The Bridge of the Golden Horn. Translated by Martin Chalmers.
This picaresque account of a young girl’s intellectual and sexual coming of age from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies, through her adventures in Berlin, Istanbul and Paris, enacts multiple acts of translation and transmutation. Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s enunciation of an identity that begins in Turkish and moves into a bold, re-forged and enriched German is accessible and entertaining. The heroine’s various incarnations as immigrant factory worker, language student and chambermaid in Berlin, then as a drama student and actress in Turkey, challenge the tired stereotypes that haunt too many literary representations of migration.
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