Translating Assyrian Fairy Tales:

1. The Translator as Co-Author

Translating legal or official documents is one thing, but translating works of fiction or fairy tales is quite another. In the former situation, generally, I do not even question whether I should add or subtract anything. In the latter, I'm no longer just a translator; I become a co-author. Walking that line between translator and co-author is a delicate balancing act. It requires a great deal of soul-searching and honesty, so much that it turns into a daily philosophical exercise, as you question what it truly means to "translate," what the translator's responsibilities are, and where they end.

You must respect the author and their choices. You can't simply change what they wrote because you believe you can do better. (Are all translators frustrated writers?) But what if you don't understand the author's intent, perhaps because they aren't writing in their native language? What if the source culture is so different from the target culture that a straightforward translation wouldn't make sense? What matters is to preserve the essence of the text, isn't it? Yet how far can a translator go?

My colleagues and I thrive on questions like these. We enjoy pushing our brains to work at full capacity, and we love knowing we're doing something neither artificial intelligence, nor many of our fellow translators could do. So of course I was elated when a Turkish-Assyrian author asked me to translate fourteen Assyrian fairy tales from Turkish into French. These stories, passed down by his grandmother, mainly originated in the Bohtan (Şırnak province) and Tur Abdin (Mardin) regions of Turkey. With the support of the 2023 Children's/Popular Book Grant from the Assyrian Studies Association, he was able to finance translations into both English and French. The books would be bilingual — Assyrian on one side, French on the other; and Assyrian-English. I was honored to be part of this lovely initiative, which I understood as yet another brick in the centuries-long struggle to preserve Assyrian language and culture in Turkey and beyond.

To be honest, I would have loved to work toward both French and English. It would have been fascinating to see how the same text translates in two different tongues. Or, if not that, I would have liked to collaborate with the English translator. Unfortunately, I only learned of her involvement many weeks after finishing my own work. Next time, I'll be sure to ask whether the text is being translated into other languages, and if so, whether I can team up with my colleagues. We could brainstorm together when the text is confusing, bounce ideas off each other and read one another's work. It would have been very helpful when I was wrestling with numerous difficulties, a few of which I will present.

Needless to say, I tried to explain these difficulties to my client, but communication proved challenging. I noticed that an editor had worked on the first few pages of the first story, pointing out several errors or passages she couldn't understand, but the author never addressed them. I also sent emails full of suggested corrections to the original, just as the English translator later told me she had done. It was all in vain — we were on our own. I must point out that later, when I googled him, I learned that my client's parents had recently been murdered under murky circumstances in their isolated, ancestral village in Anatolia, and that he had been searching for their bodies together with the local gendarmerie… This heartbreaking event explains his relative absence. I hope that my colleague and I were able to rise to the occasion and do right by the text.

2. First Case Study: The Opening Line

What gave me the biggest headache was the opening line of each tale:

When I asked the author about this, he sent me a word-for-word translation from the original Assyrian. That's when I realized I had, in fact, been translating a translation! The original text was written in Assyrian — actually in Garshuni, which is spoken Assyrian written in Latin script. Mysteriously, when I fed the opening line into an AI tool, what came out had nothing to do with the Turkish text. Instead, it read: "Once upon a time, in the king's palace, there was a king called Biltor. His name was Melko."

Bir varmış bir yokmuş is the Turkish equivalent of "once upon a time" — literally, "once there was and once there was not." But I had never come across the other phrases before. Translated literally, the line reads:

…which isn't very satisfying. Should I keep Allah, or translate it as "God" or Dieu? Since Assyrians are Christian, there's no particular reason to keep Allah, unless I wanted to add a sense of exoticism — a feeling of encountering a tale from a faraway land. But I decided that wasn't necessary; the tales speak for themselves, and there's no need to be orientalist.

"…although God had many servants, none were better than Him." How could anyone be better than God? What does "better" even mean here? And if none were better than Him once upon a time, does that imply that now someone could be? I wrote a dozen variations but never found one that satisfied me completely — they were too long, too poetic, too religious, or too complicated. For example:

In the end, the votes were cast in favour of:

To be honest, I'm still not entirely satisfied. The English translator's published version goes: May the name of God be praised and may we rejoice and be glad in Him. They say, from the beginning of all time, no one is greater than God, although He has many servants. Somehow, I suspect the French translator who worked on four of the tales before being fired didn't agonize over it quite so much. Here's what they wrote:

That single sentence — the very first line of the book — proved just how laborious the rest would be.

3. Second Case Study: Khambeshaya

Most trying of all was Khambeshaya. Fairy tales need a degree of internal coherence; readers can suspend disbelief, but the storyteller shouldn't describe the brothers' habits only to ignore them later, or say the girl is upstairs yet show what she sees downstairs. When fixing these incoherencies required only a minor adjustment, I allowed myself that liberty. But otherwise I had to remain loyal to the original text, flawed though it might be.

The tale begins with seven brothers who fear that their pregnant mother will give birth to yet another son and long for a sister. On the day the baby is to be born, they go off to hunt, instructing the midwives to hang a white cloth for a girl, or a black cloth for a boy. Tragically, the malicious midwives hang a black cloth even though a girl is born. The brothers abandon their home and build a "fortress" on a distant hill. Years later, the sister and brothers are reunited, but an evil creature transforms them into sheep. The sister meets a sorcerer who promises to restore her brothers if she agrees to marry him.

And that's where we come to one of the most confusing sections of the tale. The sorcerer instructs the girl not to cry out "Oh, only if I were blind!" as he strikes the pomegranates to break the curse. But why would striking a pomegranate (nar) make such a terrifying sound? And why would the girl wish to be blind, when it makes far more sense to want to go deaf?

After some research, I discovered that nara vurmak can also mean "to howl" — which makes better sense — except for the fact that the sorcerer is described as "taking seven nar." In my French translation, I rendered nar as grenade, which can also mean "bomb," and I changed "blind" to "deaf":

The girl goes along with the ritual but inadvertently condemns the youngest brother to remain half-lamb. She keeps her promise and marries the sorcerer — on the condition that her half-lamb brother accompany her. The sorcerer's wicked sister, consumed by jealousy, pushes the girl into a well. Meanwhile, the half-lamb hops around the well, singing a cryptic riddle:

We've never been told which half was lamb and which human, but hearing him sing, we gather that he retains a human head. Intrigued, the sorcerer looks into the well, rescues his wife, and punishes his sister in true folkloric fashion: he ties her by her hair to a horse's tail and feeds the horse salt. Maddened by thirst, the animal drags her to her death. The tale ends by reminding us that kindness and purity of heart will ultimately triumph over evil.

4. Conclusion

When I was first approached with this project, I was excited because it was out of the ordinary and perfectly aligned with my interests. I've always been deeply drawn to fairy tales, and here was an opportunity to flex my creative muscles and even add value to a text. My excitement only grew when I realized this project gave me the rare chance to play a role in preserving Assyrian folk heritage.

As an admirer of C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, I approached these tales as a treasure hunt for archetypes and universal motifs. "The Girl Without Hands" appears in both Brothers Grimm and Assyrian traditions, but with the former attributing evil to the devil, and the latter to human nature. "Dalale Bridge" echoes countless Eastern European tales about the tragic immurement of a woman to ensure the stability of a bridge — the Greek Bridge of Arta, the Romanian Master Manole, the Hungarian Kőműves Kelemen. "The Man and His Dog" from Assyrian folklore, "Gelert" from Welsh folklore, and "The Brahmin and the Mongoose" from Indian folklore all share the same theme: a loyal animal is wrongly blamed, killed, and later proven innocent. It is my idea of fun to tease out what gives the Assyrian tales their distinct color — their descriptions of bustling marketplaces, caravanserais where travelers swap stories by a fireside, lavish weddings featuring seven goats and a lamb, and very specific proverbs and idioms such as Kül başına!, meaning "ashes on your head," used to express dissatisfaction across several dialects of the Middle East and Caucasus.

Yet, a measure of frustration soon crept in when I realized the texts weren't ready for straightforward translation, and it grew when my questions went mostly unanswered. I was happy to be playing a role in cultural preservation, happy to be grappling with philosophical issues, but uneasy about making substantial editorial choices alone. Ideally, the text should have undergone multiple rounds of editing, or I should have been authorized to act as a genuine co-author. Unfortunately, time constraints and a lack of clear permissions meant I had to be content with translating faithfully while occasionally adjusting simpler errors.

As I translated, I allowed myself the pleasure of going down rabbit holes, looking up the names of places and people. I spent hours looking up the name Şeadda, which the author tells us (in a lonely footnote) is a giantess often seen in Assyrian fairy tales. My research indicated that shedah were Old Babylonian bird-footed she-devils, or shape-shifting Hebrew shedim with clawed feet. I mention this not only as yet another question raised by the text, but also to illustrate how invigorating it was to work on this project.

In the end, I remain grateful to the author for entrusting me with his work. Despite the setbacks, it so enchanted me that I felt the need to write extensively about it — I could have gone on even longer, had I not taken pity on my readers! Although the process wasn't without hurdles, it allowed me to engage with stories that reach beyond time and space, and that deserve a broader audience. It renewed my affection for fairy tales, and I developed an immense respect for the author who took the time to listen to his grandmother's tales and write them down, to seek grants and hire translators, allowing his rich Assyrian culture to persevere.