The Curtain Sweeps Down

Nihal Yeğinobalı was only 23 years old when Genç Kızlar was published in Turkey in 1950 as the work of an American author named Vincent Ewing. The literal translation of this title into English is “Young Girls,” and the English title of the non-existent original credited inside the book is The Curtain Sweeps Down—an amusing choice, given the efforts Yeğinobalı made to veil her authorship of the novel. A bright young woman from the Aegean city of Manisa, Yeğinobalı graduated in 1945 from the prestigious Arnavutköy American College for Girls, a private boarding school in Istanbul that became co-educational in 1971 when it was merged with Robert College, and which has a long list of notable alumni including Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk and renowned curator Vasıf Kortun. Fluent in English and well-versed in American culture as a graduate of this elite missionary school, Yeğinobalı slowly built a name for herself as a skilled translator of English-language texts. Her interest in literature, however, wasn’t limited to translation; she was also convinced that she could write a novel of merit herself. Curious to gauge the possibilities for publishing it, she casually asked the editors of the publishing house she was working with whether they would be interested in reading a manuscript she was planning to write. The editors—who, needless to say, were all older men— didn’t take her writerly aspirations seriously and told her to wait until she had some more experience in the literary world. But Yeğinobalı’s ambitions were not curtailed by these dismissals.

In the summer of 1950, Yeğinobalı went on vacation to Manisa. Her editors had asked her not to be away for too long, since they had set some deadlines to publish new novels and needed her to work on the translations. Yeğinobalı wasn’t so thrilled at the prospect of having to cut her vacation short, so she came up with an ingenious idea to extend her stay: write her own novel but pretend that she was translating it from a source that didn’t actually exist. She would tell her editors that she had come across a great story published in instalments in some old American magazines she found at her uncle’s house in Manisa. Supposedly, this story was its author’s singular work, and it had been long enough since it was printed that all copyright had expired. In order to make her ruse convincing, Yeğinobalı would mimic some translation patterns in her writing and make the plot look as though it were originally written in another part of the world. Having studied at an all-girls American boarding school in Istanbul, she reckoned she could pull off a story about a group of young girls set in the United States.

Offering Turkish readers a rare view of young women as sexually active protagonists, Genç Kızlar became a sensation, spreading like wild re particularly among female readers. But Yeğinobalı recalls in interviews that even men who proudly proclaimed never to read fiction told her that Genç Kızlar was the only novel they’d ever read. There was clearly an appetite for such literary material among a certain segment of Turkish society that was embracing a less conservative lifestyle. The novel had touched on something fundamental, and demand for it did not diminish in the following decades. In 1963, it was adapted into a movie—albeit one less sensual than the book—that starred Türkan Şoray, Hülya Koçyiğit and Ediz Hun, all of whom became big movie stars in later years. Watching this film today is a strange experience, since the adaptation transposes the story back into Turkey and the characters are all “Turkified.” If the pseudotranslation undergoes a cultural transposition back into the context in which it was actually created, does it, in a sense, become the original that never was?

I asked my mother on a Skype call whether she had read or heard about Genç Kızlar when she was a teenager in the early ’70s, and she told me enthusiastically that she and her friends had all loved it; apparently even my grandmother had been a fan. But the look of confusion on my mother’s face when I mentioned Nihal Yeğinobalı’s name jolted me into the realization that, to this day, many are still unaware that a Turkish woman wrote the novel, even though Yeğinobalı exposed her ploy in the late ’80s and the book has been published under her name since 2003. I wondered if this information would make any difference to my mother’s perception of the book, and told her the whole story. After listening to me for several minutes, she said: “Good for her. What a smart woman.”

Fifty-one years after Roland Barthes famously declared the death of the author, it is now glaringly obvious that it takes tremendous privilege for an author to “die”—because to die as an author, to go into the oblivion of an illusory neutrality, you have to be “alive” and afforded the opportunity to speak with your own voice to begin with. But can Yeğinobalı’s story be instructive for those whose voices are hindered or dismissed? Does self-concealment amount to an acceptance of defeat (“I acknowledge that you are not giving me a right to speak and I will not openly challenge you”), or could it be useful to view it as a tool of resistance (“You are not giving me a right to speak but I will find a way to do it anyway”)? In the context of today’s Turkey, where the current government’s Islamist project tries to prohibit all secular and democratic dissent, this question is a daily struggle. But it is also becoming increasingly relevant in other parts of the world, as we seem to be collectively stuck in the impossibility of ascertaining what the future holds. If and when open dissent becomes too risky, how do we find other, stealthier ways to disobey?