Translated Book
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha
In 2019, by translating Cervantes's great work Don Quijote into Turkish, she became the second translator to bring the complete Spanish text into our language.
Translating Don Quijote took me four years. The hardest decision was in the very first sentence: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..." — In a place of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall... This "do not wish to recall" can echo in different tones in Turkish. I rewrote every sentence countless times to carry Cervantes's playful, ironic yet melancholic voice into Turkish. In the windmills passage, simply saying "değirmen" for "molinos" wasn't enough — at the moment Don Quijote saw them as giants, we too had to live that illusion. — Banu Karakaş
