Constantinople around 1900 as a Multilingual Literary World from Swedish Perspectives. A Book Project (Istanbul, SRII)
Swedish literature holds a corpus of multilingual literary texts in which Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) around 1900 is portrayed. These texts, roughly a century or more old, are of great interest to study from perspectives which challenge traditional views of language, nation and identity shaped by a monolingual paradigm. With a focus on the role of languages and scripts for literary world-making, my research explores the crafting of Constantinople around 1900 as an immanent literary world which is multilingual, transgeneric, transgressing single national literatures, and still today accessible for readers. The selected works examined in this project are originally composed in Swedish or translated into Swedish from French, Italian, English, German, Turkish, and Greek. Through them, the many vernacular languages of cosmopolitan Constantinople are conveyed to Swedish readers. Phrases and words in Ottoman Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Arabic, and French are recorded and transcribed according to Swedish norms of articulation and its Roman alphabet. Important themes to study are – besides travelling – the situation of women (including veiling practices and life in the harems); religious rituals and norms; education, particularly in languages and the arts; warfare, massacres, genocides and life in exile; all of them issues of importance also today. The result will be presented as two chapters of a monograph in Swedish.
Final report
Constantinople around 1900 as a multilingual literary world from Swedish perspectives
The project’s purpose and development
Around 1900, Constantinople was a multilingual, multi-ethnic and multireligious city. With a focus on the role of languages and scripts for literary world-making, this project has explored how Constantinople is crafted as a literary, aesthetically formed world, which is transgeneric and transgresses single national literatures. The project has been pursued based on recent international research on literary multilingualism, translation and world literature. Important themes which the project has explored are crises (such as wars, genocides and exile), the situation of women, and education in languages and reading.
The project sets out from and develops the subproject on Constantinople as a multilingual literary world within the research programme “World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics” (PI Stefan Helgesson, 2016–2021, worldlit.se), financed by RJ.
Swedish literature holds a corpus of multilingual literary texts in which Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) around 1900 is portrayed. These texts, roughly a century or more old, are of great interest to study from perspectives which challenge traditional views of language, nation and identity shaped by a monolingual paradigm. Therefore, the research task has been to explore and discuss issues that concern perspectives of Swedophone senders and receivers, where translations and readers’ linguistic skills play an important role. The selected works examined in this project are originally composed in Swedish and sometimes translated into other languages, or translated into Swedish from English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek, or Turkish. Through them, the many languages of Constantinople are conveyed to Swedish readers, recorded and transcribed according to Swedish norms of articulation and its Roman alphabet.
In particular, the following issues have been explored:
– How did the reading of novels about and travelogues from Constantinople function as a venue where female readers of various nationalities could meet?
– How and through which strategies was Constantinople represented as a scriptworld (with several different alphabets) in novels, poems and travelogues?
Project implementation
The project allowed for a four month long stay at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII) in 2020, but this initial plan was changed because of the pandemic. My stay as a guest researcher started as planned in March 2020, but at the outbreak of the pandemic, the institute was locked down and both its staff and guest researchers had to go back home. During the spring 2020 and the study year 2021/22, I was working part time in the project while I was based in Stockholm, before I could return to SRII in the end of March 2022 for a five weeks long stay.
In Istanbul, I have visited exhibitions, museums, libraries and antiquarian booksellers in order to get impressions and knowledge that furthers the project. I have also established contacts with other researchers. Among other things, I have been able to find research on Constantinople as a centre of multiscript print culture, recently published translations of Ottoman Turkish counter-texts to the politics of Europeanization around 1900, and one of Constantinople’s most important and popular feuilletons, Jacques Loria’s Les mystères de Pera (1897), which was published in 56 instalments and therefore is very hard to find in libraries today. Also, I have been guided by old maps in order to visit places which are described in the selected literary texts that constitute the material of the project, for example living addresses and fictive milieus in Pera and the Yeditepe-garden, along the Bosphorus in Istinye (Stenia) and Tarabya (Therapia), in the Armenian districts in the Asian part of Istanbul, and on the Prince Islands. I would like to express my particular gratitude to the directors of SRII, Ingela Nilsson and Olof Heilo, whose extensive knowledge and networks have helped me in excellent ways.
In Stockholm, I have participated as speaker and listener in several workshops arranged by SRII in Zoom, which have been very fruitful for the project. I have also participated in a symposium on writer-diplomats at The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm, with a presentation which has been taken further to an article which engages with issues of multilingualism in Constantinople. In the manuscript collections of the Royal Library in Stockholm, I have had the opportunity to explore the private collection of Hjalmar Lindquist, to gather more knowledge about his work as a translator from Ottoman Turkish. He is known for his translation into Swedish of Halide Edib Adivar’s Atesten Gömlek (Sw. Eldskjortan), which appeared already in 1928. At the Royal Library, I have also explored the private collection of Elsa Lindberg-Dovlette (the princess Mirza Riza Khan) – her letters, newspaper cuttings and unpublished manuscripts – which give a deeper understanding of the context of the origin, publishing and translations of her short stories and novels from Constantinople published between 1908 and 1931.
Both in the Royal Library and in the library at SRII, I have also found more material for the project, such as novels by Halide Edib Adivar, Claude Farrère, Eira Hellberg, Annie Quiding (Åkerhielm) och Demetra Vaka Brown.
The project’s most important results
The examination of the selected texts from different genres demonstrates that reading of fiction and conversations about literature, along with dialogues about the situation of women and their emancipation, are recurring and important reasons for Western women to visit Turkish women in the harems of Constantinople. At the same time, these issues – for example what Turkish women are reading or the need for emancipation – are also themes which in their turn are portrayed in novels and illuminated in popular essays on the situation of Turkish women. To this end, linguistic fluency and translations play a crucial role.
Crises of various kinds that make up the conditions for and/or are depicted in the examined texts often highlight or thematize what is written (by hand), for example diary entries which suddenly are interrupted, an unsuccessful poem, never sent letters, a torn apart will, or strange (i.e. non-Roman) alphabets and letters on book covers and title pages. Even if a text is not visibly multiscriptal, it may portray Constantinople in a way that – also in translation – highlight written documents at the expense of a narration imagined as oral.
The project’s results will be presented within a few chapters of a monograph in Swedish. It will be published by the publishing house Makadam in late 2023 or early 2024, in open access after passing through the peer review of Kriterium.
Dissemination of research
Within the project, I have participated as a speaker in the following events:
18 May 2020: Presentation of research articles forming the basis of discussions at the workshop “Translation in multilingual contexts”, arranged by the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (in Zoom, because of the pandemic).
18 November 2021 (postponed from March 2020 because of the pandemic): A paper in Swedish about diplomats who have written anecdotes, letters and a romantic thriller about Constantinople under the last sultan, delivered in a symposium on diplomats as travel writers, arranged by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.
20 April 2022: ”Constantinople around 1900 as a multilingual literary world”. Presentation at SRII’s research seminar.
21 April 2022: ”Constantinople around 1900 as a multilingual literary world”. Guest lecture at Yeditepe Üniversitesi, Istanbul, hosted by Prof. Charles Sabatos.
The project is presented on Stockholm University’s web:
https://www.su.se/english/research/research-projects/constantinople-around-1900-as-a-multilingual-literary-world-from-swedish-perspectives
Publication list
Forthcoming publications:
Helena Bodin, ”Diplomater skriver om det tidiga 1900-talets Konstantinopel: förmedling och fiktionalisering av (själv)biografiskt stoff”, in Elena Balzamo och Per-Arne Bodin, eds, Med pennan i handen: Diplomaten som reseskildrare (Stockholm: Vitterhetsakademiens konferensserie, 2022/23). 7 800 words. Will be published in print and open access, https://vitterhetsakademien.se/publikationer/open-access.html
Helena Bodin, Elden är lös! Yangin var! Konstantinopel som flerspråkig litterär värld 1875–1928 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2023/24). 8 chapters, about 100 000 words, 24–32 illustrations. Will be published in print and open access through Kriterium.
The project’s purpose and development
Around 1900, Constantinople was a multilingual, multi-ethnic and multireligious city. With a focus on the role of languages and scripts for literary world-making, this project has explored how Constantinople is crafted as a literary, aesthetically formed world, which is transgeneric and transgresses single national literatures. The project has been pursued based on recent international research on literary multilingualism, translation and world literature. Important themes which the project has explored are crises (such as wars, genocides and exile), the situation of women, and education in languages and reading.
The project sets out from and develops the subproject on Constantinople as a multilingual literary world within the research programme “World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics” (PI Stefan Helgesson, 2016–2021, worldlit.se), financed by RJ.
Swedish literature holds a corpus of multilingual literary texts in which Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) around 1900 is portrayed. These texts, roughly a century or more old, are of great interest to study from perspectives which challenge traditional views of language, nation and identity shaped by a monolingual paradigm. Therefore, the research task has been to explore and discuss issues that concern perspectives of Swedophone senders and receivers, where translations and readers’ linguistic skills play an important role. The selected works examined in this project are originally composed in Swedish and sometimes translated into other languages, or translated into Swedish from English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek, or Turkish. Through them, the many languages of Constantinople are conveyed to Swedish readers, recorded and transcribed according to Swedish norms of articulation and its Roman alphabet.
In particular, the following issues have been explored:
– How did the reading of novels about and travelogues from Constantinople function as a venue where female readers of various nationalities could meet?
– How and through which strategies was Constantinople represented as a scriptworld (with several different alphabets) in novels, poems and travelogues?
Project implementation
The project allowed for a four month long stay at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII) in 2020, but this initial plan was changed because of the pandemic. My stay as a guest researcher started as planned in March 2020, but at the outbreak of the pandemic, the institute was locked down and both its staff and guest researchers had to go back home. During the spring 2020 and the study year 2021/22, I was working part time in the project while I was based in Stockholm, before I could return to SRII in the end of March 2022 for a five weeks long stay.
In Istanbul, I have visited exhibitions, museums, libraries and antiquarian booksellers in order to get impressions and knowledge that furthers the project. I have also established contacts with other researchers. Among other things, I have been able to find research on Constantinople as a centre of multiscript print culture, recently published translations of Ottoman Turkish counter-texts to the politics of Europeanization around 1900, and one of Constantinople’s most important and popular feuilletons, Jacques Loria’s Les mystères de Pera (1897), which was published in 56 instalments and therefore is very hard to find in libraries today. Also, I have been guided by old maps in order to visit places which are described in the selected literary texts that constitute the material of the project, for example living addresses and fictive milieus in Pera and the Yeditepe-garden, along the Bosphorus in Istinye (Stenia) and Tarabya (Therapia), in the Armenian districts in the Asian part of Istanbul, and on the Prince Islands. I would like to express my particular gratitude to the directors of SRII, Ingela Nilsson and Olof Heilo, whose extensive knowledge and networks have helped me in excellent ways.
In Stockholm, I have participated as speaker and listener in several workshops arranged by SRII in Zoom, which have been very fruitful for the project. I have also participated in a symposium on writer-diplomats at The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm, with a presentation which has been taken further to an article which engages with issues of multilingualism in Constantinople. In the manuscript collections of the Royal Library in Stockholm, I have had the opportunity to explore the private collection of Hjalmar Lindquist, to gather more knowledge about his work as a translator from Ottoman Turkish. He is known for his translation into Swedish of Halide Edib Adivar’s Atesten Gömlek (Sw. Eldskjortan), which appeared already in 1928. At the Royal Library, I have also explored the private collection of Elsa Lindberg-Dovlette (the princess Mirza Riza Khan) – her letters, newspaper cuttings and unpublished manuscripts – which give a deeper understanding of the context of the origin, publishing and translations of her short stories and novels from Constantinople published between 1908 and 1931.
Both in the Royal Library and in the library at SRII, I have also found more material for the project, such as novels by Halide Edib Adivar, Claude Farrère, Eira Hellberg, Annie Quiding (Åkerhielm) och Demetra Vaka Brown.
The project’s most important results
The examination of the selected texts from different genres demonstrates that reading of fiction and conversations about literature, along with dialogues about the situation of women and their emancipation, are recurring and important reasons for Western women to visit Turkish women in the harems of Constantinople. At the same time, these issues – for example what Turkish women are reading or the need for emancipation – are also themes which in their turn are portrayed in novels and illuminated in popular essays on the situation of Turkish women. To this end, linguistic fluency and translations play a crucial role.
Crises of various kinds that make up the conditions for and/or are depicted in the examined texts often highlight or thematize what is written (by hand), for example diary entries which suddenly are interrupted, an unsuccessful poem, never sent letters, a torn apart will, or strange (i.e. non-Roman) alphabets and letters on book covers and title pages. Even if a text is not visibly multiscriptal, it may portray Constantinople in a way that – also in translation – highlight written documents at the expense of a narration imagined as oral.
The project’s results will be presented within a few chapters of a monograph in Swedish. It will be published by the publishing house Makadam in late 2023 or early 2024, in open access after passing through the peer review of Kriterium.
Dissemination of research
Within the project, I have participated as a speaker in the following events:
18 May 2020: Presentation of research articles forming the basis of discussions at the workshop “Translation in multilingual contexts”, arranged by the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (in Zoom, because of the pandemic).
18 November 2021 (postponed from March 2020 because of the pandemic): A paper in Swedish about diplomats who have written anecdotes, letters and a romantic thriller about Constantinople under the last sultan, delivered in a symposium on diplomats as travel writers, arranged by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.
20 April 2022: ”Constantinople around 1900 as a multilingual literary world”. Presentation at SRII’s research seminar.
21 April 2022: ”Constantinople around 1900 as a multilingual literary world”. Guest lecture at Yeditepe Üniversitesi, Istanbul, hosted by Prof. Charles Sabatos.
The project is presented on Stockholm University’s web:
https://www.su.se/english/research/research-projects/constantinople-around-1900-as-a-multilingual-literary-world-from-swedish-perspectives
Publication list
Forthcoming publications:
Helena Bodin, ”Diplomater skriver om det tidiga 1900-talets Konstantinopel: förmedling och fiktionalisering av (själv)biografiskt stoff”, in Elena Balzamo och Per-Arne Bodin, eds, Med pennan i handen: Diplomaten som reseskildrare (Stockholm: Vitterhetsakademiens konferensserie, 2022/23). 7 800 words. Will be published in print and open access, https://vitterhetsakademien.se/publikationer/open-access.html
Helena Bodin, Elden är lös! Yangin var! Konstantinopel som flerspråkig litterär värld 1875–1928 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2023/24). 8 chapters, about 100 000 words, 24–32 illustrations. Will be published in print and open access through Kriterium.