Ralph Hubbell on the work of Turkish literary giant Oğuz Atay

Ralph Hubbell on translating Oğuz Atay's "Waiting for the Fear" (New York Review Books). Atay is seen as one the great Turkish authors of the 20th century, but has largely yet to appear in English

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Oguz Atay is widely seen as one the towering Turkish fiction writers of the 20th century. So why has it taken until now for him to appear in English?

Turkish is not an obscure language, because it's spoken by tens and millions of people. But there is not a huge market for literature in translation. I also imagine it has something to do with how few people there are out there who can read Turkish and also have "a strong pen", as the Turkish saying goes, which narrows down the candidates for translators. But of course there are other Turkish writers that have come out well before, like Said Faik, Sabahattin Ali, Orhan Pamuk. So maybe it's simply because people just had their appetite fulfilled when it came to Turkish writing. That might be one reason why writers like Oğuz Atay didn't quite get out there.

I think it could also be related to the fact that he was discovered in Turkey relatively late. He wrote in the late 1960s up to the mid-1970s and went largely unread. It wasn't until around, I think, the mid-1980s that a publisher republished his work. It was then that he struck a chord. So I think there are a lot of reasons around for the delay. Also I think he's difficult; he's difficult in Turkish as well. Maybe he's not for everyone. I have plenty of friends who aren't fans, but plenty of friends who are. So maybe it's just a combination of all these factors.

Waiting for the Fear appears in the prestigious New York Review of Books series. How did it come about as a project for you?

It was my project. I hadn't translated any full-length book before I took on this project. I had been translating some poems and short stories, very low-stakes things. But I was doing an MFA at Johns Hopkins and my professor, Brad Lighthouser, had us do a reading class where we only read NYRB Classics. I had known about NYRB Classics beforehand so I was very excited for this class because I just love the publisher. NYRB Classics's reputation is so great because you can literally choose any title from their catalog and it is an excellent read. My professor had its founder, Edwin Frank, come visit us, and we got to fire some questions at him about NYRB Classics, about its genesis and how he finds some of the titles he does.

A year or two later, when I had a little more translation experience, I thought to myself that I'd really like to translate something for NYRB Classics because there's so much Turkish literature that's appropriate for them that hasn't been translated. So I emailed my professor and said: "Hey, if Edwin needs a Turkish translator for any project, let him know." But I thought I have to be a little more specific. So I looked at my bookshelf and my wife's bookshelf - we had just moved over from Istanbul a couple of years beforehand - and we had a few volumes of Oğuz Atay on the shelf. I took off Waiting for the Fear off the shelf, read a story and thought: "That was great." That is when I asked Brad if he could organise a meeting between me and Edwin. So I got the meeting. We had about 20 minutes to talk. I pitched it to him and he liked what he read. It took about a-year-and-a-half, almost two years, of wrangling. And the rest is history. Oğuz Atay always struck me as perfect for NYRB Classics. I knew his reputation well enough that I thought he would be good for this particular publisher. And it turns out he is.