Textual Practice ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20 ‘The clamour of Babel, in all the tongues of the Levant’: multivernacular and multiscriptal Constantinople around 1900 as a literary world Helena Bodin To cite this article: Helena Bodin (2020): ‘The clamour of Babel, in all the tongues of the Levant’: multivernacular and multiscriptal Constantinople around 1900 as a literary world, Textual Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1749382 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2020.1749382 © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 07 Apr 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtpr20 TEXTUAL PRACTICE https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2020.1749382 ARTICLES ‘The clamour of Babel, in all the tongues of the Levant’: multivernacular and multiscriptal Constantinople around 1900 as a literary world Helena Bodin Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden ABSTRACT With a focus on the crafting of Constantinople as a literary world, this article considers how the city’s particularly rich and composite soundscape, linguascape and scriptworld around 1900 contributes to a vernacular poetics. Such a poetics, I suggest, could be described in terms of a heterolingual and multivernacular foregrounding of linguistic difference and asymmetry. Issues relating to the materiality of language and linguistic diversity, including the role of scripts, are explored in a selection of ten Western European travelogues and narratives set in Constantinople during the last period of the Ottoman era (1876–1922) and written in Italian (De Amicis), French (Loti), Danish (Jerichau-Baumann), Norwegian (Skram), and Swedish (Lindberg-Dovlette and Beyel). Proceeding from the soundscape via the linguascape to the scriptworld of the city, it is demonstrated how these ‘-scapes’ and worlds are established, rendered, thematised, transcribed, and inscribed as heterolingual, multivernacular and multiscriptal in Constantinople as a literary world. Different textual and paratextual strategies are identified and analysed with regard to their auditory, visual and material features. However, as a part of monoscriptal Western European literature using Roman script, this literary world becomes cosmopolitanised. In this case the vernacular poetics did not embrace the many scripts of Constantinople. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 26 June 2019; Accepted 24 March 2020 KEYWORDS Constantinople; heterolingualism; literary world; multiscriptalism; vernacular poetics By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, was a cosmopolitan metropolis, indeed a cosmopolis – a multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual city with a diversity of vernacular languages which contributed to its soundscape and formed its linguascape.1 About one million inhabitants, among them Turks, Greeks, and Armenians, shared their streets, waterways and shops with transiting Western travellers and tourists, as well as with resident Westerners. The visual appearance of the city’s typographic CONTACT Helena Bodin helena.bodin@littvet.su.se © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 H. BODIN landscape and scriptworld was by this time still characterised by a variety of scripts.2 Its streets, porches, window displays, and bazaars, along with its circulating local newspapers, visiting cards, and receipts, were distinguished by the parallel use of Arabo-Persian (for Ottoman Turkish), Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek and Roman scripts. For centuries, Constantinople had functioned as a cosmopolitan hub of importance for trading and travelling, warfare and international politics, economy and culture, and its role was especially crucial in the time leading up to the Balkan Wars and the First World War in the 1910s and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in the 1920s. Thus around 1900, Constantinople was situated at the heart of an exchange between cosmopolitan and vernacular practices, insofar as these notions are understood as relational and practice-oriented rather than ideas or declarations.3 Against this background, and with a focus on the crafting of Constantinople as a literary world, my intention is to consider how the city’s particularly rich and composite soundscape, linguascape and scriptworld around 1900 contributes to a vernacular poetics. I shall do so by exploring issues relating both to the materiality of language and to linguistic difference and diversity, including the role of scripts, in a selection of ten Western European travelogues and narratives (novels, short stories, and collections of published letters and diary entries). They are all set in Constantinople during the last period of the Ottoman era, from the beginning of the reign of Abdul Hamid II in 1876 until the new Turkish state was proclaimed in 1922. Two of the selected works are travelogues: one in Italian by Edmondo De Amicis, Costantinopoli (1877), and one in Danish by Elisabeth JerichauBaumann, Brogede rejsebilleder (1881; Colourful travel pictures).4 Pierre Loti is represented by ‘Constantinople en 1890’ (a short guide to Constantinople of 1890) and two novels, Aziyadé (1879) and its sequel Les désenchantées (1906; Disenchanted), all of them in French.5 Also included in the selection is a short novel in Norwegian, Fru Inés (1891), by Amalie Skram.6 Elsa Lindberg-Dovlette’s Swedish collection of short stories, Kvinnor från minareternas stad (1908; Women from the City of Minarets), and her two novels, Främling (1924; Stranger) and Bakom stängda haremsdörrar (1931; Behind the Closed Doors of the Harem), are set in the reign of Abdul Hamid II in the early twentieth century. Likewise, the collection in Swedish by the Swiss-born and Frenchspeaking Stephanie Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar från Broussa och Konstantinopel (1919; Letters and Diary Entries from Broussa and Constantinople), spans the time of her life in Constantinople between 1912 and 1916.7 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, literature from and about Constantinople was potentially a world literature: it emanated from or described one of the world’s centres; it was composed in – and translated into – various languages, and it circulated widely.8 So were also the majority of the selected ten texts, and those of De Amicis and Loti were especially influential. These literary writings, however, contribute not only to world literature TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3 but also to the continuous worlding going on in the works. In On Literary Worlds (2012), Eric Hayot posits the worldedness of a literary work as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon, as the relation the work establishes ‘betweeen the world inside and the world outside the work’.9 With Hayot, one could say, that within world literature, these Western European texts situate Constantinople as a literary world. As features of its aesthetic worldedness, this literary world has particular relations to the external, contextual world as immersed in time, and distinctive qualities of worldliness.10 Consequently, these works do not simply mirror or represent Constantinople. Instead, they model it as a literary world which does not quite coincide with the actual site of the city. Constantinople is described as not one but as many cities, which spread out and overflow Europe as well as Asia without any clear limitations.11 Its various parts are portrayed as located in different countries (such as France, Italy, England, and Russia), or as other well known port cities (such as Marseille or Trabzon),12 or they are characterised by adherents of different religions.13 Constantinople is described as both manifold and single in a way that motivates this exploration of how the cosmopolitan city is crafted as a literary world by means of a vernacular poetics.14 While Constantinople in the latter half of the nineteenth century has often been described, due to its heterogeneity, as an exemplary cosmopolitan location, the nature of this cosmopolitanism calls for further examination. As the Turkish historian Edhem Eldem has proposed, ‘Levantine cosmopolitanism’ would be the preferred specification.15 The cosmopolitanism of Constantinople depended on the shift from Ottoman power to European imperialism during the late nineteenth century and ‘seems to have developed almost as a byproduct of Westernization’.16 Eldem notes the absence of a common culture and emphasises the composite character of Levantine cosmopolitanism, consisting of pragmatically imported Western cultural models that combined Parisian fashion, Italian opera, German architecture and British interior design. In this respect, the city’s cosmopolitanism was more a geographically and culturally contextualised social praxis than it was an ideology.17 From the point of view of Western Europeans, Constantinople could be regarded as one of the western parts of the shrinking Ottoman Empire, but, simultaneously, it was perceived to be ‘Oriental’, as a kind of Oriental enclave in Europe.18 By this time, before the Turkish language reform in 1928, Ottoman Turkish was still written in the Arabo-Persian script and had not yet been succeeded by Modern Turkish, which used Roman letters.19 Around 1900, the linguistic situation of Constantinople had undergone several quite recent changes: Italian had been succeeded by French as the dominant language in the European parts of the city, and the Italianate lingua franca of the Eastern (Levantine) Mediterranean (mixing Italian, Catalan, Greek, Arabic and Turkish) had likewise lost some ground.20 Greek and Armenian were also major languages, besides French and, of course, Turkish. 4 H. BODIN Generally, Constantinople may rightly be characterised as multilingual, and several of its languages (for example English, French, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish) would in other contexts naturally be regarded as cosmopolitan, in the sense of ‘large scale lingua francas’, since they are imperial and sometimes also colonial languages.21 But – as will be demonstrated – when Constantinople around 1900 is crafted as a literary world, communication in the selected works is not based on formalised translations between discrete national languages, hierarchically organised. On the contrary, the linguascape of Constantinople is characterised by juxtaposition and heterogeneity, by multilingual and heteroglossic premises, and by linguistic diversity and flexibility. Heuristically, the languages of Constantinople, portrayed in this way, could therefore be considered as vernaculars, since they are used for sharing empirical observations and experiences of a worldliness shaped by local and particular understandings of reality from different ethnic and religious perspectives, as distinct from what is nationally fixed.22 My proposal is therefore that the linguascape of Constantinople at this time, when crafted as a literary world, could more precisely be described as heterolingual and multivernacular. These notions focus on linguistic difference and asymmetry,23 not as barriers but as preconditions for communication and mediation in contexts such as the Constantinopolitan, where both partial fluency in several languages and interpreting skills are necessary and appreciated.24 The texts considered here portray Constantinople through its diversity of spoken and written languages. They thereby actively make use of languages and linguistic difference by highlighting the tension between language as representational means and represented object.25 In order to craft the soundscape, linguascape, and typographic landscape or scriptworld of Constantinople as a literary world, these works depend on the materiality of language, that is, of scripts, writing and print. Due to their multimodal (auditive, visual, and material) qualities, alphabetic scripts may challenge presupposed views on how literary worlds are created as immanent features of literature, and on the tension between the world inside and the world outside the work. A word conveyed in an alien script, or a misheard word spelled according to another language’s phonetic norms and alphabet, may be exactly the point which materially connects a literary world with the world it aims to represent.26 How, then, is Constantinople crafted as a literary world in these texts, especially as regards its many languages and scripts? What kinds of encounters appear between the city’s various vernacular languages, one of which is the matrix language of the narrative (that is, its dominating, framing language)?27 To what extent and by what means is the diversity of languages and scripts of Constantinople mediated by Western literary works employing the Roman alphabet? How may the material features of scripts contribute to TEXTUAL PRACTICE 5 the inscription of worldliness in world literature, exemplified by these narratives about Constantinople? These issues will be explored in several steps, proceeding from the soundscape via the linguascape to the scriptworld of Constantinople, to demonstrate how these ‘-scapes’ and worlds are established, rendered, thematised, transcribed, and inscribed as heterolingual and multivernacular. Establishing the heterolingual soundscape When the diversity of vernacular languages in Constantinople is thematised, it mainly concerns their sounds, or auditory aspects. Noise, as in the confusion of tongues in Babel, is often foregrounded. The sounds of human communication are not always associated with a specific language, but conversations, shouts, screams, and songs ‘in all the tongues of the Levant’, are depicted; as Loti puts it: ‘La mer est à ses pieds […], et d’où monte une clamour de Babel, en toutes les langues du Levant’. (‘The sea is at its feet; […] and from this sea rises the clamor of Babel, in all the tongues of the Levant’.)28 A typical situation – quite a topos in travelogues and narratives from Constantinople – features a traveller disembarking the steamer at one of the quays who is overwhelmed by the noise emanating from the many languages in which he or she is welcomed or offered services. Similar situations are also found in the bazaars or street markets, and especially on the Galata Bridge. Jerichau-Baumann describes in her Danish travelogue an enormous hubbub at the quay, where she hears people quarrelling in Turkish, Greek, Armenian and other languages. Wittily, she compares the situation with a fight, where not only hands, shoulders, and oars, but also languages and arguments are used as weapons.29 De Amicis similarly describes in Italian the sounds of voices in various languages from the Galata Bridge: Sopra il mormorio sordo, che esce da questa moltitudine, si sentono gli strilli acuti dei ragazzi greci, carichi di giornali d’ogni lingua; le grida stentoree dei facchini, le risa sgangherate delle donne turche, le voci infantili degli eunuchi, i trilli in falsetto dei ciechi che cantano versetti del Corano […]. Over the hollow murmur that comes from this multitude you can hear the shrill cries of the Greek boys selling newspapers printed in every language; the stentorian shouts of the porters, the boisterous laughs of Turkish women, the squeaking voices of eunuchs, the falsetto trill of blind men chanting verses of the Koran […].30 Writing in Swedish, Lindberg-Dovlette draws attention to the many languages heard in Galata: French, Greek, German, English, Armenian, Russian, and Genoese.31 Beyel also describes in Swedish the city’s diverse languages; even more important, however, is her insistence that it is possible both to discriminate between and make sense of the various linguistic sounds without 6 H. BODIN understanding exactly what people are saying. She finds ‘alla dessa skrik, läten och melodier, allt detta brokiga väsen’ (‘all these screams, sounds and melodies, all this motley noise’) as a part of the beauty of the city. Without this noise, Beyel thinks, one would be suffocated by Constantinople’s ugliness.32 As several of these examples show, the heterolingual situation may, in and of itself, be meaningful to the constitution of Constantinople as a literary world, irrespective of any given language’s more exact verbal significance. On the other hand, since languages that the travellers and narrators do not understand are recognised only as sounds or noise, literary characters functioning as interpreters are prominent in these texts whenever there is need for more precise interlingual communication. Besides interpreters proper (who in the Turkish context are called dragomans), they may be various kinds of brokers or intermediaries – guides, middlemen in the bazaars, English, French, or German governesses in the harems, or multilingual servants.33 In his portrayal of the Great Bazaar, De Amicis ironically describes the multilingual skills of ‘the middlemen, and all their hangers-on’ who assist the merchants: Se sapete il greco, parlano turco; se sapete il turco, parlano armeno; se sapete l’armeno, parlano spagnuolo; ma in qualche modo s’intendono e ve l’accoccano. If you know Greek, they speak Turkish; if you can follow Turkish, they speak Armenian; if you understand Armenian, they’ll talk in Spanish; in one way or another they’ll make sure they understand each other while you don’t have a clue what they’re saying.34 When no interpreter is at hand, problems may arise, as Jerichau-Baumann vividly recounts. She and her company intended to visit Hagia Sophia (at that time a mosque), but the caïque oarsmen brought them instead to the fish market, although they tried to explain in English and other languages where they wanted to go. One of the travellers shouted nothing but ‘Aya Sofia’ over and over again, and the author herself had ‘as her war cry’: ‘Parlez-vous français?’. The Danish group was just about to despair of ever seeing the mosque, when, at last, a tailor who knew Italian rescued them.35 As this episode demonstrates, there is a certain asymmetry between the involved languages which captures the heterolingual milieu of Constantinople: when the travellers ask for assistance in English and French, help arrives in Italian. Beyel’s letters and diary entries from Constantinople illustrate a similar phenomenon. Surprisingly, she introduces a man who is a Turkish citizen and an Orthodox Jew as a member of the Swedish community in Constantinople. His inclusion among the Swedes and his Swedish-sounding name, Albert, is due to his role as their special guide.36 That all Western travellers TEXTUAL PRACTICE 7 and visitors depend on guides and interpreters undermines not only presupposed linguistic hierarchies but also the usual hegemonic hierarchy between Western travellers and Eastern merchants, or between Western masters and Eastern servants. As these examples have demonstrated, the heterolingual soundscape of the city and its many asymmetrical communicative situations, involving interpreters, middlemen, and guides, form the base for the crafting of Constantinople as a literary world. Rendering the multivernacular linguascape In his influential study on the mimetic representation of polylingual reality, Meir Sternberg has listed several categories that describe the overall phenomenon of heterolingual mimesis through a set of well-tried literary devices for representing ‘the reality of polylingual discourse through a communicative medium which is normally unilingual’.37 His description is relevant to our materials about Constantinople, where languages (in the plural) certainly are the narrated and described object and not only a means of representation. Next, I will draw attention to a few literary devices that are deployed in these works. Sternberg terms them explicit attribution, impressions of heterolingualism, and selective reproduction. The multivernacular linguascape of Constantinople, modelled as a literary world, is to a large extent rendered by the device which Sternberg calls explicit attribution – that is, a direct statement concerning the language in which the reported speech is made.38 As demonstrated above, readers are in such cases explicitly told in what language a dialogue is pursued, although the phrase is conveyed in the language shared by the author and the intended reader. Thus Loti renders in French how an old, conservative Turkish woman, enraged, speaks Turkish to the French governess: ‘– Allez-vous-en! lui dit l’aïeule, dans sa langue turque, en frémissant de haine.’ (‘Go!’ said the old woman in Turkish, quivering with hatred.’).39 Explicit attribution is a frequently employed device in the Norwegian short novel by Skram as well. The eponymous Fru (Mrs) Inés is introduced not by her nationality or ethnicity but by her linguistic competencies, as she is being addressed in different languages by the men surrounding her. She proves to be a veritable polyglot: ‘Damen talte flytende fransk, men slo ofte om i italiensk, spansk og engelsk, ja endog i gresk. Nu og da henvendte hun plutselig noen svenske ord til en meget ung herre’ (‘The woman spoke fluent French, but veered often into Italian, Spanish, English, and even Greek. Now and then she would suddenly address a few words of Swedish to a very young man’).40 Furthermore, it is often stated explicitly that dialogues are heterolingual, as when an Italian speaks French, ‘“Madame, vil De fornærme mig,” sa italieneren lavt på pilsnart fransk’ (‘“Madame, you wish to insult me,” the 8 H. BODIN Italian said softly in rapid-fire French’), or when Inés speaks Greek, ‘“De kan vente,” sa Inés på gresk til kusken’ (‘“You can wait,” Inés told the driver in Greek’).41 In one dialogue, likewise reported in Norwegian, between Inés and the above mentioned ‘very young’ Swede Arthur Flemming, they switch between English and Swedish while discussing their linguistic skills. When Inés asks something in English, Flemming answers ‘på så forkjæert engelsk’ (‘in such wretched English’) that Inés laughs and advises him to speak Swedish: ‘Jeg forstår hvert ord De sier, skjønt jeg ikke kan uttrykke mig flytende på det sproget.’ (‘I understand every word you say, although I can’t express myself fluently in that language.’) Her mediocre Swedish mirrors his weak English. Inés concludes that knowledge of French is what really matters: ‘Når De bare kan fransk – det er hovedsproget i Konstantinopel, mellem oss siviliserte da.’ (‘As long as you know French – that’s the main language in Constantinople among civilized people like us.’)42 However, her statement is contradicted by her extensive multilingual practices. Flemming’s linguistic difficulties acquire yet deeper significance later on in the story, as Inés in one of her letters writes to him about his inability to express what he feels: ‘Men nu merker jeg jo, at du bare har en underlig måte å uttrykke dig på, eller rettere, at du ikke kan uttrykke hvad du føler. Og derfor vil jeg elske dig allikevel.’ (‘I can see that you have a strange way of expressing yourself, or more accurately, that you can’t express what you feel. So I will love you in spite of that.’)43 All in all, Skram’s short novel is a striking example of the use of explicit attribution as a means to portray Constantinople as a heterolingual literary world. The dialogue between Fru Inés and young Flemming is, thus, of significance to the narrative as a whole, because the problem it stages and addresses – their asymmetrical linguistic skills – parallels their unequal love story, which turns out to have deadly consequences for both of them. One more such example, in which the multivernacular linguascape of Constantinople and its many heterolingual situations appear to be a precondition to the narrative as a whole, is Loti’s Les Désenchantées, where it is essential that the three Turkish women whom the fictive writer André Lhéry encounters know French – speaking as well as writing. Without knowledge of French, the three ladies would not have been able to communicate with and trap Lhéry, who only remembers a little Turkish from his earlier visit. When their first encounter is narrated, the reader is only informed about the sound of the voice of one of the women: ‘– Monsieur, André Lhéry, n’est-ce pas? – demanda l’une qui avait la voix infiniment douce, timide, fraîche […].’ (‘“Monsieur André Lhéry, are you not?” asked one of them, whose voice was wonderfully sweet, youthful, and shy […].’)44 The Turkish ladies are hidden behind at least two veils, and Lhéry’s first response is only a bow. It takes several lines before we learn, by means of explicit attribution, that the TEXTUAL PRACTICE 9 conversation is actually going on in French: ‘Leur aisance à s’exprimer en français surprenait André Lhéry’. (‘The ease with which they expressed themselves in French surprised André Lhéry’.)45 Sternberg also mentions how a literary text can give impressions of heterolingualism by means of conceptual reflections ‘at the crossroads of language and reality’.46 Such impressions may be produced through ‘culturally typical (or typified) topics’, ‘fields of allusion, or paralinguistic features like gesticulation’.47 The thematisation of multilingualism is one such topic that is culturally typical for Constantinople crafted as a literary world. In Skram’s short novel, for example, a Scandinavian woman living in Constantinople has had enough of all the praise Fru Inés receives: ‘De skal ikke la Dem narre av, at hun taler noen sprog […]. Det er vi nødt til her. Min eldste datter kan alt uttrykke sig på syv, skjønt hun bare er 10 år gammel.’ (‘You shouldn’t be taken in by all the languages she speaks […]. We have to do that here. My eldest daughter can already express herself in seven, and she’s only ten years old.’)48 Another example of how impressions of heterolingualism are produced is Beyel’s allusion to Babel, i.e. the traditional narrative of the Tower of Babel, which several religions use to explain the origin of different languages. Beyel presents Constantinople as a place where people from all over the world speak their own language, thus turning ‘det gamla Byzanz till ett modernt Babel’ (‘the old Byzantium into a modern Babel’). She does not, however, observe the confusion of tongues that once bedevilled Babel, since everyone in Constantinople knows at least two languages, and, she adds, there is yet one more option: to speak ‘på ett så tydligt sätt med händer och armar, ögon och minspel’ (‘clearly by means of hands and arms, eyes and facial expressions’).49 Thus Beyel makes special mention of the paralinguistic feature of gesturing as one of the city’s many languages. Selective reproduction, or single-word cultural indication, is another productive device in these works.50 In such cases, ‘an intermittent quotation of the original heterolingual discourse’ functions according to metonymical principles such as pars-pro-toto or synecdoche, in relation to the other language as a whole.51 Examples are easy to find in passages describing the street markets in Constantinople, where cries from carriers, sellers, and coachmen are conveyed in – for example – Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, French, and English. When Beyel describes the street where she lives, Rue Journal in Pera, she assigns about four pages to such selective reproductions of single words in languages other than the Swedish matrix language of her letter.52 Her model was perhaps a similar passage in De Amicis’s well known Costantinopoli: A ogni passo ci suonava nell’orecchio un grido. Il facchino turco urlava: – Sacun ha! – (Largo!); il saccá armeno, portatore d’acqua: – Varme su! – l’acquaiolo 10 H. BODIN Greco: – Crio nero! – l’asinaio turco: – Burada! – il venditore di dolci: – Scerbet! – il venditore di giornali: – Neologos! – il carrozziere franco: Guarda! Guarda! Street cries sounded around us all the way: the Turkish porter shouted ‘Sakın ha!’, ‘Clear the way!’, the Armenian water-carrier, ‘Var mi su?’, the Greek water-seller, ‘Krio nero!’, the Turkish donkey boy, ‘Burada!’, the sweetmeatseller, ‘Sherbet!’, the newspaper vendor, ‘Neologos!’, the European coachman, ‘Watch out! Watch out!’53 Further examples of single inserted words indicating a heterolingual discourse may also include a minor Western language like Swedish, as when the Swedish husband of Fru Inés in Skram’s short novel in Norwegian curses in Swedish, ‘“Hvor skal du hen, for tusan!”’. (This is an effect which the English translation misses, even if it conveys the vernacular expletive: ‘“Where the hell are you going!”’.)54 Loti’s alter ego, André Lhéry, the protagonist narrator and (fictive) French author of Les désenchantées, provides an example of selective reproduction that is also significant to his perceived cultural identity and characterisation. Lhéry becomes increasingly Turkish as the story evolves and he gradually recalls phrases in Turkish, which makes him feel more and more like an inhabitant of Stamboul, the old Turkish district of Constantinople. After buying a Turkish fez and prayer beads, he thinks of himself even more as an ‘Oriental’, and when ordering a coach, he directs it to the Adrianople gate in Turkish: ‘Edirné kapoussouna guetur!’55 As is exemplified by Beyel’s and Skram’s narratives, selective reproduction is also employed to render various kinds of mixed language and linguistic shortcomings. Beyel tells admiringly about a Greek maid who knows six languages. However, when announcing the visit of a mutilated young peasant from the countryside, the maid mixes up a few of them: ‘Gnädige Frau, der joli garçon Eyub ist gekommen’.56 Similarly, Skram conveys a line in mispronounced, broken Swedish (perhaps more resembling Danish), articulated by a Turk, who is one of the many admirers of the protagonist Fru Inés. Overhearing her when she introduces herself as ‘fru Inés’ to a Swede, the Turk excitedly exclaims that he recognises the title ‘fru’ and that he knows how to speak Swedish: ‘Mai vite dale svenske.’ (‘I know speak Swedish.’)57 As these examples of heterolingual mimesis have shown – deploying devices of explicit attribution, impressions of heterolingualism, and selective reproduction (or single-word cultural indication) – Constantinople crafted as a literary world is multivernacular and inhabited by characters who speak, understand (or not) and listen to languages other than their native or national ones – and, in addition, they gesture. There are Turkish, Greek, Italian, and Armenian sellers, a cursing Swedish director, a French writer trying out his Turkish, a Greek servant mixing German, French and TEXTUAL PRACTICE 11 Turkish, a Turk who mispronounces a phrase in Swedish in a dialogue reported in Norwegian in which a polyglot Spanish woman is speaking Swedish with a Swede. This literary world is clearly heterolingual, and it includes the reporting (or matrix) language of the narrative – that is, the language which the author and the reader share – among its various vernacular languages. Thematising the multiscriptal scriptworld Not only languages and single words or phrases but also scripts are occasionally mentioned explicitly in these works, perhaps by a metaphorical description of their visual appearance or by their linguistic provenance. Thus Lindberg-Dovlette notes in one of her short stories how ‘Turkish script’, resembling seaweed, decorates the marble well in the Grand Bazaar. In the Book Bazaar ‘old Greek characters’ and ‘Oriental signs’ in illuminated books and on parchment, as well as the Arabic script of the Quran, are also described by several metaphors.58 In a similar way, describing the cemeteries of Constantinople, De Amicis draws attention to the Armenian cemetery with its large and flat sepulchral stones, ‘coperte d’iscrizioni nel carattere regolare ed elegante della lingua armena’ (‘covered with inscriptions in the regular and elegant Armenian script’).59 But there are cases in which the provenance of the script is not mentioned, as when Loti, who appears as the protagonist of the novel Aziyadé, mechanically, again and again, reads the text on his beloved Aziyadé’s gravestone.60 In this instance, the script is surely not Roman but rather the Arabo-Persian alphabet used in Ottoman Turkish. There are other examples from the same novel, however, where writing is described without any mention of the script in question, as when Aziyadé writes her name on the walls of her home and in her slippers, or when Loti has her name tatooed on his chest and engraved in a ring.61 Though the reader may perhaps infer that because of its ornamental qualities the script is most likely Arabo-Persian, it remains unclear how to visualise such scenes. Writing practices are also mentioned by Beyel, who tells about her efforts to learn to write Turkish, that is, in Arabo-Persian script.62 In Aziyadé, Loti draws attention to the problems of writing an address, presumably in Arabo-Persian script. Envelopes have to be prewritten with a particularly long and complicated address that takes up no fewer than eight lines.63 His English friend is advised not to write his adopted Turkish name (supposedly in Arabo-Persian script) but to use his real name: ‘J’habite, sous le nom de Arif-Effendi, rue Kourou-Tchechmeh, à Eyoub […]. Comme vous seriez en peine pour mettre mon adresse en turc, écrivez-moi sous mon nom véritable, par […] l’ambassade britannique.’ (‘I go by the name of Arif-Effendi […]. Don’t torture yourself 12 H. BODIN copying my address in Turkish, use my real name and send it by way of […] the British Embassy.)64 Sometimes the actual writing process is concealed but still forms the precondition for the narrative as a whole, as is the case in a few of Lindberg-Dovlette’s short stories. The first one in the collection, ‘Konstantinopel’ (‘Constantinople’) is presented as the notes of a deceased young Turkish woman. Nothing is said about the script, only about the scent of the small scattered leaflets, which were collected in an embroidered cloth with the fragrance of rose oil and jasmine.65 The last short story, entitled ‘Oskrifna bref’ (‘Unwritten letters’), presents the reader with letters which the protagonist, a desparing young woman in a harem in Constantinople, neither wrote nor sent to her mother, who is illiterate: ‘Hade hon [modern] kunnat tyda alla de fina, orientaliska tecken, då hade många små bref funnit väg till henne från Stambul.’ (‘Had she [the mother] only been able to decipher all of the delicate, Oriental signs, then many small letters would have found their way to her from Stamboul.’)66 The characterisation of the script infers that these letters, had they ever been written, would have been recorded in AraboPersian script. Thus when Constantinople is crafted as a literary world, not only is attention drawn to its soundscape and multivernacular linguascape, but its scriptworld is also thematised, although exactly what script is being used often remains obscure. Transcribing and audialising alien scripts in the main text We have seen that works composed in Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian render the many vernacular languages and thematise the scripts of Constantinople. In the case of languages such as Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Russian, which use scripts other than the Roman, this procedure also involves transcribing single words and phrases into Roman script – one should remember that this was before the Turkish language reform. One suggestive example is a mishearing by De Amicis as he renders the Russian children’s shout from the ship at their first sight of Stamboul: ‘Zavegorod! Zavegorod!’.67 As has been observed by editors and translators, the children were actually shouting Tsar’gorod, the old Russian name for Constantinople as the Imperial City.68 This incidental mishearing highlights the fact that most instances of heterolingual mimesis in these narratives (rendered by means of selective reproduction or single-word cultural indication) rely on the authors’ individual ways of apprehending and transcribing the alien words into Roman script according to the phonetic norms of each reporting language (that is, those which the author and the reader share). Since (in most cases) there has never been any original text to TEXTUAL PRACTICE 13 reproduce, but only auditory sensations and impressions of a sounding linguascape to record, in this context I prefer to speak of transcription rather than transliteration. Single words indicating Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultural habits and religious practices in languages using other scripts than the Roman – mainly Turkish – are frequently inserted in the narratives. These words name various kinds of food and dishes, clothing such as the many different veils for women, cultural phenomena such as baksheesh (tip), religious customs such as Ramadan and dates according to the Islamic calendar. Even if they are not conveyed in Arabo-Persian script, these words stand out graphically, since their alienness is marked by various visual, typographic means such as diacritics, italics, quotation marks, or asterisks, which often are followed by translations or explanations added in footnotes or parentheses. Foreign words left without explanatory translations are clarified later in the story as the plot continues. The warning for fire in Turkish, Yangın var!, is a recurring example. In Lindberg-Dovlette’s short story in Swedish, it is marked with an asterisk, ‘Janghen var!’, and translated in a footnote at the bottom of the page, ‘Elden är lös’ (‘Fire!’).69 In Beyel’s likewise Swedish diary entries and letters from Constantinople, it is rendered a little differently and explained through an equal sign: ‘“yangin vâ-a-ar!” = elden är lös!’.70 JerichauBaumann dedicates a whole chapter to this warning cry, which she conveys in yet another way, supplemented with Danish translations: ‘“Jankinvar” (Ildløs)’ and ‘“Jankinvar!” – “Der er Ild”’.71 She describes vividly the noise generated by the fire: a jumble of voices, the howling of dogs and screaming of guards, the curses of the firemen, the questions and cries from the crowd, against the background of a mighty sea of flames in the night. Beside the warning for fire, she also renders the Turkish word for firemen and declines it in the plural according to Danish grammar: ‘Tlumbagierne’.72 The intended Turkish word should be tulumbacı, that is, literally, those who bring the pumps. De Amicis’s travelogue in Italian also has a chapter with the heading ‘Ianghen var’. A Greek waiter tells what is happening, yelling: ‘– Ianghen var, per Dio! Non avete sentito il grido?’ (‘“Yangın var, for heaven’s sake! Haven’t you heard the shout?”’).73 The firemen are named in Turkish, and the expression is marked by italics and translated in a parenthesis: ‘– Tulumbadgi! – gridò uno dei guardiani del ponte. – (I pompieri!)’ (‘“Tulumbacı!” [“Firemen!”], cried one of the watchmen on the bridge.’)74 In Loti’s French novel Aziyadé, the warning for fire in Turkish is conveyed as ‘le terrible yangun vâr!’. Also the night watchmen (Tu. bekçiler) who cry the warning are named in Turkish with a French plural -s: ‘le cri des beckdjis, le cri des veilleurs de nuit’ (‘the cry of the ‘beckdjis’, the nightwatchmen, shouting their terrible alarm, ‘yangun vâr!’).75 They are likewise mentioned by Beyel, 14 H. BODIN although in a different spelling declined in the definite form according to Swedish grammar, and with a translation: ‘békdji’n, nattvakten’.76 When literary texts using heterolingual mimesis are translated, yet other problems occur.77 Although all of these works employ Roman script, phonetic and transcription norms vary between the different languages of publication: Italian, French, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Thus translations often imply a new spelling of the embedded alien words. In this way, Lhéry’s words in Turkish in Les Désenchantées are conveyed differently in the French source text and the English target text according to the phonetic norms of each language. As quoted above, in the French text, Lhéry says: ‘“Edirné kapoussouna guetur!” (Conduis-moi à la porte d’Andrinople)’, while the English translation conveys the phrase as ‘“Edirneh Kapoussouna ghetir” (“Drive to the Adrianople gate”)’.78 The Modern Turkish equivalent would be yet another: Edirne kapısına götür.79 From prefaces and afterwords, footnotes and added glossaries, it is clear that the embedded words in transcription offer a challenge to the translators, who make different choices and motivate them differently. These options range from altering De Amicis’s travelogue in Italian by modernising the embedded Turkish words according to the standards of modern Turkish spelling to the decision not to alter Skram’s rendering of Turkish in the English translation from 2014, but as a compensation, to add a glossary with explanations and an Anglicised spelling of these words.80 As has been demonstrated, the embedded, alien words are marked visually in conformity with Western graphic and typographic norms. The transcriptions of these words leave auditory impressions of the multivernacular sound- and linguascape of Constantinople, conveyed as material imprints within the frame of the Western national literatures. The embedded words produce a reality effect by suggesting that the authors must have been in Constantinople, since they have transcribed words and phrases they have themselves heard (or misheard) in the city’s various vernacular languages. Inscribing and visualising alien scripts in the paratexts While the many foreign and sometimes misheard or mispronounced words in the literary world of Constantinople recorded in script function as actual vestiges of the city’s soundscape and linguascape from the decades around 1900, the main texts of our narratives do not mediate the visual appearance of the city’s scriptworld mimetically, since its many scripts are conveyed by transcriptions into Roman letters. Alien scripts do occur in a few instances, but these are in the paratexts outside the main text, in the emblems and illustrations often found on the covers or title pages.81 The works by the Swedish writers serve as a few examples of this tendency. TEXTUAL PRACTICE 15 On the cover of Beyel’s collection of letters and diary entries from Broussa (Bursa) and Constantinople there is a small and simple, framed piece of Arabic calligraphy included in a larger drawing showing a typical Turkish room. The cover of her book from the previous year on her fourteen years in Turkey before moving to Constantinople shows the bismillah in Arabic calligraphy (‘In the name of God’).82 Likewise, Lindberg-Dovlette’s two novels on harems in Constantinople present alien scripts as parts of the covers and title pages. The first one displays some Arabo-Persian calligraphy on its title page. It does not evoke God’s name but reads instead yabancı, which is a translation of the novel’s Swedish title Främling (‘Stranger’) into Ottoman Turkish. The sequel is adorned with well-known verses by the Persian poets Omar Khayyam, Rumi, and Hafez in Persian calligraphy both in the cover image and in several lines at the top and bottom of the title page.83 If we had more biographical information about the authors, it would no doubt be worth considering what these pieces of calligraphy and the designs of the covers meant to themselves. In comparison to the many transcriptions within the main texts, the alien scripts of the paratexts acquire the role of inscriptions, and their material qualities are intensified. The dislocation of alien scripts from the main text to paratexts implies, however, that the highly stylised calligraphic means of writing in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian are prioritised, while the many scripts of Constantinople used in daily communication are neglected and remain invisible, both in the main texts and in the paratexts. This use of scripts in the paratexts is therefore far from vernacular, since it draws on calligraphied quotes from the Quran, according to Islamic custom, or the poetry of Muslim mystics. Western readers are obviously not expected to read or understand the alien Arabic or Arabo-Persian scripts literally, but only to experience them visually and materially as pieces of Orientalising art and as calligraphic inscriptions. Calligraphy definitely represents another kind of writing and reading than do the texts guided by a vernacular poetics. Conclusion: the inscription of worldliness in time We have seen that as crafted in Western narratives as a literary world, Constantinople around 1900 is characterised by the heterolingual and multivernacular features of its soundscape and linguascape. Written and published in Italian, French, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, these texts articulate the city’s cosmopolitan whole through its diverse vernacular expressions. These are conveyed by means of heterolingual mimesis, that is, by literary devices that turn out to be difficult to render in translation. The many unexpected linguistic encounters between the various vernacular languages of Constantinople – examples of which we have seen in Turkish, in flawed Swedish or 16 H. BODIN Russian, and in phrases in mixed languages – exist only within the matrix language of the narratives, where they present entangled problems for the translators. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that when foreign phrases and words are conveyed in Roman script by means of transcriptions (marked typographically and by translations or explanations), the auditory features of Constantinople’s linguascape are prioritised above the visual features of its scriptworld, which are dislocated from the main text to the paratext. In Constantinople as a literary world, scripts that are alien to Western readers are consigned to decorative functions, such as the use of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian calligraphy on title pages and covers. While reading the main text, readers are not invited to visualise the city’s diverse scriptworld, which becomes cosmopolitanised and homogenised by being transferred into a monoscriptal literary world conveyed in Roman script. There remains a certain tension, not to say a gap, between the multivernacular and multiscriptal Constantinople around 1900 and the cosmopolitan monoscriptalism of the city crafted as a literary world. The vernacular poetics did in this case not embrace the scripts. Yet, in their different multimodal – auditory, visual, and material – ways, both the main texts (with their many transcriptions) and the paratexts (with their Orientalising calligraphy), emphasise the material features of Constantinople’s scriptworld. Thus they contribute to the aesthetic inscription of worldliness. Worldliness, however, is dependent on and immersed in time. When Lindberg-Dovlette wrote her novels about life inside a harem in Constantinople, the new Turkish state was already a fact. By the late 1920s the city’s name had been changed to Istanbul, and its multivernacular scriptworld was rapidly changing due to the expulsion of Greeks and Armenians and to the Turkish language reform, in which the Arabo-Persian alphabet was replaced by Roman script. The once multivernacular and multiscriptal city became almost as monoscriptal as the Western narratives from Constantinople, and the worldliness of the renamed city, Istanbul, has ever since been inscribed in world literature in Roman letters. Nevertheless, the examined works and their paratexts show that their readers can still experience something of the material features of the bygone scriptworld of Constantinople. Notes 1. For soundscape (in literature), see Ph. Schweighauser, ‘Literary Acoustics’, in Gabriele Rippl (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), pp. 475–93; for linguascape, see Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 109. 2. For typographic landscape, see Social Semiotics, no. 2 (2015); for scriptworld, see Journal of World Literature, 1.1 (2016) and S. S. Park, ‘Scriptworlds’, in TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 17 Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 100–15. For an introduction to the research programme ‘World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics’, at Stockholm University, of which this article is a part; see S. Helgesson, ‘Introduction. The Cosmopolitan and the Vernacular in Interaction’, in Stefan Helgesson et al. (eds.), World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018), pp. 1–11, with reference to Sheldon Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, Public Culture, 12.3 (2000), pp. 591–625, at p. 593. Edmondo De Amicis, Costantinopoli (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1877), Vol. 1–2, in English translation: Constantinople, trans. Stephen Parkin (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2013 [2005]); Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede rejsebilleder (Kjøbenhavn: Forlagsbureauet, 1881). English translations of JerichauBaumann are my own. Pierre Loti, ‘Constantinople en 1890’ [1892], Constantinople fin de siècle et la mosquée verte à Brousse (İstanbul: Amphora, 2014), pp. 13–66; Aziyadé (İstanbul: Amphora, 2014 [1879]), English translation by William Needham (2011) at https://archive.org/details/Aziyade/mode/2up [Date accessed; 23 February 2020]; Les désenchantées: Roman des harems turcs contemporains (İstanbul: Amphora, 2010 [1906]), in English translation: Disenchanted, trans. Clara Bell (London: MacMillan, 1906). A. Skram, ‘Fru Inés’ [1891], in Skrams beste: Sjur Gabriel, Fru Inés, Forrådt (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2005), pp. 115–255; in English translation: Fru Inés, trans. Katherine Hanson and Judith Messick (London: Norvik Press, 2014). Elsa Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor från minareternas stad (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1908), Främling: Boken om Konstantinopel. Historier om Astrid-Anisa, Condjagull och Yasmine (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1924), Bakom stängda haremsdörrar (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1931); Stephanie Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar från Broussa och Konstantinopel (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1919). English translations of Lindberg-Dovlette and Beyel are my own. Orhan Pamuk’s translator, Maureen Freely, mentions Constantinople in the last years of the Ottoman Empire as ‘one of the most written-about cities in the world’ in her chapter ‘Artist in Action: My Borderland’, in May Hawas (ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 139. For Constantinople–Istanbul in literature, see V. Kennedy, ‘Istanbul’, in Jeremy Tambling (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 573–86; A. Seyhan, ‘The Translated City, Immigrants, Minorities, Diasporans, and Cosmopolitans’, in Kevin R. McNamara (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 229– 32; H. Tekdemir, ‘Crossing the Bridge: Constantinople Crowds and the Cityscape in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues’, in Richard Hibbitt (ed.), Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 69–90. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 45. For a case study, see H. Bodin, ‘Seclusion versus Accessibility: The Harems of Constantinople as Aesthetic Worlds in Stories by Elsa Lindberg-Dovlette’, in Stefan Helgesson et al. (eds.), World Literatures: Exploring, pp. 246–60. Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor, p. 46: ‘Du skall ej tro att vår stad är blott en enda stad. Det är flera hopade intill hvaranda. De breda sig ut och de flöda öfver två 18 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. H. BODIN världsdelar, utan att någonsin känna sin begränsning, hvarken i Europa eller Asien.’ De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 29, trans. p. 16. Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor, p. 53. Ibid., p. 61: ‘det […] mångfaldiga och enda Konstantinopel’. E. Eldem, ‘Istanbul as a Cosmopolitan City: Myths and Realities’, in Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani (eds.), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley–Blackwell, 2013), p. 219. Eldem, ‘Istanbul as a Cosmopolitan City’, p. 222. Ibid., pp. 222 and 224. Helena Bodin, ‘Konstantinopel kring 1900 som litterär värld: En kultursemiotisk analys av skandinaviska exempel’, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, no. 1/2 (2018), pp. 47–59. See Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2010 [1999]). Eldem, pp. 212 and 219. For lingua franca, see also Philological Encounters, 2 (2017), esp. the introduction by Michael Allan and Elisabetta Benigni, ‘Lingua Franca: Towards a Philology of the Sea’, pp. 1–5, and Joanna Nolan, The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca: Fact and Fiction (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). M. L. Pratt, ‘Comparative Literature and the Global Languagescape’, in Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (eds.), A Companion to Comparative Literature (Chichester: Blackwell, 2011), p. 281. For the notion of the vernacular, its possible definitions and applications, see S. Helgesson and C. Claesson, introduction to the special issue ‘Publication, Circulation and the Vernacular: Dimensions of World Literary Unevenness’ of Interventions [forthcoming], and C. Kullberg, ‘Le Vernaculaire: A Brief Lexical History in French’, in S. Helgesson et al (eds.), World Literatures: Exploring, pp. 19–30, at. pp. 24–8. See Pratt’s definition and elaboration of heterolingualism as the ‘work of capturing the meaning and force of linguistic difference’ (p. 288), appearing ‘not when realism calls for it, but when writers undertake to explore linguistic difference as a social force, a site of power, and a source of knowledge’ (p. 289). Pratt underlines also ‘the asymmetry between production and comprehension’ of a language (p. 282). For a discussion of the hetero-prefix, see Helena Bodin, ‘Heterographics as a Literary Device: Auditory, Visual, and Cultural Features’, Journal of World Literature, 3.2 (2018), pp. 196–216, at pp. 199–201. Cf. Pratt, p. 283: ‘In sum, because of the asymmetrical powers of comprehension, language can be permeated with marks of difference and incompetence, and still enact communication.’ Elaborating further on Pratt’s discussion, an important feature of a vernacular would in this respect be that it ‘enables speech to mark social differences, while maintaining comprehension across difference’ (Pratt, p. 283). See references further below in the section ‘Rendering the multivernacular linguascape’ to Meir Sternberg, who regards this as a general feature of texts which represent a multilingual discourse, and the chapter ‘Representing Languages in Modernist Fiction’ by Juliette Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 39–79. Pratt also comments on the use of heterolingual devices ‘to thematize language as a force in the story’ (p. 288), as mentioned above. TEXTUAL PRACTICE 19 26. See further Bodin, ‘Heterographics as a Literary Device’. 27. Cf. Pratt, who mentions the possibility of heterolingualism as ‘one language hosting (or invading or occupying) another’ (p. 290). 28. Loti, Constantinople, p. 13, trans., p.15. For the Babel metaphor, see also Beyel, further below. 29. Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede rejsebilleder, p. 8: ‘Dér mundhugges der, ikke alene paa Tyrkisk, Græsk og Armenisk og i andre Sprog, men de hugge fra sig med Haand og med Aarer, med Albuestød og med Dunk i Ryggen, det var en Støj uden Lige.’ 30. De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 43, trans., p. 22 31. Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor, p. 52. 32. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, pp. 79–80. 33. For the governesses’ role in the harem, see Bodin, ‘Seclusion versus Accessibility’, pp. 256–7. 34. De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 117, trans., p. 57. 35. Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede rejsebilleder, p. 15. 36. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, p. 81. 37. Meir Sternberg, ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, Poetics Today, 2.4 (1981), p. 222. Sternberg mentions both translational and heterolingual mimesis as equivalent terms. For a critique of Sternberg, in which I agree, see Julia Tidigs, Att skriva sig över språkgränserna: Flerspråkighet i Jac. Ahrenbergs och Elmer Diktonius prosa, PhD diss., Åbo akademi, (Åbo: Åbo Akademis förlag, 2014), p. 52. 38. Sternberg, ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, p. 231. 39. Loti, Les désenchantées, p. 220. 40. Skram, ‘Fru Inés’, p. 118, trans. p. 10. 41. Ibid., pp. 122 and 227, trans., pp. 14 and 111. 42. Ibid., pp. 128–9, trans., p. 19. 43. Ibid., p. 197, trans., p. 79. 44. Loti, Les désenchantées, p. 71, trans., p. 95. 45. Ibid., p. 71, trans., p. 97. 46. Sternberg, ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, p. 230. 47. Ibid., p. 231. Sternberg mentions also indicators such as ‘interests, attitudes, realia, forms of address’ (p. 231). 48. Skram, ‘Fru Inés’, p. 147, trans., p. 33. 49. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, p. 74. 50. Sternberg, ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, pp. 225–7. For single-word cultural indication, see Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 83; cf. Tidigs, p. 53. 51. Sternberg, ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, pp. 225–6. 52. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, p. 76–9. 53. De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 71, trans., p. 35. Note that the cry in Italian (‘Guarda!’) is translated into English, while other translations are provided by the translator in an endnote (p. 269), where he also comments that De Amicis may have confused some words in Turkish. 54. Skram, ‘Fru Inés’, p. 236, trans., p. 122. 55. Loti, Les désenchantées, pp. 64–5. 56. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, p. 109. 57. Skram, ‘Fru Inés’, p. 118, trans., p. 10. 20 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. H. BODIN Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor, pp. 36 and 93. De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 79; trans., p. 39. Loti, Aziyadé, p. 174. Loti, Aziyadé, pp. 63, 96, 125–6, 132, and 146. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, pp. 28 and 34. Loti, Aziyadé, p. 146. Ibid., pp. 84–5, trans., p. 45. Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor, p. 4. Ibid., p. 221. De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 7, trans., p. 5 (in italics). See Ibid., trans. Parkin, the note for p. 5 on p. 268. Lindberg-Dovlette, Kvinnor, s. 15. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, p. 79. Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede rejsebilleder, pp. 112–3. Ibid., pp. 113, 114, and 119. De Amicis, Costantinopoli, pp. 361–2, trans., p. 166 (where the heading is rendered in Modern Turkish as ‘Yangın var!’). De Amicis, Costantinopoli, p. 364, trans., p. 167. Loti, Aziyadé, p. 122, trans., p. 69. Beyel, Brev och dagboksanteckningar, p. 79. Sternberg, ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, pp. 238–9. Loti, Disenchanted, p. 86. For this and other Modern Turkish equivalents of Loti’s Turkish, see I. Piechnik, ‘Turcismes chez Pierre Loti et leurs traductions en polonais’, Romanica Cracoviensia 15 (2015): 224–38, quoted from p. 236. S. Parkin, ‘Introduction’, in De Amicis, Constantinople, p. xiii–xiv. For Skram, see ‘Glossary’, in Fru Inés, trans. Hansen and Messick, pp. 133–4. For paratexts, see Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Stephanie Beyel, Fjorton år bland turkar och turkinnor i Mindre Asien (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1918). I am grateful to Bo Utas for information on the Arabo-Persian calligraphy and the Persian quotes in the paratexts of Lindberg-Dovlette’s novels. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [grant number M150343:1]. ORCID Helena Bodin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1711-5798