(Un)Worldly Translators: On Ironic Poetics in Transit

In the 2025 Mangold lecture Prof Deniz Gögtürk argues that in an age of rising walls and deepening divides, language education and translation are more vital than ever. As smartphones and earbuds increasingly take over the interpreter’s task, our role as educators is to puncture myths of total transparency and effortless equivalence. We must foreground nuance, multiple meanings, and the productive limits of understanding. Against fantasies of seamless communication, this lecture proposes an “ironic poetics of translation” that privileges resonance over one-to-one accuracy. Translators move in two directions at once: immersing themselves in another way of being in the world while keeping the distance needed to make it legible for others. This double movement complicates fixed ideas of identity, nation, and belonging.

Fictional translators—often cast as deviant or even devious—show how gaps and unreadable archives can ignite poetic imagination. German Turkish literature offers vivid examples. Zafer Şenocak’s novels weave illegible notebooks and fragmented voices into narratives that resist closure. His Alman Terbiyesi (Deutsche Schule) enters into dialogue with Sait Faik and Sabahattin Ali—especially Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna (1943; Madonna in a Fur Coat, 2016), set between 1920s Berlin and 1940s Istanbul, a city teeming with unreliable translators, spies, and refugees. These works portray translators as (un-)worldly counter-figures to monolingual modernization, echoing arguments elaborated by exiled scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, and, later, Edward Said.

Translation, then, is more than craft: it is an ethical practice of living with incompleteness. It resists the flattening force of global English, embraces distance, and treats friction as a creative spark across divides. Far from closing gaps, working with languages shows that it is precisely through gaps that we remain connected.

Deniz Gögtürk, Ph.D. Freie Universität Berlin, joins the Faculty of Arts as the Mangold Fellow 2025. She is professor of German / Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and works on cultural and media studies with a focus on moving images, multilingual literature, and theories of migration, social interaction, and aesthetic practice in a global horizon. Publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture, translations from Turkish literature, and co-edited volumes: The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002, expanded 2nd edition 2019); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007); Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010); Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken der Gemeinschaft (2019). Her book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders is forthcoming from De Gruyter. She is working on a new project on Documentary Poetics. She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the Berkeley German Department’s electronic journal.

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