The Tanzimat period and its diverse cultures of translation: Towards new thinking in comparative literature

With increasing attention to world literature and transnational literary studies, scholars have been looking for new avenues to locate networks of circulations and translations beyond national borders. The nineteenth-century as the age of global canonization, in this respect, plays a significant role in the historiography of world literature, which associates the non-European literatures of the epoch with the universal imitation of Western literary forms and norms. This essay defines the nineteenth-century Ottoman literary field as a complex multilingual literary system and shows that the Tanzimat* authors and translators formed networks of dissemination and circulation that is incompatible with center-periphery cartographies of world literature. By foregrounding examples of regionally marked translational concepts, practices and institutions, this essay embeds Tanzimat literary translation practices in questions that move the field of Comparative Literature today. It proposes the Tanzimat literary practices as a new model for thinking about literary comparativism outside of national and universalist paradigms. This paper argues the following: for comparatists and the discipline’s progressively enlarging explorations of the non-West, then, the problem of methodology arises in the contradiction between synchronic and diachronic approaches to translation. Once we engage with the historicity of translations produced during the Tanzimat period, it becomes evident that privileged paradigms of translation are overly limited. Attention to the Tanzimat would therefore be, as Spivak would put it, “inconvenient and impractical” for a traditional comparatist. The scale of literary and translational values change as we move from Europe to Asia, from nation to region, from one period to another, and from region to region. There is enormous variation in translation models throughout the ages and across cultures. The Tanzimat case reminds us that we need to move scales each time we do work of comparison, which would then save scholars of non-European literature from “watering down conventions,” or rendering works “commensurable, transparent and consumable” to cater to the needs of the global literary system. It might be time to invent a new way of studying cultural circulation and hybridization in multicultural empires that precede global capitalism, and that remain outside of colonial maps.