Speaker
Description
Socialist ideas which gained a relative freedom and even the opportunity to be represented in Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1960s, were oppressed in a massive scale in 1970s. After the military coup by memorandum in 1971, socialist student leaders were executed or arrested; The Worker’s Party of Turkey (TİP) were shut down; ultranationalist groups waged a violent street war against the leftist groups; socialist intellectuals were assassinated; many socialist journals were banned and massive crowd of The Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK) demonstrators were fired upon on May 1, 1977, leading to the notorious Taksim Square Massacre. During this tumultuous decade, the journal Birikim became a pivotal nexus for the dissemination of socialist ideas. This presentation explores Birikim as a site for translation activism, arguing that it sought to mediate the crisis of meaning through both original essays and the translation of Marxist classics and works of European socialist intellectuals. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of “cultural field”, the study posits translation not just a linguistic act, but a medium of struggle in extreme conditions of ideological conflict. Translation policy of Birikim not only focused on reframing socialist ideas and addressing national problems such as economic policy and political representation, but also the quality of the translations of socialist works which demonstrates the high level of importance that the journal ascribed to translation. Ultimately this presentation inextricably links translation history to the annals of the history of social struggle, wherein the act of translation has functioned as a conduit for political engagement.
| Keywords | translation activism, Birikim, crisis, Bourdieu, socialist thought |
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| barbaros.uzunkopru@gmail.com |