Translating Miss Julie into Turkish

An interview with Ertuğ Altınay

INTERVISTE
24 Febbraio 2025

Ertuğ Altınay is Associate Professor of Performing Arts and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics at the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage at the University of Milan. He serves as the principal investigator of three research projects: Staging National Abjection: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas (European Research Council Starting Grant); Negotiating Abjection: Performance and Politics Among Turkey’s Diasporas in Lombardy (ERC Attractiveness Grant, Cariplo Foundation); and Archives of Abjection: Minoritarian Cultural Production in Turkey and Its Diasporas (Next Generation EU Program and the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research).

In 2012, Altınay published a Turkish translation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (Matmazel Julie, Agora Kitaplığı). We met with him for an interview on Strindberg’s classic play, with a focus on his translation and our own theatrical production.

Could you please give our readers a little bit of context on what Strindberg represents in Turkish theatrical culture? What was his reputation while you were working on your translation?

I would say Miss Julie was already considered a modern classic back then and the time was right to translate it again. European-style theatre began to gain popularity in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century as part of the broader modernisation and Europeanisation efforts. In order to protect the borders of the Empire and to prevent ethnic conflicts, they implemented a series of social and political reforms and that created a new kind of intellectual, especially in Istanbul. And these people were interested in European art as well, so that’s how theatre began to gain popularity, initially with the work of non-Muslims. Theatre activities gradually began to gain prominence and professional theatres were established. After the inception of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, these efforts became more institutionalised. The government invested in public theatres, and they were staging both classical and modern works. I’m sure there have always been Strindberg fans in Turkey, but he’s neither a constant staple nor unknown. Halfway, I would say.

In what language were these modern classics staged?

Primarily Turkish. There have also been many school productions at the American and European high schools as well as minority schools. An interesting phenomenon is that the established title for Miss Julie in Turkish is Matmazel Julie because the early translations were done primarily from French.

Did you work on the original text or on an English or French translation?

I worked on an English translation in collaboration with a copy editor who spoke Swedish, Selin Uludoğan. That’s an interesting story because she’s an actress too and she learned the language during Erasmus. She had just done an undergraduate exchange and with those language skills she was able to support me as a copy editor and we were actually able to correct some issues with the draft and be even more accurate.

Did you have the necessity to include any cultural adaptation to the text?

Very basic, like idioms and things like that, but I wouldn’t even call them cultural adaptation necessarily. I definitely avoided word for word translation, so I would classify idioms as a strategy for that, but in terms of actual cultural adaptation, no.

And what about the formal language? What’s interesting in Miss Julie, or at least based on the translations that I read, is the turning point within the play where characters go from formal language to a more informal one. This of course has a symbolic meaning. Does this happen in your translation as well?

Turkish is like German and maybe even Italian in this respect, so we do have this kind of differences: there’s a second person plural that’s also the formal second person singular.

Your translation was actually staged as a theatrical production. Was it the original idea to have it staged or did the stage production come after the translation? What came first?

The translation was made for the production, which was Turkey’s official event for the Strindberg year in 2012, the centennial anniversary of his death. The production was sponsored by the Swedish Embassy.

Who was the director involved? Are there any particular aspects of the production that you would like to share?

The director was Jale Karabekir, a feminist dramaturg and director. She was the artistic director of Tiyatro Boyalı Kuş (Theatre Painted Bird), the most established feminist theatre company in Turkey. One of the actors was Yeşim Koçak, who works at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipal City Theatre. She’s one of their stars, so it was quite an impressive cast in general. There was also another award-winning actor, Asiye Dinçsoy, who played Kristin. I actually collaborated with them in terms of dramaturgy. What I ultimately saw in the play was something similar to what Diana Taylor calls scenarios, the portable scripts that define everyday life. Another thing that was going on was shadow dancing, both an allusion to the tradition of shadow theatre, but also about the borders between fiction and reality.

That’s very intriguing because to me one of the most fascinating aspects of Miss Julie is that despite the preface written by Strindberg, where he states that the play can be considered an example of Naturalistic theatre, it leans more towards a Symbolist kind of theatre. It’s in a liminal space, and the fact that you added such elements as shadow dancing and shadow puppets makes sense to me with this contradiction that’s in the text itself.

This play is definitely heavily symbolic on several levels! The director tried to establish the passages and tensions between fiction and reality by visually using shadow theater motifs and blackouts, which can be described as cinematographic transitions. In some key parts of the play, especially the spatial and temporal shifts were supported in this way, and she preferred to use minimalist forms of music and movement in those scenes.

So what about the social and sex war between the two protagonists? It’s interesting that you mentioned that the director was a feminist. Do you think that Miss Julie shall be considered a misogynistic text or not? There’s still quite a debate around it…

It definitely raises questions. I would say when it comes to a text that is actually written for the stage, it’s more about the production than what the text inherently is sometimes.

Miss Julie is considered a misogynist text in theatre literature. As a translator, I was loyal to the original text, and the text was performed in the same way, but with a feminist approach. In the production of this play, which takes place on a midsummer night when the Count, the embodiment of power, is not at home and the everyday life routines are forgotten for just one night, the director interpreted it as a fictive scenario that Julie and Jean try out. The fiction becomes reality only after the Count comes home.

In this contemporary feminist interpretation, Jale Karabekir did not change any of the lines except some omissions aiming to shorten the text, but simply set it up as a play between Julie and Jean, a kind of play-within-a-play. Kristin, of course, was acting as a motif in this play-within-a-play, constantly denying this scenario and calling them to reality by remaining outside of it. With the announcement of the Count’s arrival in the finale, it was reinforced that this fiction, the play-within-the-play, the conflict between class and gender, was irresolvable.

Was your translation staged only once during this occasion, or was it staged several other times?

It was a seasonal production, so it was staged regularly. I don’t know about Italy, but in Turkey plays usually run longer than in most other international contexts. It was on stage weekly, for probably longer than a year. Within the theatre season, the actor, Jean was later replaced, and the replacement was a dancer. That was interesting. And then another actress used it for her graduation project and also staged it a few times professionally as well. Several other student productions have occurred since then, so it kind of became the usually preferred translation, especially for student productions. I think it’s still the preferred one, and I’ve heard from some acting professors that it works better for staging than previous translations.

Was your professional background that made your translation different compared to other ones? Perhaps they were perceived as more literary or meant to be read rather than performed?

Not exactly, because the previous translations were also by theatre scholars. The thing is that Turkish is a very dynamic language. We have had several language and writing reforms. I myself cannot read anything written before the 1930s! Until 1928, a form of the Perso-Arabic script was the standard script. After a modified version of the Latin script was officially adopted and a language reform was implemented, Turkish kept changing more rapidly than many other languages. I think it is easy for some translations to become more dated because of this. But surely, as a habit of mine as a translator, I always kept asking myself: is this something I would say?

What were your first thoughts about our stage production of Julie? Did you enjoy the camera on stage?

I think texts like Miss Julie are easily available and we should be able to experiment with them. Your production was very interesting. I’m a very sartorially oriented person as well, so I really liked the multiplication of Julie’s shoes and the diversification of them as opposed to the Count’s boots. I found that even more interesting than the use of the camera! I really appreciated how you multiplied and transformed the shoes because it created an excess of symbols, which in a sense deconstructs the symbolism as well. The character of the cook Kristin was not in your adaptation, but other signs of class were still in place. It was especially striking in a city like Milan, so focused on shoes and handbags! That’s social class. But the intermedia aspect was quite impressive too, especially within that kind of space. It wasn’t exactly a black box or the kind of empty white gallery where you normally see these kinds of performances. So taking a space like Teatro Franco Parenti and transforming it through a device was quite remarkable.