Translating Latife Tekin´s Dear
Shameless Death
Life is full of surprises, and being at a workshop in Turkey was
certainly one of the twists and turns of life. I would like to thank
the Steering Committee of the 6th Cunda
International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature
for inviting me. I´m very grateful, and hope I have managed to
contribute with some points of view, although not a professional
translator.
After leaving University, my work experience is connected to primary and secondary education, first as a teacher. For a spell in the 80´s I was involved in union work at county and national level. The last 20 years I have been the principal of a middle sized secondary school, project leader and finally adviser for the Director of Secondary Education in The County of Nordland. Being heavily involved in school development from the 80s, I have written heaps of papers on various aspects of education. The last 8 years of my professional career, I wrote documents to be presented at the political assembly of the County of Nordland.
To my surprise I couldn´t get the novel out of my head. It made me uneasy until I realized the novel had to be translated into Norwegian. I tried to figure out whom to contact, and how to get someone interested in translating Dear Shamless Death. But living far away from Oslo where the publishing houses are located, doesn´t make it easy.
Just for the fun of it, I tried to translate the first few paragraphs into bokmål. I immediately got stuck, and thought the language of Latife Tekin too difficult to transfer to Norwegian. However, the text was nagging me until I suddenly realized it demanded to be translated into nynorsk (New Norwegian). Before I knew it I had translated the first "chapter".
Here I need to make two important digressions:
Personal background/CV
My academic background is from the University of Oslo and the University of Cambridge. My thesis was The Thematic Function of the Social Structure in Shakespeare´s Plays, submitted in 1973.After leaving University, my work experience is connected to primary and secondary education, first as a teacher. For a spell in the 80´s I was involved in union work at county and national level. The last 20 years I have been the principal of a middle sized secondary school, project leader and finally adviser for the Director of Secondary Education in The County of Nordland. Being heavily involved in school development from the 80s, I have written heaps of papers on various aspects of education. The last 8 years of my professional career, I wrote documents to be presented at the political assembly of the County of Nordland.
My road to Cunda
I met Saliha Paker way back in 1970 when both of us were studying in Cambridge. Finally, I visited Saliha in Cunda last summer, and luckily Saliha introduced me to Dear Shameless Death and Latife Tekin´s universe. Reading the novel while being in Turkey, talking with the translator of the novel, and meeting the author, made a stong impact on me.To my surprise I couldn´t get the novel out of my head. It made me uneasy until I realized the novel had to be translated into Norwegian. I tried to figure out whom to contact, and how to get someone interested in translating Dear Shamless Death. But living far away from Oslo where the publishing houses are located, doesn´t make it easy.
Just for the fun of it, I tried to translate the first few paragraphs into bokmål. I immediately got stuck, and thought the language of Latife Tekin too difficult to transfer to Norwegian. However, the text was nagging me until I suddenly realized it demanded to be translated into nynorsk (New Norwegian). Before I knew it I had translated the first "chapter".
Here I need to make two important digressions:
