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language: Turkish (English tr. Translation Attached Translators Collective)
country: Ottoman Empire/Turkey
year: 1898
form: literary
dates read: 3.9.25
Scenes of Life, translated by the Translation Attached Translators Collective,[*] is a short novel by Fatma Aliye, one of the first female Ottoman Turkish novelists and (as I understand it) the first Turkish woman to be a professional writer. told in the form of eleven letters among five women, the novel reflects on the institution of marriage and a wide range of questions connected to it, most prominently the nature of love, the relationship between men and women, the institutional power of the family, and women’s self-development.
the five women are connected to each other through marriage; starting with Mehabe, who writes the first letter:
Fehame is, I would say, the emotional and intellectual center of the novel, as nine of the eleven letters are either addressed to or written by her. the first six letters comprise an epistolary debate between Mehabe — who is happily married — and Fehame — whose husband fulfills his legal obligations to feed and clothe her and their children, but no more — about the nature of love, with Mehabe trying to convince her cousin that love is real and that marriage is the ideal institution for celebrating it and Fehame shooting down all of her arguments with a pointed pragmatism: marriage, she observes, is a legal contract. it would be nice if love always existed within marriage, but it won’t.
striking in Fehame’s letters is her shifting of responsibility: Mehabe argues that Fehame should appeal to her husband to try to win his love and criticizes him for withholding it, but Fehame rejects this. her husband, after all, had only slightly more agency in their marriage than she did: their union was arranged by his family. given that he is fulfilling his legal obligations — and that she has no wealth of her own to fall back on — Fehame does not blame her husband but first and foremost her own family for pretty literally selling her to her husband’s family in exchange for the bride-price.
Sabahat is in a similar situation to Fehame’s, but more so: not only does her husband neglect her emotionally but actively cheats on her, despite her evident (but now souring) love for him. Sabahat’s letters highlight one of the gaps in Aliye’s analysis, namely class — though some of these women may belong to fallen aristocratic or bourgeois families, they nonetheless obviously belong to the Ottoman upper class, and part of Sabahat’s objection to her husband’s behavior is not simply the infidelity but the fact that he actively chooses the company not of his social equals (men or women) but rather of people she considers “beneath” him. Sabahat in fact has her own independent financial means, and, as Fehame observes, this gives her some agency in this situation — but, as Fehame also points out, she is still bound by social conventions and institutional misogyny, so she must be careful in how she exercises it.
Nebahat and Itimad are outliers; their connection to the other three woman is a bit tenuous, through an extended narration in Sabahat’s last letter of a visit to one of the islands in Istanbul’s harbor. they are the youngest of the letter-writers, and neither of them is yet married. they look on Sabahat’s and their other acquaintances’ marriages with dismay, torn between their (socially sanctioned-constructed — something Aliye appears conscious of) desires and the apparent realities of the status of women. I was particularly struck both by Nebahat’s question to Itimad — “What is all this education, this training, this effort for?” and by Itimad’s answer:
In response to your question, “All this education and training — for what purpose?” I say: is it not for ourselves? To become more self-sufficient, to understand humanity and to learn about the world we live in?
and yet this is belied in Itimad’s imagination by her immediate return to men’s desires:
You suggest [men] should marry the foolish and ignorant to find happiness, right? But would that truly make all men happy? For those who desire the opposite, can there be anything more disheartening in the world than this?
this is a novel about a group of women grappling with the (im)possibility of women living their lives for their own sakes — something they want (even Mehabe, who regards love as a central human need that must be satisfied as part of any project of self-actualization) but something that they struggle to really imagine. I think it would pair really interestingly with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s deconstruction of romance in Padmarag, and reading this has me really excited for Translation Attached’s forthcoming translation of one of Aliye’s other books, Nisvan-ı İslam, a collection of fictional conversations between a Turkish woman and Western women visiting Istanbul about the lives of Ottoman women.
the translation itself is excellent. there are a handful of small editing errors, but the book is, as the back cover blurb from Azade Seyhan says, a pleasure to read, while capturing something of the rhythm of late Ottoman prose, if not its linguistic texture. on that point, I appreciated the translators’ note, which elaborates on some aspects of both late Ottoman style and Aliye’s personal choices:
We also often had to contend with an abundance of synonyms. Aliye employs numerous synonyms and near-synonyms derived from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish — words that would have been familiar to her readers — often listing them in succession. We usually adhered to her choices, but occasionally dropped one or two synonyms when the English version was sounding too repetitive. One cannot help but speculate that, while this extensive use of synonyms was a feature of the era’s literary style, Aliye’s reliance on them may have also been a deliberate effort to assert herself as a writer in a male-dominated field, demonstrating her command of language and literary skill.
on which note, it’s also really nice that this edition includes not only the original Ottoman Turkish text (both in Ottoman script and romanized more or less according to post-1928 Turkish norms) and a contemporary Turkish “rendition” (as Nefise Kahraman describes it) — I want to revisit this in the future when I’m better at Turkish and I really appreciate their conception of the book as a way to introduce both Turkish readers and non-Turkish readers interested in Ottoman Turkish to the language of Ottoman literature.
if you’re interested in Ottoman literature, in early non-Western feminist writing, in epistolary novels, or in unusual works in translation, this is definitely worth a read!
moods: emotional, polemic, reflective, sad
[*] see their website for more information; the book lists the following contributors to the translation of Scenes of Life: Duygu Çevik, Karolina Dejnicka, Beril Sarısakal Erkent, Nefise Kahraman, Elvan Tayhani Karataş, Cumhur Korkut, Yasemin Gamze Mangal, and Heather Yawney.