This article examines translations of Salman Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children, into French, German, Italian, and Turkish. Specific examples reveal that while all translators maintain a foreignizing stance toward the source text, their respective target languages and cultures make foreignizing a relative effect, dependent on the target language and target culture's distance from or proximity to the source text/culture. The article also argues that Rushdie's novel fits the notion of literatures of the world, because the translations replicate and also refract the source text in different contexts, thus effectively multiplying a single source novel to become plural in its multiple (language) worlds.

As the latest American Comparative Literature Association reports (the ACLA state of the discipline reports) suggest, following the "translational turn" in comparative literature, novel intersections between translation studies and comparative literature have paved the way for further negotiations between these two subjects in a promising way. The aim of this article is to discuss the changing roles of translation and comparative studies of (translated) literature to reconsider the supposedly close relationship between the two adjacent fields in the Turkish context. We agree with Gürsel Aytaç that the intersection between translation and comparative literature occurs in literary translation. Literary translations are interventions of source texts into the receiving polysystem, meaningfully affecting the host culture and its literary system. Therefore, we argue that literary translations as rewritings should serve more as an object of investigation in the field of translation studies as well as comparative literature. We also argue that unorthodox approaches in comparative studies of translated literature can make these disciplines come together in more fruitful ways. The present study therefore encourages bordercrossings in comparative literature and translation studies to open a space for new-fangled approaches in comparative studies of translated literature.

No abstract