Uno straniero in Terra matrigna. La traduzione italiana del romanzo Yaban di Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu

Between 1941 and 1942, the novel Yaban by Yakup Kadri (Karaosmanoğlu), published in Turkey in 1932, appeared in the Medusa series of Mondadori editions. It was the first time that a twentieth‑century Turkish novel was translated into Italian and it was not done in a specialist field, i.e. by scholars, orientalists or even more precisely Turkish scholars, but within a series of a prestigious and innovative publishing house that had been set up to promote great international literature. The novel, which in Italian is entitled Terra matrigna, is however not a translation from the original but from German. Only a couple of years earlier, in fact, the same novel had been translated from Turkish into German, raising a certain clamour, especially in Turkey. This essay proposes a reconstruction of the editorial process that accompanied the Italian publication of Karaosmanoglu’s novel, in an attempt to situate this first diffusion of a modern Turkish literary work in the Italian and European context, in order to understand the cultural relations and the framework of the understanding and reception of early twentieth‑century Turkish literature in Europe.