There’s no place like home… A review of Casale’s Prisoner of the Infidels
Prisoner of the Infidels. The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe. Osman of Timişoara. Edited, Translated and Introduced by Giancarlo Casale
By Kristof D'hulster
An attractive pocket, 200 pp., 19$, a stylized tulip on the front cover, and a back flap that raises high expectations: “Victor Hugo meeting Papillion in an effervescent Ottoman Turkish memoir of war, slavery and self-discovery”. Sounds exciting! For me, Papillion is (an autobiographical?) movie of someone who repeatedly tries and escapes from prison. Entertaining, but I haven’t seen it in a while. Victor Hugo is a bit trickier: 19th century, Romanticism, republicanism, Les Misérables, Notre-Dame de Paris. What else? I haven’t read any of his works, but I’ve seen Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame…. Where exactly does the twain meet? Wikipedia is but one click away, but I decide not to do that. I’ll find out soon enough. In fact, I even decide to skip Casale’s introduction and just start with chapter one, ominously entitled “Surrender”.
With no footnotes to distract me and to slow down my reading pace (the translator using endnotes instead), already two hours later, I have finished the final chapter, aptly entitled “The end”. And what a read it has been! I have read a thing or two in Ottoman literature, either in translation or in the original language, and the Ottoman works that I would call a page-turner are far and between (read: I really can’t think of any). To this, Osman’s memoir proves the notable exception, for it has all ingredients of a riveting tale. Heroic forbearance in the face of heart-breaking suffering? Check! Alternating episodes of rekindled hope and smashing despair? Check! Suspension, violence, trust and betrayal, lust and love, all uncoiling through unexpected plot twists in a variety of settings, ranging between the mighty Danube current and the Croatian woods, rough Viennese nightlife brawls and the intimacy of some Balkan bedchambers? Check, check, check, and check! I got to join Osman in a near-death experience, in the literal run for his life, and in his concocting a final and successful escape, including the inevitable fake signature and a sophisticated disguise. The one cherry missing on the cake is the fake moustache…
The story itself is easy enough, and one needs neither Victor Hugo and Papillion on the back flap nor the tulip on the front cover to devour it. Yet, for all its simplicity, Osman’s memoir reveals itself to be much more than a one-dimensional picaresque tale, as it equally evokes a range of difficult universal questions: questions on human suffering and resilience in the face of dehumanizing brutality, on lawlessness that prevails in spite of laws and laws upheld in spite of lawlessness, and on the fluidity, malleability, and multidimensionality of identity. It invites introspection on the meaning of belonging and of home, on how to belong and what to belong to, on how and where to find a home, on exile and nostalgia, on the permeability of borders and the meaning of border-crossing, on destiny and the vicissitudes of life. Al-faraj baʿda l-shidda baʿda l-faraj baʿda l-shidda… As I proceeded through the chapters, also issues of credibility, authorial testimony/self-fashioning, and fiction/non-fiction started lingering in the back of my head. The way that the narrative pace picks up pace and then slows down, punctuated with fast-forwards and reflexive stills, departs from all literary models that must have been available to Osman so starkly — indeed, screams Netflix adaptation so loudly — that I am even left to wonder whether Osman is real or rather the pseudonym of Casale. Can an early 18th-century Ottoman author truly be that unboring? I guess it’s time for me to read Casale’s introduction.
Turns out that that there is no need to picture myself a Giancarlo Casale with an impressive fake Ottoman moustache. The paper trail, consisting of an 18th-century autograph and some more underexplored textual traces in the Turkish and Austrian archives, is undeniable: Osman’s memoir is just as real as the man himself. As rightfully stressed by Casale, Osman was a literary trailblazer. Seemingly without much of an education and without any immediate cultural model to emulate, Osman crafted not only one of the few Ottoman slave narratives that have come down to us, but also the — as far as we know — first book-length autobiography ever to be written in Ottoman Turkish. Through the factual/credible account of his remarkable resilience in the face of a cruel fate as a slave in a foreign land, Osman presents us with “a complex deconstruction of the very idea of selfhood”, and a “profound meditation on belonging, on self-discovery through alienation, and on the impossibility of ever truly returning home.” As the saying goes, there is no place like home, but where exactly is “home” and what exactly constitutes it? How do prolonged alienation and estrangement affect personhood, identity, and sense of belonging? Ghayba in reverse… In his introduction, Casale picks up on this and various other threads that run through Osman’s narrative. He situates Osman’s memoir against the backdrop of Ottoman-Habsburg relations as a unique case of reversing the case and contextualizes it within the small corpus of Ottoman ego-documents, he suggests models that Osman may have emulated and explores the author’s possible motives for his innovative history-making and self-fashioning, he picks up on the few textual threads that Osman left beyond his memoir and traces the afterlife of Osman’s autograph manuscript. He asks the right questions and he asks them well, and the answers that he provides prove excellent guidelines for further discussion, without smothering the reader’s personal engagement with the text. For the benefit of those with a thirst for more Osman, more Ottoman ego-documents, and more slave narratives, the translator has included sufficient bibliographical references to get them started.
Casale is rather modest regarding his own contribution to this book’s magic. For sure, the plot is Osman’s making, but also his translation’s remarkably simple and refreshingly modern style Casale claims to be first and foremost Osman’s merit. In fact, Casale made it all sound so easy that I was left with a bit of frustration. As I personally have never read an Ottoman text that comes even close to what I would call downright “easy”, could there perhaps be something wrong with my command of Ottoman Turkish? Unwilling to take Casale’s word for it, I checked Kreutel’s Ottoman edition, and it turns out that Casale is right about Osman’s language and style and that — mutatis mutandis — there is not(hing/that much) wrong with my command of Ottoman Turkish. Whew! Osman’s prose indeed runs like a train, as it is remarkably unhampered by pretty much everything that makes the standard Ottoman Turkish text such a hard read: versification, Arabic and Persian phraseology, and all tricks rhetoric that require the modern reader to have a Redhouse and a Steingass on his or her lap while reading, and all this in combination with a dizzyingly alien(ating) cultural discourse that presumes the reader to have successfully gone through the Ottoman madrasa curriculum. Moreover, there is the fact that the present translator is largely released from the daunting task of reading the demanding dīvānī hand of Osman’s autograph (see figure 1) and of figuring out the numerous non-Ottoman phrases and proper nouns, by virtue of the efforts of Richard Kreutel and others. Just imagine the skill it takes to recognize German Oy, Scheisen! (“Hey, I need to shit!) in dīvānī script!
Much work has been done and Casale rightfully acknowledges this. And yet, in spite of all this, I would argue that his modesty is still uncalled for, and that the success of the book is as much his merit as it is Osman’s or Kreutel’s. Literary translations from Ottoman are never easy, and are about as demanding as their edition is. Lest you forget, as much as Kreutel’s text edition was already a major step forwards, it is still but one step on the long road that leads from Osman’s autograph to a rendering of his memoir in a language that makes sense to us and in a format that we can relate to. To give but the most obvious way in which Kreutel’s edition as a first layer of interpretation needed to be supplemented with an equally sophisticated second layer of interpretation by the translator: Kreutel’s edition constitutes a single continuous text throughout, with no capitals, no italics, no quotation marks, and no punctuation whatsoever (see figure 2). As such, each title, each paragraph indentation, and each full stop are interventions by Casale, and the credits for these are his alone.
Even though there is probably no Ottoman text as widely available in translation as Osman’s memoir (German, French, Turkish, various Balkan languages) is, it is a good thing that Giancarlo Casale has now added English to this already impressive list. It should be noted that such a translation project by “a proper scholar” is not as obvious as one might think. Historians often look down on translations, as these fail to meet institutionalized expectations of what proper historical research should entail. Use your sources, cull them, contextualize them, paraphrase them if you must, but by no means “translate” them! Luckily, Casale has disregarded this professional dictum, hereby proving that translation deserves its place in historical practice as a viable and valuable way of engaging with a historical source. It is to be hoped that some readers will follow up on the leads provided by Casale and delve into Osman’s other, un(der)explored writings. If so, we will hear back from Osman in the future, and that is something to look forward to.
Works quoted:
Die Autobiographie des Dolmetschers ʿOsmān Aġa aus Temeschwar. Der Text des Londoner Autographen in normalisierter Rechtschreibung, herausgegeben von Richard F. Kreutel (Hertford, 1980).
J. Redhouse, Redhouse Türkçe-İngilizce Sözlük (İstanbul, repr. 1997).
F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (New Delhi, repr. 1996).
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