BİR CİHAN İKİ SULTAN — "ONE WORLD, TWO SULTANS"This is the Turkish translation of my novel A Gift for the Sultan, just published by Nokta publishers in İstanbul.
The phrase at the top is Timur ve Yıldırım'in Mücadelesi —“The struggle of Timur and Yildirim”
Timur was the khan from Samarkand we know as Tamerlane; Yildirim (or Yıldırım in Turkish), "Thunderbolt", was the nom de guerre of Sultan Bayezid (1354-1403), defeated by Timur in the Battle of Ankara, July 1402.
The novel is about much more than the struggle of these two fierce warriors — it is also about how a great city, Constantinople, confronts a terrible siege and about the complicated relations between Orthodox Greeks and Ottoman Muslims in this frontier period, when neither had unchallenged dominance of the region. But Timur and Yildirim's struggle is a big part of the story, and is of special interest to Turkish readers as part of their founding history.
A Gift for the Sultan (English-language original)
2 comments:
Great post.I would certainly prefer to read more foreign fiction which were translated from Turkish translation to english, or in any languages.Because in that way I could have an idea what do people think,feel or their culture is.When we read books from a foreign country it seems like travelling in that country through the stories plot.We could recognize how they have been living afar from our own culture
Thanks, Jim. You may enjoy the novels of contemporary Turkish writers Orhan Pamuk and (quite different) Elif Shafak (both are translated, and Shafak also writes in English and collaborates in translation of her work). I've reviewed some of their works on my website (http://geoffreyfox.com/ficreadings_J-Z.html#readingstopJ-Z). Also, a very fine novel by an earlier writer, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, reviewed in this blog: http://geoffreyfox.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/istanbul-memories.html
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