The Time Regulation Institute
by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
It has, I believe, been said many times that writers commune with other writers via their work and, in fact, their work traces an albeit sometimes eccentric, but artistic line from one to another. One work, however, which has fascinated me for a number of years is Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s Time Regulation Institute, composed as the Republic of Turkey (now referred to as Turkiye) evolved into founder Ataturk’s vision of a ‘modern’ state, but published in 1962. As with many novels composed in another tongue but English, the English language reader must sometimes struggle to find a good translation: the good news is that, in the case of Tanpinar, Maureen Freely (who grew up in Istanbul) and Alexander Dawe who has lived most of his life in that city, both collaborated in rendering an excellent translation of Time Regulation Institute (published in 2013).
Mind, translating Tanpinar was a challenge, albeit a worthy one. Noting that the distance between modern Turkish and Ottoman has grown with every decade, Freely and Dawe explain,
As a young man, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar witnessed the transformation, almost overnight, of the ornate, opaque language we now know as Ottoman into an idiom thought to be more fitting for a modern, westernizing republic. First came the Alphabet Revolution, in 1928. Atatürk gave his new nation just three months to say good-bye to Arabic script and to master the new Latin(ate) orthography. In 1932 he launched the Language Revolution, with the aim of ridding modern Turkish of all words of Arabic or Persian origin. The Turkish Language Society, to which he entrusted this great task, did not, in the end, manage to do away with all such words, nor did it succeed in winning support for the thousands of neologisms it invented to replace them. But it did succeed in reducing the vocabulary by 60 percent. (22)
The translators go on to note that in this challenge, writers took both sides, pro- and anti- the state’s language intervention, with some even going to prison. Tanpinar evaded the dicta for just “pure Turkish” and sought compromise between the richness of Ottoman, revelling “in Ottoman’s rich blend of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish,” and wishing to find “graceful and harmonious ways to blend Eastern and Western influences.” (22-23) And so, too, in the speech of the main protagonist, Hayri Irdal, say Freely and Dawe, we find that his language “strains to keep pace with modern times,[ but] keeps collapsing into its old ways.” (23)
The world of Tanpinar’s novel also teeters between the demands of modernism—or, as Freely and Dawe put it, “modernism-from-above”—and the traditional, albeit mixed, Turkish culture of protagonist Irdal’s days of yore. Indeed, the novel first reveals Irdal’s more traditional ambiance and beginnings and then goes on to his joining the organization of the title, The Time Regulation Institute, designed to impose regular hours for work, “time off,” shops opening or closing, and the needs of a modern industrialized society. Now readers must note that Tanpinar is satirising, but those in the 21st century might not recall the days when time was not so regularised.[1] Despite clocks and even watches, in Irdal’s time, time was so not formally coordinated; and there are certainly places, even today, where time and hours are not as strictly observed or noted.[2]
I leave you to the novel….
— Bronwyn Mills
Note: If you can get BBC or this YouTube episode, a fascinating hour-long presentation of the attempt to romanize the writing of many languages. The beginning chronicles Ataturk’s reform of Turkish (then Ottoman) script,
[1] Never mind daylight savings, variously introduced in the first part of the 20th century—in Europe first by Germany, in 1916, to save coal by taking advantage of daylight and, in the Americas, by Canada’s Thunder Bay in 1908, to save energy and taking advantage of daylight.
[2] I have a distinct memory of several years ago, asking a Brazilian gardener what time it was. He was wearing a fancy US watch, but, to answer me, instead he looked up at the sun.
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