Orhan Pamuk wins the Nobel
You've probably already seen it, but Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name is Red and Snow, has won the Nobel Prize for Liturerature (official announcement). As something of a Turkophile*—albeit one who's stuck half-way through Red—that's great news.I think this means three things:
- The much-shortlisted Yaşar Kemal will die without a Nobel. He's 83 and they're not going to give it to two Turks in a short span of years.
- Pamuk is now effectively immune from prosecution for "insulting Turkishness." Much the same happened to Mahfouz, from being accused of apostasy for Children of Gebelawi and banned in much of the Arab world for supporting peace with Isreal, to being something of a national treasure, put to rest with a state funeral.
- tr.LibraryThing.com needs to pick up! At least nine languages are usable and even Welsh is 40% translated, but Turkish is languishing in the single-digits. Why not celebrate Pamuk's Nobel by entering all your Turkish books and doing a little translating of the site? LibraryThing even has a Turkish library on tap!
posted by Tim at 1:03 PM
5 Comments:
You got your chocolate in my peanut-butter. (The above goes with the previous blog post.)
Re: Alexa. Oh, Alexa's numbers are TERRIBLE. You can't really translate them into visitor or hit numbers, but even on relative terms they've gotten LibraryThing wrong over and over again. They do, however, tend to get it reasonably right over a long period of time. And they're the best you can get for free. Even paid, MediaMetrics numbers on LibraryThing seem less precise than Alexa.
Oh, Perl is cool. No question. I was a Perl hacker before I apostasized to PHP.
I was an student in Alanya, and did archaeology in Bodrum. I always confuse "vacation" and "dessert." Clearly you were not there for dessert, although there's a pastry shop I remember quite fondly...
Cool. Are you reading My Name is Red in English or Turkish? I did both, and have decided to read the rest of his works in Turkish. I ordered a couple from http://www.tulumba.com today, including Yeni Hayat (The New Life), a story about a book that changed one man's life.
MY NAME IS RED is an amazing work -- I picked it up for it's references into 16th Century Istanbul life, and found his prose powerful, even in translation. Learning Turkish is on my short list of things to do, and I hope, in between research, I can truly savor Pamuk in his native language, finally.
And my day job is writing in Perl, but it's all about the tool that's best for you, and the job at hand.
Well, there aren't many turkophiles who are also helenophiles. I'd imagine it's easier to add the helenophile to the turkophile than vice versa.
My blog entry about Orhan Pamuk is at
http://leventskaleidoscope.blogspot.com/2006/03/orhan-pamuk-post-modern-turkish-author_03.html
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