ideal. The
rise of Nazism in Germany—which, according to Hannah Arendt’s early
intuitions, was not unrelated to the racial concepts of imperialism64—and
the irrefutable violence of Kemalism against the ethnic and religious mi-
norities within Turkey should stand as a warning to those naive enough
to think that hybridization and multicultural contexts would readily con-
stitute a cosmopolitan ethics. Translation practices unlocked Turkey’s
borders to some countries, but they blocked those borders to others. The
Kemalists translated extensively from European countries, but the same
official program gave equal emphasis to erasing the influence of the Ar-
menians, Kurds, Greeks, Arabs, and Persians who had shaped the Otto-
man Empire. Translation alone is not a guaranteed antidote to separatist
nationalism or ethnocentrism.
I would therefore like to differentiate the concept of a hybrid artifact
from cosmopolitan ethics, which will be a pronounced theme in the last
chapters of this book. I define a hybrid as a de facto product of modern
times, in which there are no pure national or pure Western and pure East-
ern artifacts, due to the constant translations between countries. How-
ever, being a hybrid in itself does not prevent the ideological separation
between West and non-West, nor is it an antidote to chauvinistic national-
ism. Chapter 4, “Convictions about Untranslatability,” problematizes the
concept of the original as the perceived untranslatable core of a culture
and analyzes the rise of nationalist and purist anticosmopolitan ideolo-
introduction 23
gies, both in Germany and Turkey starting in the mid-1930s and through-
out the 1940s. This chapter discusses texts and buildings that were obvious
hybrids of multiple influences but that were paradoxically and mistakenly
presented as products of nationalism. The hybrid only escapes its potential
risk of maintaining chauvinism or ethnocentrism when it is coupled with
a cosmopolitan ethics. Chapter 5, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Architecture,”
concludes the book with a detailed interpretation of the architect Bruno
Taut’s last theoretical statement, which, I suggest, aspired toward not only
hybridity but also cosmopolitan ethics in the Kantian sense of the term—
namely, a cosmopolitan ethical and political system that guarantees per-
petual peace. In 1795 Immanuel Kant offered a list of regulations for cos-
mopolitan law and an ethics of hospitality to institute perpetual peace, a
peace that annihilates the possibility of all future wars.65 This was a cosmo-
politanism predicated on the confidence that enlightened reason would
accomplish the task of peace because, Kant argued, human rationality was
universally shared and every human being was capable of acting in relation
to universal maxims.
Cosmopolitan ethics is handled in this book as an ideal that has never
been achieved in history, even though it has, as an aspiration, shaped the
imagination of numerous citizens, writers, and artists in different ways.
Historically, cosmopolitanism has been one of the most virtuous ideals
that exposed the most unfortunate contradictions. It is an obvious irony
that the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius medi-
tated at night on the cosmopolitan city that embraced all of humanity,
while during the day he led wars in the name of the Roman Empire.66 This
was an eerie link between imperialism and cosmopolitanism. Centuries
later, August Wilhelm Schlegel distinguished between “workmanlike
translations” and the ones that achieve a “higher poetic re-creation.” The
latter type of translation, he claimed, “is designed for nothing less than
the unification of the best qualities of all nationalities, to enter fully into
their thoughts and feelings, and thus to build a cosmopolitan centre for all
humanity. Universality, cosmopolitanism is the truly distinctive German
characteristic. . . . It is therefore, no mere sanguine optimism to suppose
that the time is not distant when the German language will become the
speaking voice of the civilized world.”67 It is hard to bear the gap between
the nobility of an aspiration for peaceful humanity and the banality of
an imperial linguistic imagination in such statements. Contrary to gene-
alogies that trace a linear link from the Cynics and Stoics of the ancient
world to Kant, cosmopolitanism has not been a Western concept alone.
Translatable ideals that aspired to a type of cosmopolitan ethics existed
24 introduction
cosmopolitan ethics. Things do not get lost in translation, but they get
multiplied through displacement and replacement. And based on the spe-
cific story of this transfer in each particular case, the places of departure
and arrival of each transportation—which are both already constantly
changing with the continuing translation processes—are connected to
each other in a unique way. In this way, translations make history.
notes
i n t ro D u C t i o n
tions from Turkish, German, and French are by the author, unless otherwise
indicated.
37 Ataç, “Tercümeye Dair”; Ataç, “Tercüme Üzerine.”
38 Ataç, “Tercümeye Dair.” For instance, while deliberating on how to translate
“je ne mange jamais” (I don’t/never eat), Ataç finds the direct translation “ben
asla yemem” (I never eat) inadequate. The author is probably making a delib-
erate reference to the French idiom “je ne fume jamais” (I don’t smoke), as if
the speaker treats eating as an unnecessary and addictive act like smoking,
and so the translator needs to find an adequate idiom in Turkish, even if this
changes the original words. Ataç, “Tercüme Üzerine,” 155.
39 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility.
40 Köni, “Tercümeye Dair Düşünceler.”
41 Ibid., 159.
42 Ibid., 158.
43 Ibid., 159.
44 Ibid., 158.
45 Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” 42.
46 Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones”; Simon, “Trans-
lating and Interlingual Creation in the Contact Zone.”
47 Eldem, sketchbooks. This quotation is from several entries in Eldem’s diary. A
more detailed analysis appears in chapter 2.
48 This book partly engages with the transformed scholarship on Orientalism
and the postcolonial theories after Edward Said’s book Orientalism was pub-
lished in 1978. While a comprehensive list of works on postcolonial discourse
in architecture, which is still evolving, would distract the focus here, here are
a few influential texts that also discussed the Ottoman Empire and Turkey’s
place in it: Said, Orientalism; Baydar (Nalbantoğlu) and Wong, Postcolonial
Spaces; Bozdoğan, “Architectural History in Professional Education”; Crin-
son, Empire Building; Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism”; Al-
sayyad, Forms of Dominance; and Roberts, Intimate Outsiders. For my views
on postcolonial theories in architecture, see Akcan, “Critical Practice in the
Global Era.”
49 Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism. For a half-heartedly appreciative over-
view of writers who demonstrated the relations between imperialism and
translation, see Robinson, Translation and Empire.
50 Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omer Khayyam, 1859 (reprinted by Oxford
Classics in 2009). The claim also arrived in Turkey through translation. See
Weidle, “Tercüme Sanatı.” For more examples, see Bassnett and Trivedi,
“Introduction.”
51 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation; Jacquemond, “Translation and Cultural
Hegemony.”
52 Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” 180. Also see Cronin, Translation and
Globalization.
53 Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” 183.
54 Ibid., 181.
55 Niranjana, Siting Translation; Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility.
n ot e s to c h A p t e r o n e 295
56 For instance, see Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation”;
Simon, Gender in Translation; K. Harvey, “Translating Camp Talk.”
57 Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.”
58 Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 12–13.
59 Mukherjee, Translation; Bassnett and Trivedi, Post-Colonial Translation. Of
particular note is Haroldo de Campos, who subversively found a similarity
between translation and cannibalism, seeing translation as a source of nour-
ishment for the Brazilian languages (Vieira, “Liberating Calibans”).
60 Bassnett and Lefevere, Translation, History and Culture; Bassnett, “The Trans-
lation Turn in Cultural Studies.”
61 For essays that explore the explanatory power of Bourdieu’s theories, see
Inghilleri, “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting.”
Also see Wolf and Fukari, Constructing a Sociology of Translation.
62 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Also see Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop,
The Imperialist Imagination; Ames, Klotz, and Wildenthal, Germany’s Colo-
nial Pasts.
63 The clash of civilizations has by now become a common phrase, but the two
authors who coined and disseminated the term were Bernard Lewis (“The
Roots of Muslim Rage,” September 1990, http://www.theatlantic.com/issue/
90sep/rage.htm, part 1, p. 16) and Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civili-
zations.
64 Arendt’s evocative analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism raised questions
that were as difficult as the ones it answered.
65 Kant, “Perpetual Peace.”
66 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
67 Schlegel, “The Speaking Voice of the Civilized World,” 221.
68 Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, and Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanism; Vertovec
and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism.
69 Zubaida, “Middle Eastern Experiences of Cosmopolitanism,” 37.
70 P. Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics; Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, and
Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanism; Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopoli-
tanism.
71 Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace.”
72 Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 14.
73 Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular History,” xx.
74 Robbins, “Introduction,” 3.
75 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism.
76 Kaldor, “Cosmopolitanism versus Nationalism.”
77 Kurasawa, “A Cosmopolitanism from Below.”
78 Mercer, “Introduction.”
o n e | M o D e r n i s M f ro M a b ov e
1 For past surveys of modern architecture in Turkey during the early republi-
can era, see Alsaç, Türkiye Mimarlık Düşüncesinin Cumhuriyet Dönemindeki
Evrimi; Aslanoğlu, Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Mimarlığı; Batur, “Cumhuri-