The early oblivion of the first Aeneid in Turkish: aiming at a moving target

Abstract

The first complete translation of Vergil’s Aeneid into Turkish was published in 1935–36, during the first decades of the Turkish Republic. The translator Ahmed Reşid (1870–1955) was an intellectual and statesman who not only witnessed but also played active roles in arguably the most radical sociocultural turn in the country’s long history. As Reşid did not know Latin, he used an intermediary French translation as his source text. If this alone might seem from a normative viewpoint an obstacle to success, a broader perspective that considers various approaches in current translation criticism reveals a more complete and nuanced image of Reşid's translation project. My aim here is to contextualize historically and to critically discuss this carefully made but too soon forgotten Vergil translation, by using a case-specific plurality of methods. I argue that Antoine Berman's hermeneutical model is especially useful for studies on classical reception including Vergil translations.