Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, introduction by Pankaj Mishra. New York: Penguin, 2014.
The verbal text is jealous of its linguistic signature but impatient of national identity. Translation flourishes by virtue of that paradox. — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translation as Culture”
1. Traveling Tanpınar
2014 marks the appearance of a second English translation of one of the funniest satirical novels of the twentieth century. Serialized from June to September 1954 in the newspaper Yeni Istanbul (New Istanbul), Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü was published in book form in 1961. Animated as it is by a concatenation of slips of the tongue, jokes, and outright misunderstandings, Tanpınar’s novel has gone on to play yet another joke on its readers in its translated afterlife, by begetting two different English translations in less than fifteen years. Ender Gürol’s English translation, which appeared in 2001, was not very imaginative, failing to reproduce much of the range of Tanpınar’s Turkish. Despite its own shortcomings, Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe’s able attempt at a new English translation is welcome.
Born in 1901 in Istanbul, Tanpınar graduated from the Faculty of Literature at the Istanbul Darülfünun (House of Sciences) in 1923 and taught at secondary and tertiary schools in Erzurum, Konya, Ankara, and Istanbul. Appointed in 1939 as Professor of Nineteenth Century Turkish Literature at Istanbul University, he resigned from his position in 1942 to serve as a Republican People’s Party deputy from 1942 to 1946. Returning to academe in 1948, he served as Professor of New Turkish Literature from 1949 until his death in 1962. The author of one of the most important works of Turkish literary criticism, XIX. Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (“History of Nineteenth-Century Turkish Literature,” 1949, rev. ed. 1956), Tanpınar also composed numerous novels and collections of short stories and poetry, as well as a memoir entitled Beş Şehir (“Five Cities,” 1946, rev. ed. 1960).
An important representative of conservative modernism in Turkey, Tanpınar is often grouped with other traditionalist writers of the republican period, including his mentor, poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (1884-1958); the pedagogue, academic, and practitioner of traditional arts Ismayil Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978); and the journalist, novelist, and critic Peyami Safa (1899-1961), all of whom were committed to linking the republican present to the Ottoman past. Critical of Tanzimat and republican reformers for introducing a “duality” (ikilik) into Turkish spiritual life, Tanpınar’s writings sought a remedy for the “crisis of self” (benlik buhranı) engendered by the “change of civilizations” (medeniyet değişmesi), attempting to restore links to a rejected “Oriental” history. Flaunting talismanic proper names along with luminous metaphors, Tanpınar’s elaborate sentences voice the silence of a “second, deeper time” running alongside the present and infused with memory.[1] During the 1960s and 1970s, when leftist literature with overtly social themes was especially popular in Turkey, Tanpınar’s somnambulist characters, in their pursuit of the phantoms of the imperial past, appeared too aloof from contemporary social struggles. Appreciation of Tanpınar’s impressionistic style, during this period, was limited to the traditionalist right, including a close circle of faculty colleagues and former students at Istanbul University who served as editors of the posthumous publication of his works.
Influential critical treatments of Tanpınar by Berna Moran and Sara Moment Atış were published in Turkey and the US during the 1980s, but Tanpınar’s popularization occurred only during the early 2000s, with the republication of his works by two different publishing houses: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, owned and controlled by Yapı Kredi, the oldest private bank in Turkey, and Dergâh Yayınları, which has a traditional academic focus and retains the publication rights to Tanpınar’s works. (A lawsuit was settled in favor of Dergâh in 2005.) This Turkish “rediscovery” of Tanpınar must be understood in the context of the post-Kemalist turn of the 2000s, marking a settling of accounts with Kemalist secularism. It must also be situated within Turkey’s intensified incorporation into global circuits of capitalist economy and exchange during the same period. As the flood of foreign currency, goods, and cultural forms pouring into the country awakened in middle-class Turks a fear of the devaluation of “Turkish” linguistic and cultural purity, Tanpınar’s past formulations of Turkish national identity as East-West synthesis seemed newly attractive, perhaps appeasing the anxieties of those desperate to feel “at home” in global capitalism.[2]
Selections from Tanpınar’s works appeared in English translation in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, mainly in anthologies and dissertations, but wider recognition in the Anglophone world awaited the English translation of Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul (2003; trans. 2005), which openly honored Tanpınar as a major influence. It is unsurprising, then, that it is Pamuk’s translators, Erdağ Göknar and Maureen Freely, who have also mediated Tanpınar’s entrance into a world literary market, Göknar translating A Mind at Peace and Freely, with Alexander Dawe, The Time Regulation Institute. In an irony very much of a piece with the comic mode of the latter novel, the oft-cited endorsement of the apprentice provides the shibboleth for the global circuit of the master, transmitting to Tanpınar many of the same difficulties that arise in the circulation of Pamuk’s own work in a “global” English.[3]
2. A Tale of Inauthenticity
We should welcome The Time Regulation Institute as a resister of both of these recent appropriations (one national, one global) of Tanpınar as a symbol of Turkish authenticity. A satirical drama of Turkish modernization divided into four segments, this final novel holds a unique place in Tanpınar’s oeuvre, differing notably in style and mood from his earlier melancholic works. The “time regulation institute” of its title is a fictive clock-setting agency charged with synchronizing all the clocks in Turkey, and the novel is framed as the autobiography of the agency’s Assistant Director, Hayri İrdal, a survivor of the difficult transition from Ottoman empire to Turkish republic. Born in 1893 in Istanbul, a poorly-educated Hayri passes his childhood under the influence of four father figures embodying different aspects of Ottoman culture: the Istanbulite Abdüsselam Bey, of Tunisian descent, patriarch of a Babelian Ottoman household incorporating personae from all corners of the empire; the clock repairman and mosque timekeeper (muvakkit) Nuri Efendi, who instills in Hayri his love of clocks; the vagabond fabulist Seyit Lutfullah, who first awakens Hayri’s interest in occult and magic; and the Greek alchemist and pharmacist Aristidi Efendi, who dies in 1912 in a fire during an attempt to fabricate gold. In the novel’s first segment, entitled “Great Expectations,” a middle-aged Hayri reflects on the significance of these four men to him:
I now feel distant from all these characters and long-ago events; a part of me has turned away from the past, though I still claim it as my own. But however I might regret it, I cannot explain myself without looking back. There were times when I even dressed like them, adopting aspects of their personalities. Without my quite knowing, I would on occasion even become Nuri Efendi or Abdüsselam Bey or, yes, even Seyit Lutfullah. They were my models, the masks I hardly knew to be masks….Perhaps this is what we mean by “personality”: the rich array of masks we store in the warehouses of our minds and the eccentricities of those who manifest themselves in our person.
The portrayal of these four men is accomplished with affection and, indeed, endearment: there is none of the ironic contempt displayed in the novel’s third and fourth segments for the vain opportunism of the clock-setting agency’s functionaries. But we would be mistaken to take this as Tanpınar’s tale of a fall from the authentic Ottoman past to what Hayri calls a “confabulated” republican present. Rather than idealized essences, The Time Regulation Institute offers us only masks and masks behind masks. In the construction of these father figures inhabiting an alternate world of illusion and searching for quick and fabulous wealth, the first segment sketches the contours of the personae Hayri will encounter later, during his adult years, mainly at the Şehzadebaşı Coffeehouse: characters “locked out” of the “contemporary age,” “living in some kind of limbo,” “lead[ing] indolent lives, half the time taking the world seriously, half the time dismissing it as a joke.” The relationship of the novel’s first segment, marking the late imperial period, with its subsequent segments, marking the republican period, is not the relation of an idealized origin to a fallen present, but rather a relation of repetition in which the Ottoman fathers are imagined as every bit as inauthentic and alienated as their republican children. If there is something qualitatively different about the republican period, it is in the intensification and generalization of the lie. No longer solely a means of resistance (or of survival) for those locked out of the hegemonic imperial order, lies establish the governing logic of a newly established republican reality itself.
In the novel’s second segment, archly entitled “Little Truths,” Hayri returns from the First World War and moves with his first wife into the home of the last father figure who is still alive. When Abdüsselam dies, misunderstandings over the details of household property ownership lead to Abdüsselam’s children charging Hayri with stealing an imagined Şerbetçibaşı Diamond that allegedly belonged to their father. It is through the Şerbetçibaşı Diamond fiasco that Hayri first comes to recognize and articulate the absurdity of the new order:
I have already told you that I am an ignorant man. All my life I’ve had to learn new words. At almost every stage, I was obliged to renew my lexicon with revisions based on real-life experience—with my own blood and toil. Through my adventures with the Şerbetçibaşı Diamond, I came to understand the meaning of the word “absurd” [abes].
Diagnosed as mentally ill after a breakdown during his court hearing, Hayri is remanded to the Viennese-educated judicial psychiatrist Doctor Ramiz for treatment. (Ramiz is one of Tanpınar’s satiric targets, neurotically opening and closing his briefcase, extracting and replacing a pocket knife, a bottle of lemon cologne, and a pack of cigarettes, all while instructing Hayri to have a dream manifesting symptoms of the Oedipus complex.) After his release, Hayri takes a temporary position as secretary to the Spiritualist Society, and in the novel’s third and longest segment, entitled “Toward Dawn,” an unemployed Hayri meets Halit Ayarcı (the surname means “clock-setter”), who, impressed with Hayri’s knowledge of clocks and of the Islamic philosophy of time, proposes the founding in Istanbul of a Time Regulation Institute, with Hayri to serve as its assistant director.
Modeled on the muvakkithanes or clock rooms of mosque complexes designed to mark prayer intervals according the transit of the sun, the Time Regulation Institute opens its regulation stations throughout Turkey for the adjustment of unsynchronized clocks. The Institute has been read as symbolizing the discipline of capitalist modernity with which the secularizing and nationalizing Turkish republican state sought to catch up. As an emptied repetition of Nuri Efendi’s muvakkithane, the Institute is also a product of the relativist realism of the age, embodied by Halit Ayarcı, who “saw both his future and his past through the prism of the present.” As he tells Hayri:
Being a realist [realist] does not mean seeing the truth for what it is. It is a question of determining our relationship with the truth in the way that is most beneficial for us….You, Hayri Bey, are…old-fashioned. But the realism of today’s man is something else. What can I make with the material at hand, with this very object and all it has to offer?
Regarding the present as a historical moment “in which bureaucracy has reached its zenith,” with Hayri’s assistance Halit Ayarcı constructs “an absolute institution—a mechanism that defines its own function,” staffing the whimsically designated Minute Hand, Pin, and Spring Departments and regulation stations with uniformly dressed young men and women who speak and behave like automatons.
Hayri’s affiliation with the Institute changes him profoundly. Despite his constant mocking and parodying of the Institute, he becomes the mastermind of some of its most ridiculous schemes, including an intricate system of cash fines to be levied on the owners of unsynchronized clocks and watches. Charged by Halit Ayarcı with composing a biography of a fictional seventeenth-century clockmaker to be entitled The Life and Works of Ahmet the Timely, Hayri pursues the project to the point of altering public records in the Nuruosmaniye Library. In a remarkable episode in the final segment of the novel, entitled “Each Season Has an End,” Hayri designs the Institute’s new building, whose interior and exterior both resemble a clock. In the supersession of the absolutist “idealist” Hayri by the relativist “realist” Halit (both of these names are variations on Tanpınar’s own second name, Hamdi), The Time Regulation Institute judges that the inauthenticity of a modernity organized by a fetishism of appearances and by the arbitrary logic of the lie cannot be overcome. The novel concludes with the Institute’s dissolution and the appointment of its staff to a newly founded Committee for Continuous Liquidation.
In his introduction to Freely and Dawe’s English translation, Pankaj Mishra describes The Time Regulation Institute as an “anarchic,” “bleak” tale of belated modernity, suggesting that the Institute symbolizes the “clock towers” that “Atatürk decreed…be erected across the country…[as] part of the new architecture and urban environment in which Turkish citizens could pretend to be modern, and anyone still adhering to Islamic time, or time-keeper’s houses, was severely punished.” Mishra is mistaken about the facts here: the construction of clock towers in late Ottoman Turkey dates to the imperial decree of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) on the twenty-fifth year of his accession, and while the 1925 republican calendar and clock reforms did mark the official adoption of the Gregorian calendar and of international twenty-four-hour clock time, the law did not ban the Islamic calendar, which was to remain in use for “private affairs” (ahval-i mahsuse).[4]
Mishra suggestively places Tanpınar in the company of Jun`ichirō Tanizaki, Rabindranath Tagore, and Lu Xun as chroniclers of “the experience of arriving late in the modern world, as naïve pupils, to find one’s future foreclosed and already defined by other people’s past and present.” But Tanpınar’s image of outsiders “locked out” of the “contemporary age” also describes the lower urban classes, not just the postcolonial intellectual. Hayri’s description of the regulars of the Şehzadebaşı Coffeehouse segments them into three social classes: “aristocrats” or “world orderers,” “who busied themselves with the ordering of the world”; “Eastern plebeians,” who “had little to say about life’s simple pleasures or even the hardships of making ends meet, preferring instead to indulge in an innocuous flair for the comical”; and “irregulars” “devoid of social refinement and utterly ill at ease in the urban environment” (translation slightly modified). It would be a mistake to neglect the “Eastern plebeians,” the category that Hayri himself inhabited before his affiliation with the Time Regulation Institute. What Tanpınar appears to have seen in this “bizarre crowd” of collective daydreamers, specifically in their refusal to play the game of modernity, is an alternative. In the active refusal of these lower middle classes to “unlock the door” and “step out,” we see something akin to the refusal of the colonized as described by Ashis Nandy in his classic The Intimate Enemy. “If beating the West at its own game is the preferred means of handling the feelings of self-hatred in the modernized non-West,” Nandy suggested, “there is also the West constructed by the savage outsider who is neither willing to be a player nor a counter player.”[5] For a social group striving neither to catch up with nor to oppose the West, instead continually standing “on the threshold,” The Time Regulation Institute appears to imagine just such a position.
But it is not enough, either, to read The Time Regulation Institute as a postcolonial novel about what Mishra calls “the obscure sufferings of people in ‘less developed’ societies.” The novel also moves beyond the East-West schism, representing the so-called West itself as a victim of capitalist modernity’s empty, homogeneous “time-space” and mode of “staging history” in it.[6] For the Time Regulation Institute, we learn in the novel’s final segment, has inspired the creation of similar institutions (along with Clock Lover’s Societies) in various South American and Near and Far Eastern countries as well as “several countries in Europe.” This suggests that rather than reading The Time Regulation Institute as a “Turkish novel” (and still less as a novel of Turkishness), we might read it as advancing the internal critique of European modernity, very much in the company of the works of literary thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Marcel Proust.
To be sure, Tanpınar`s imagination of an alternative social order had its own severe limitations: it was very much urban, male, and Muslim. Do The Time Regulation Institute’s “sneaky” Jew, “rich Armenian obsessed with faux politesse,” and entirely absent Kurds and rural women—not to mention the “irregulars” of the Şehzadebaşı Coffeehouse—find any welcome in it? While such exclusions are inexcusable in themselves, we might say that insofar as Tanpınar relinquished the search for any authentic identity, in The Time Regulation Institute, he took an important and instructive step toward a politics of nonidentitarianism that has been and will continue to be a vital element of the struggle for social justice in Turkey—and anywhere else.
3. Translating Tanpınar
In her 1993 essay “The Politics of Translation,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote that “[n]o amount of tough talk can get around the fact that translation is the most intimate act of reading. Unless the translator has earned the right to become the intimate reader, she cannot surrender to the text, cannot respond to the special call of the text.”[7] Composed in a modern Turkish from which Arabic and Persian borrowings were purged and replaced by neologisms and older Turkic words, from the 1930s onward, The Time Regulation Institute makes for a difficult job of translation indeed. In their introductory “Note on the Translation,” Freely and Dawe remind us that Tanpınar chose what is now an archaic lexicon including many such purged words, reminding us also that Tanpınar was fond of “cascading clauses beginning with verbal nouns that are as likely as not to be in the passive voice.” Whereas in the prose rhythms of Tanpınar`s earlier works, short, paratactic sentences built up to a more intricate sentence, like a wave that crests at the shore, the prose of The Time Regulation Institute is more a landscape of cliffs—and ruins.
Freely and Dawe do an able job with a complex text woven of multiple threads that cross and converge in unexpected ways. They tap the poetic-archaic registers of twentieth-century United States English to approximate Tanpınar’s movement across the historical registers of modern Turkish, and their Hayri is, for lack of a better word, likably old-fashioned. Their translation of the phrase “bütün günümü geçirdiğim” as “whittle away my hours,” or of “hakkımda gösterdiği teveccühe” as “goodwill bestowed on me,” for example, successfully register Hayri’s discomfort with the present. Embellishments such as the phrase “may he rest in peace,” interpolated in a passage on the book’s fourth page and not to be found in Tanpınar’s original, are often sensible ones, here suiting Hayri’s idiomatic colloquial style. More inventive are combinations of semantic and homophonic translation, such as the clever rendering of a sentence containing the phrase “lop yumurta” (“hard-boiled egg”) with the help of the interlinguistic rhymes “pop” and “plop.”
But there are semantic and interpretive mistranslations that warrant notice. The first sentence of any novel deserves special care, offering as it does as what Spivak called “entry into the protocols of the text.” Take, for example, the famous opening of Jane Eyre, over which so much ink has been spilled: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” Onto the apparent directness and simplicity of this single sentence is condensed the vast symbolic distance of obstructed social mobility that Jane overcomes in her life’s journey. The first sentence of The Time Regulation Institute is equally richly compressed. Dawe and Freely’s rendering of the first sentence is not inaccurate: “I have never cared much for reading or writing; anyone who knows me can tell you that.” But their stylistic decision to abide by what Lawrence Venuti calls the “regime of fluency”— here, to divide the sentence into two independent clauses and to invert their order—sacrifices the emphasis of Tanpınar’s Turkish sentence on the act of seeing oneself from outside, through the eyes of others. A more literal, yet no less fluent translation of Hayri’s words would certainly have served Anglophone readers better, here: "Those who know me know that I don`t have much interest in the business of reading and writing." In a novel whose theme is self-alienation, the loss of this originary act of self-externalization (or double-consciousness) is no inconsequential thing.
Two other serious errors are made in the first paragraph. Here is a more direct translation of the rest of the paragraph, following the sentence “Those who know me know that I don’t have much interest in the business of reading and writing”:
In fact, all that I have read—if we exclude the Jules Verne and Nick Carter stories I read in my childhood—consists of a few history books, which I glanced through while skipping over the Arabic and Persian words, and The Tales of a Parrot, The Thousand and One Nights, and The Tales of Avicenna [Ebu Ali Sina hikayeleri]. Later, during my years of unemployment before the foundation of our institute, I also ran my eyes over the children’s school books at home, and sometimes read brief articles and serial pieces at the Edirnekapı and Şehzadebaşı coffeehouses, where I would spend a whole day compelled to read [hatme mecbur kaldığım] the newspapers from cover to cover.
Mistakenly, Freely and Dawe have translated Ebu Ali Sina hikayeleri, or The Tales of Avicenna, as “the works of the philosopher Avicenna.” Ebu Ali Sina hikayeleri is in fact a sixteenth-century collection of folk tales about the life of the philosopher Avicenna, in style and content very much unlike the works of the philosopher Avicenna. This is not only a mistake; it misleads us about Hayri’s character, overwriting the rootedness in Turkish oral culture on which Hayri himself insists here (and emphasizes, by reminding us that he skipped over the Arabic and Persian words), with an emblem of the high culture of the Ottoman literati to which Hayri, unlike Tanpınar`s earlier heroes, has little access.
This erasure—it is in fact an inversion—of the fundamental contours of Hayri’s character, as Tanpınar wants us to understand them from the start, is repeated in the final sentence here. Again mistakenly, Freely and Dawe have translated Tanpınar`s “hatme mecbur kaldığım zamanlarda” as “when I was left with nothing to do but recite the Koran.” While the Arabic borrowing “hatm,” meaning “completion,” does denote the recitation of the Qur’an from beginning to end, it is also used idiomatically—often with intended hyperbole, as Tanpınar uses it here—to describe any act of reading “from cover to cover.” The Turkish original is unambiguous: Hayri read the newspapers cover to cover. There is no Qur’an in this passage (and nowhere else in The Time Regulation Institute does Hayri recite a Qur’an).
Freely and Dawe misattribute the historical “Declaration of Independence” (“hürriyetin ilani”) to the birth of the Turkish Republic in 1923, where Tanpınar is actually referring to the 1908 constitutional revolution and the end of the absolutist reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Failing to recognize Kuşdili as an area of the Kadıköy district of Istanbul where Hayri performs plays, Freely and Dawe tell us that Hayri “decided to join a troupe in Kadıköy that performed kuşdili in a rundown hall,” noting helpfully if haplessly in their glossary that kuşdili is “a bird language that people use to communicate with one another.” Honorifics and other name forms are handled badly: “Ümmü Gülsüm” (“Mother of Gülsüm”) becomes “Gülsüm the Illiterate” (the Arabic borrowing ümmî, “illiterate” is indeed derived from ümm, “mother”; but this does not excuse the error). In Tanpınar’s original text, Hayri’s great-grandfather is consistently called by his nickname, Takribî Ahmet Efendi, rather than Tevkiî Ahmet Efendi; but Freely and Dawe switch back and forth, sometimes calling him “Ahmet Efendi the Some Timer,” at other times “Ahmet Efendi the Signer.” For no apparent reason, Ahmet Zamani Efendi is sometimes “Ahmet Zamani Efendi,” at other times “Ahmet Efendi the Timely.” Other errors are made with double negatives, in particular, and in mismatching pronouns and verbs.
It is difficult to understand Freely and Dawe’s choices regarding some culturally specific realia. The word “baldız,” referring to a man’s wife’s sister, is translated as “sister-in-law” in one place and left untranslated in another. “Sele,” a type of olive, is left untranslated for no apparent reason, as is “oya,” a form of embroidery. The cultural particularity of such objects is not especially significant here, and if their emphasis serves any purpose at all, it is an exoticizing anthropologization. By contrast, difficult and important concepts like “terkip,” a noun denoting combination and synthesis of which Tanpınar was fond, are rendered carelessly or not rendered at all. “Abes,” which Freely and Dawe correctly translate as “absurd,” has a special place in the lexicon of The Time Regulation Institute, but Freely and Dawe abuse it, tendentiously deploying it over too many of Tanpınar’s considered variations: “gülünç” (ridiculous), “manasız” (meaningless), “beyhude” (in vain), and “mantıksız” (illogical), among others. The English language certainly has the resources to match.
Where Freely and Dawe draw on those resources, it is sometimes in the wrong place. An example is their linguistic construction of Hayri as a clearly literate, perhaps Francophile dandy—a characterization just as much at odds with Tanpınar’s original text as their image of Hayri reciting the Qur’an. Freely and Dawe’s translation of “sözlük” (dictionary, lexicon) as “arsenal of bon mots”; of “yüzde yüz emniyetle” (with one hundred percent certainty) as “bona fide”; of “sevdiği kız” (the girl he loved) as “his paramour”; of “ona doğru adeta koşuyor” (running toward him) as “galloping toward us en masse”; of “çıkmaz” (blind alley, dead-end street) as “cul-de-sac”; and of “eleğim sağma” (rainbow) as “arc-en-ciel” strike one as capricious, as do interpolations such as “objet d’art,” “voilà,” “to use the parlance of the theater,” and “modus operandi.” While Hayri does use many of the French loanwords common in standard modern Turkish, such as “etüd,” “enstitü,” “sekreter,” and “psikanaliz,” in Tanpınar`s original they do not serve to suggest, as Freely and Dawe’s Francophile interpolations serve to suggest, a Hayri quite so at home and at ease with the strong French cultural influence on Turkish modernization, any more than he is at home and at ease with modernization itself—that is, with translation. If there is an uncanny resemblance between the appropriation of the historical past by the Time Regulation Institute and the appropriation of local literatures by the world literary market, then Tanpınar’s novel might after all also be read as an allegory of its own global circulation in English.
NOTES
[1] The image of a “second, deeper time” appears in the essay “Bursa’da Zaman” [“Time in Bursa”], in Beş Şehir (Dergâh, 2010), 116.
[2] See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity,” in Public Culture 11(1): 109.
[3] See my “Those Outside the Scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters,” New Literary History 41.3 (2010): 633-651.
[4] On this point, and for a short history of time in the Ottoman Empire, see François Georgeon, “Changes of Time: An Aspect of Ottoman Modernization,” New Perspectives on Turkey 44 (2011): 181-195. For a bilingual history of the Istanbul muvakkithanes in Turkish and English, see Server Dayıoğlu, Istanbul Muvakkithaneleri/Clock Rooms in Istanbul (Istanbul: Kültür A.Ş., 2010).
[5] See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 13.
[6] Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1-34.
[7] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York, Routledge), 183.
[8] The Turkish original I reference here and elsewhere is Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (Istanbul: Dergâh, 2008). In rendering my own translations here, I have consulted the Redhouse Türkçe/Osmanlıca-İngilizce Sözlük (Istanbul: SEV Matbaacılık ve Yayıncılık, 1999).