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Thursday, October 12, 2006

Orhan Pamuk wins the Nobel

You've probably already seen it, but Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name is Red and Snow, has won the Nobel Prize for Liturerature (official announcement). As something of a Turkophile*—albeit one who's stuck half-way through Red—that's great news.

I think this means three things:
  • The much-shortlisted Yaşar Kemal will die without a Nobel. He's 83 and they're not going to give it to two Turks in a short span of years.
  • Pamuk is now effectively immune from prosecution for "insulting Turkishness." Much the same happened to Mahfouz, from being accused of apostasy for Children of Gebelawi and banned in much of the Arab world for supporting peace with Isreal, to being something of a national treasure, put to rest with a state funeral.
  • tr.LibraryThing.com needs to pick up! At least nine languages are usable and even Welsh is 40% translated, but Turkish is languishing in the single-digits. Why not celebrate Pamuk's Nobel by entering all your Turkish books and doing a little translating of the site? LibraryThing even has a Turkish library on tap!
*Lived in Bodrum and Alanya for about a year total. Speak bad kitchen-Turkish. Note, a serious Hellenophile as well. Just take a look at my books! I HATE that I have to say this, but, from experience, I do.

11 Comments:

Blogger oli said...

Thanks for Your comment, I appreciate that a lot.
"Really, this idea--that "visitors" and "visits" are slippery--is not something anyone in the business would dispute." I agree totally.
I doubt even the standards of Alexa.
However, there must be something, what You can clinge to. And it might be fine, if only the dimension of the numbers is correct (like the potence of 10).

I was not sure , if You are a cool programmer ("who said, that I am a cool programmer"), Tim, but it was naturally me, who thought that. And; having kids IS cool.
BTW, old-fashioned Perl is COOLER than Lisp or Ruby; but You HAVE to love Unix to be cool.

O.k. Don´t think about setting up tr.librarything anymore since You have stated to be a Hellenophile.
Bir sene Alanyada ne yaptin?
Tatil bir sene gecmedin; turism isiyordun mu?
...
Gia sou, philos mou!

10/12/2006 3:02 PM  
Blogger oli said...

corr: Linux is as cool as Unix, if not cooler.
Forgive me posting this here.

Corr2: I have overread Your statement of being a Turkophile as well;
Protes, evharisto.
Salve dive Iane!
(Ianus biceps)

10/12/2006 3:16 PM  
Blogger LibraryThing said...

You got your chocolate in my peanut-butter. (The above goes with the previous blog post.)

Re: Alexa. Oh, Alexa's numbers are TERRIBLE. You can't really translate them into visitor or hit numbers, but even on relative terms they've gotten LibraryThing wrong over and over again. They do, however, tend to get it reasonably right over a long period of time. And they're the best you can get for free. Even paid, MediaMetrics numbers on LibraryThing seem less precise than Alexa.

Oh, Perl is cool. No question. I was a Perl hacker before I apostasized to PHP.

I was an student in Alanya, and did archaeology in Bodrum. I always confuse "vacation" and "dessert." Clearly you were not there for dessert, although there's a pastry shop I remember quite fondly...

10/12/2006 3:30 PM  
Anonymous thebiblioholic said...

Cool. Are you reading My Name is Red in English or Turkish? I did both, and have decided to read the rest of his works in Turkish. I ordered a couple from http://www.tulumba.com today, including Yeni Hayat (The New Life), a story about a book that changed one man's life.

10/12/2006 6:17 PM  
Anonymous Woodrow Jarvis "asim" Hill said...

MY NAME IS RED is an amazing work -- I picked it up for it's references into 16th Century Istanbul life, and found his prose powerful, even in translation. Learning Turkish is on my short list of things to do, and I hope, in between research, I can truly savor Pamuk in his native language, finally.

And my day job is writing in Perl, but it's all about the tool that's best for you, and the job at hand.

10/12/2006 6:19 PM  
Blogger oli said...

Took me 10 mins to figure out the meaning of "You got your chocolate in my peanut-butter" (1970es, Reese’s Peanut Butter).
(I AM from here (sic!), at least an adjacent area. Somehow.)

Same same, I mean, likewise (reg. the slogan).

If this comments are interfering in You biz here, I can delete them, since this is no chatroom here.
punditoliver a t yahoo.gr
and no fear of spam

I do not know too much about domains, SEO and the like. But I do want to learn that stuff. Thanks for Your hints.

tatli means tasteful (tat-li, with taste)
tatil stems from arabic

kale nyxta!

10/12/2006 6:26 PM  
Blogger oli said...

Hi Woodrow Jarvis "asim" Hill said!
You have an awesome day job. I would also like to write perl. day and night. Your blog is wordpress (PHP).
How did You manage Your ID ("Woodrow...") to link to Your blog instead of that bloody blogger.com-profile?
PLZ let me know!

Is Yasar Kemal not the author of Bizim Köy; the revolutionary book about the countryside in easy Turkish? Suited to learn Turkish?

10/12/2006 6:33 PM  
Blogger RJO said...

Would it inspire people to translate if there was a link on each language page showing all the books in that language that have already been cataloged? (Maybe there is such a link and I just can't read it.)

I have only one Turkish book (actually bilingual).

10/12/2006 9:47 PM  
Blogger gabriel said...

Well, there aren't many turkophiles who are also helenophiles. I'd imagine it's easier to add the helenophile to the turkophile than vice versa.

10/13/2006 4:34 PM  
Blogger language said...

Would it inspire people to translate if there was a link on each language page showing all the books in that language that have already been cataloged?

I enthusiastically support this notion.

(I too am both a Turkophile and a Hellenophile. Glad there's another!)

10/13/2006 6:24 PM  
Blogger Levent Mollamustafaoglu said...

My blog entry about Orhan Pamuk is at

http://leventskaleidoscope.blogspot.com/2006/03/orhan-pamuk-post-modern-turkish-author_03.html

4/26/2008 5:22 PM  

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