An Overview of a Peripheral Literary Exchange: A Bibliography of Portuguese Literature in Turkish Translation

This paper offers a bibliography of Portuguese literature translated into Turkish in book format and an analysis of it. The need to create a bibliography emerged from the lack of a complete bibliographic resource to consult to provide a background for a doctoral study on the reception of Portuguese author José Saramago’s works in Turkish. The bibliography prepared through consulting existing bibliographies, archives, previous studies on translation into Turkish, and other resources confirms the peripheral position of Portuguese literature in the Turkish literary system, while offering an overview of the dynamics of this one-way literary movement. The findings show that the translation of Portuguese literature into Turkish is a relatively recent phenomenon. The fact that most of the translations have been produced within the last 25 years may be related to the shift of attention onto Portuguese literature after Saramago’s Nobel win in 1998. The bibliography also confirms Johan Heilbron’s (1999) hypothesis that central languages tend to be used as mediating languages to translate peripheral literature. In the case of the translation of Portuguese literature into Turkish, Spanish, English, and French appear as mediating languages in the scarcity of translators working directly from Portuguese.