Translation as Intertextual Creativity: A Case Study on La Galatea in French and in Turkish

This paper contributes to the studies on translation practices in French and Ottoman literatures by closely investigating certain narratives that are intertexually linked. The first of them is Miguel de Cervantes’s pastoral romance La Galatea, printed in 1585, as the author’s first book. In 1783, the French author Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian takes the liberty to reconstruct the romance and completes the otherwise unfinished first volume. His Galatée attracts the attention of ？emseddin Sami, the Ottoman-Albanian writer and linguist, in 1873. The young enthusiast exercises an almost mot-à-mot linguistic transfer, however, reserving the translator’s right to cultural assessment. Subsequently, an Armenian-Ottoman entrepreneur, Vi？en Tilkiyan, concealing his true source, prints ？oban K？zlar in 1876 in Armeno-Turkish, and publishes its Ottoman-Turkish version next year. This research, by employing such concepts as authenticity, imitation, inspiration, self-censorship, and rewriting, investigates the diversifying concepts of translation in the European and the Ottoman contexts. It also discusses the intermingling of translation with original texts and vice versa, hence its accommodation of intertextual creativity