I’m not a writer or a translator. I can't say I know Turkish. Well, I made some attempts at learning it and I know some basics, which allow me to recognize parts of speech, tenses and some suffixes, so I can identify the roots of the words to check their meanings in dictionaries. This, of course, helps, but is not enough to translate with ease, especially when it comes to literary texts, like Engin’s stories, which have their own specific language, and which google or other translator programmes struggle with as well.

Yes, I have to use the translator. But I don’t just copy what it comes up with. Needless to say, I have to correct it, in terms of endings [e.g. in Polish, we have different tense, person, number, and gender endings], pronouns, etc. so that it makes sense. I have to admit that the automatic translators have made a huge progress in the last few years. I remember, many years ago, when Engin’s stories first appeared, Google was coming up with such gibberish, that I had a lot of laugh, but couldn’t possibly accept as Engin’s words – I was sure this gibberish is definitely not what our intelligent idol wrote. I could possibly just use the translations that appear in different languages in different EA fan groups, but I decided to “torture myself with Engin”, trying to get to the original and crack it… So, I copy Engin’s original text to Google or DeepL and then make my own version, sometimes comparing with the other fan groups translations. Well, sometimes I discover that other translations just follow the google one, even if what google writes makes no sense… So other versions do not always help.

Unfortunately, in each of Engin’s stories there are parts that I really don’t know what to do – where neither the translator, nor a dictionary helps. The problem is not just idiomatic expressions, cultural background unknown to us, or Engin’s way of expressing himself. Sometimes it can be something quite mundane...

Here’s one such case, taken from Engin’s story no 21 “Breath in darkness”, which I decided to translate after all the videos showing Engin smoking. If you remember the story, it narrates a young boy’s first experience of smoking a cigarette. The boy goes out looking for a pack of cigarettes for Uncle Ismet and when he finally finds it, he’s tempted to try one. He opens the pack from the other side and smokes. On coming back, he sees all the neighbourhood looking for him – his absence lasted quite a while. But instead of showing up and saying: “Here I am, I’m OK”, he hides behind an electric pole…

And here’s Engin’s sentence that I struggled with:
The original Turkish from the story published in Kafasina Gore: Sigara paketinin delik kısmı ise büyüdükçe büyüyor, beni aramalarının önüne geçiyordu.
Google translate: The hole in the cigarette pack grew bigger and bigger, preventing them from calling me.
OK, the first part, causes no problems. But what about the second one? Where’s the subject of preventing? What about “calling me”? All the people were calling the boy, so “preventing them from calling” makes no sense.
I analyzed each word separately then: beni=me, aramalar – calls or searches, önüne geçiyordu <- önüne geçmek = prevent. So maybe, I wondered, it should be the other way round: preventing me from calling them??? As it was the narrator who sat quietly in his hiding.
I looked for translations in some of EA fan groups. But, most probably, they had the same problem as me. Some translations skipped the second part altogether and changed the first part too: “I guess I had been out more than I thought, and the trouble with opening the pack of cigarettes was getting bigger and bigger.”
Another translation had: “The hole part of the cigarette package got bigger and bigger as it grew.”, so again it only referred to the part about the hole in the cigarette pack.
Then I found an English one, which was slightly longer and included the second part too: “The hole in the cigarette package grew bigger and prevented me from being searched.” A bit cumbersome but, as you can see, they took the meaning of “search”, rather than “call” here, even though “being searched” brings to mind something completely different than people looking for a lost boy. In yet another group I found the best translation of all those mentioned before “The tear/hole in the cigarette pack got bigger, and the guilt made me hide.” Well, the second part seemed completely changed, but it did made sense: the hole seemed getting bigger, which reflected the boy’s guilt and all that guilt didn’t allow him to show up.

Finally, I decided to consult the guru - Kenneth Dakan, who translated Kismet’s “Sessizlik” into English. Here, it was much more developed and much, much longer: “In my mind, the hole I’d torn in the bottom of the cigarette pack grew bigger and bigger, and my guilty conscience weighed on me, paralyzing me, forcing me to stay hidden even as everyone worriedly searched.” Thus, the translator explained what made the boy stay behind the electrical post.
Oh, yes, I liked it very much, it all made sense, but how did Ken come up with such a long and meaningful interpretation from so few words written by Engin? Of course, I know translators do not have to translate word for word and they can play with words and change some bits. Maybe it was some kind of an idiom or saying that Ken knew, and google didn’t. After all, Ken doesn’t need google like me.
Or maybe he was in some sort of telepathic or other contact with Engin? Oh, Engin, Oh, Engin – I thought - did you write in shortcuts, and now we have to guess, what you meant? I mean, OK, we can guess that it was what he meant, but why didn’t he write it to make our life easier?
And then it occurred to me to check the book – the story in the original Turkish “Sessizlik”, and there: surprise, surprise, the sentence was ... eight words longer: Sigara paketinin delik kısmı ise büyüdükçe büyüyor, hissettiğim suçluluk beni saklandığım yerde kalmaya zorluyor, ınsanların beni aramalarının önüne geçiyordu.
Google: The hole in the cigarette pack was getting bigger and bigger, and the guilt I felt was forcing me to stay in my hiding place, preventing people from looking for me.
Now everything was clear and explained where Ken took the long sentence from. He took it from the book, while I struggled with a copy in Kafasina.
But who could have thought that the problem was “Kafasina Gore” cutting a whole line in the story? And of course, most translations were and still are made on the basis of what Kafasina publishes, where as you can see, you can be in for a surprise.
So, these are some of the unpredictable traps in trying to translate Engin’s stories: not only is it Turkish itself, not only is it Engin’s Turkish, but it can also be simple printing errors. One letter can change the sense, as happened in the story “Cherry Tree” in the first edition of “Sessizlik” – what about a whole word or a whole line missing?
The lesson learnt is, whenever we come across something senseless in translation, we have to take into account all printing mistakes too. And that makes the translating task a truly hard nut to crack.
Oh, Engin, how much do we have to suffer for you?

PS. Well, you may say - just don't try to translate, which is a pretty sensible advice to a complete amateur like me. But, the Polish fans want to know what Engin writes, and there's not even a slightest possibility someone is going to publish Engin's book in Polish.

The part discussed as it appeared in "Kafasina Gore".