Per un testo ‘minore’ della città: Latife Tekin e la poetica della traduzione di Istanbul

The essay aims at investigating the representation of Istanbul in the works of Latife Tekin (b. 1957), one of the most original female authors in contemporary Turkish fiction. The main goal is to demonstrate how the urban poetics developed in her novels Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (1983; Dear Shameless Death, 2001), Berci Kristin Çöp Masalları (1984; Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, 1992) and particularly Buzdan Kılıçlar (1989; Swords of Ice, 2007) can be considered as a peculiar “poetics of translation” or, in other words, as the attempt, mostly unaccomplished, to transfer the marginalized voice and the perspective of Anatolian migrants into the linguistic and literary space of high national culture. Starting from Jurij Lotman’s cultural semiotic of the city and having recourse to the notion of “minor language” formulated by Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari, I will try to explore, both in aesthetic and political terms, Tekin’s literary agenda such as to highlight the main narrative strategies adopted to produce a “translated” or a “minor” text of Istanbul. In doing so I will briefly illustrate the parabolic evolution of her urban poetics to focus on some peculiar aspects of its last stage, the deconstructive or “untranslatable” one.