Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary
P2 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Ankara in May 2015
The city where I was born has never been so poor, dilapidated and isolated in its 2000 year history. She has always been a city of ruins to me, full of the sadness of the setting sun of the empire. In my life, I either fought against this kind of sadness or (like every Istanbul person) made her my own sadness.
——Olhan Pamuk's Istanbul: The Sorrow of Ruins
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P4 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in the Konya Meulana Museum in May 2015
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P5 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Salt Lake in May 2015
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P6 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Istanbul in May 2015
Turkey: From Empire to Republic
Turkey's predecessor is the Ottoman Empire, which lasted for six centuries. The capital of the empire is Pamuk, who was born and raised in Istanbul (formerly known as Constantinople). In the middle of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire reached its peak under the rule of Suliman I, and incorporated the land originally belonging to Arabia and Byzantium into the empire's territory, spanning Europe, Asia and Africa. The culture of the Ottoman Turkish Empire was produced by the blending of Byzantine culture representing the West and Persian culture representing the East. However, as the combined fleet of Spain and Venice took control of the Mediterranean Sea, the Ottoman Empire gradually declined. In 1919, after the end of the First World War, in order to avoid becoming the prey of Britain and France, Mustafa Kemal led the bourgeois revolution, overthrew the rule of Sudan VI, and established the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire officially ended. Kemal, who was honored as the father of his country, immediately carried out the reform of "overall westernization", and everything was in line with Europe. Religion was eliminated from the political life of the country. The spelling of Turkish was changed from Arabic letters to Latin letters, making it impossible for the new generation to read ancient books except classical experts. All policies are aimed at strengthening the alliance with Europe, so that a declining empire can squeeze into the ranks of western modern countries in the shortest time.
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P7 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Konya Meulana Museum in May 2015
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P8 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Konya Meulana Museum in May 2015
Olhan Pamuk's "Empire" Yousi (excerpt)
Author: Liang Qing
In October 2006, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Turkish writer Olhan Pamuk, because his novels "found a new symbol of conflict and crisscross between civilizations when pursuing the melancholy soul of his hometown". Facing this literary laurel, Pamuk was well deserved. He is considered to be one of the most outstanding novelists in contemporary Europe. From the first novel "Sefdert and His Sons" written in 1979 to the latest work "Istanbul" in 2005, he has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature: the American Foreign Novel Independence Prize, the German Book Industry Peace Prize, the French Literature Prize, the Dublin Literature Prize Italian Grinzana Carver Literature Award... His works have been translated into more than 40 languages and published. Among them, My Name Is Red (1998) and White Castle (1985) were translated and introduced to China by Shanghai People's Publishing House in 2006, enabling Chinese readers to see the history of the Ottoman Turkish Empire revived under Pamuk's pen. Although these two novels are called "historical novels" because they involve a lot of the Ottoman Empire with a glorious history, it is not history itself that interests Pamuk. His "empire" leisurely thoughts sent from afar are not limited to the true representation of the past glory of an ancient empire. As a novelist, Pamuk has always devoted his aesthetic attention to the form and content of literature from the literary perspective, with the help of Turkey's unique historical and cultural context. The theme of the novel is highlighted through Pamuk's innovation of novel narrative techniques.
White Castle: The Translator's View
In White Castle, Pamuk used the history of the Ottoman Empire as a way to question himself and society. Through the suture of narrative structure, he juxtaposed the story that took place in Istanbul in the 17th century and the military coup in the late 1980s under the same text, forming a self-evident argument - the opposition between tradition and modernity.
The beginning of the novel is the foreword of Pamuk's fictional identity as the scholar Farouk Darwinolu. Darwinolu was forced to leave the university due to the military coup in the 1980s. After giving up his job as a teacher, he compiled an encyclopedia behind closed doors. A chance led him to find a manuscript of the Ottoman Empire in the Gabuze Archives. The story in the book attracted him to immediately start translating it from Arabic into the Latin that Turkey now uses. "After reading a few words of this manuscript on the desk, I went to the desk in another room and tried to describe the meaning of the manuscript in my mind in today's words." ② The figure shuttling between two rooms and two desks, busy recording the story in the Osman Arabic manuscript with modern Latin letters, is a vivid and appropriate metaphor in itself, It implies that the national individuals in the modern context look left and right, lose and drift when facing the historical text.
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P13 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Istanbul in May 2015
Turkey has entered the stage of rapid development of modernization process after Kemal's rule. However, the process of modernization, especially the modernization reform at the cost of abandoning tradition and denying history, is not a blessing for everyone. Peter Berg pointed out in his famous book "Wandering Soul - Consciousness Changes in the Process of Modernization" that "people who live in the third world under the influence of modernization begin to have a feeling of doubt and uncertainty about their meaning of life and social norms, and feel that they have no roots and no home. In short, modernization brings a group of wandering souls and lost individuals." ③ The Turks, who left behind the glorious history and culture of the Ottoman Empire for more than 600 years, are also like duckweeds that have lost their roots when copying the Western model. Although they are in their homeland, they are still puzzled by the struggle for survival and knowledge. Darwinolu's move to translate ancient manuscripts was directed against the alphabet reform carried out in Turkey from 1928 to 1929. The translation work of building a bridge between the two texts, in a sense, expresses the desire of the intellectuals represented by Pamuk to correct the excesses of the Turkish Cultural Revolution. Pamuk asked the fictional Darwinolu to remind readers that translation needs to overcome not only linguistic differences, but also political and social, historical and psychological gaps.
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P14 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Istanbul in May 2015
My Name Is Red: Debate over Style
Pamuk's innovation of novel form began in White Castle, and was fully reflected in My Name Is Red (hereinafter referred to as Red), which is mainly reflected in his "polyphonic art" of multi angle narrative ⑤. Everyone in the novel tells the story in the first person, and finally forms a unique multi voice chorus. The story begins with a body's confession, "Now I am a dead person, a dead body lying at the bottom of the well. Although I have died for a long time and my heart has stopped beating, no one knows what happened to me except the despicable murderer" ⑥. Mr. Gao Ya, who was killed by the murderer, was a highly skilled gilder in Istanbul Fine Painting Workshop in the 16th century. The young man who had been away from home for 12 years returned to his hometown to take over from Mr. Gao Ya and assist his uncle in completing a book secretly compiled by His Majesty the Sultan. Soon, my uncle was also killed. The sultan asked the master of Heihe Painting Workshop to find the murderer from the three meticulous painters within three days, and the clues were hidden in the meticulous paintings in the book.
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P15 Turkey · The Sorrow of the Empire @ Xiaohui's Visual Diary was created in Konya Meulana Museum in May 2015
(The above Xiaohui visual photography works belong to documentary photography works, which use Pentax K-3 Pentax digital camera and Pentax 80-200mm f2.8 lens. Some works are shot with the multiple exposure function of the camera, and later only the contrast, color balance and color saturation are adjusted. They have copyright! Please do not copy my works without my consent.)
Xiaohui's visual diary was created and photographed in Istanbul in May 2015
