José Saramago's reception in Türkiye: The case of Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, Körlük
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2026.e106523Palavras-chave:
Reception, literary translation, social representations, Portuguese literature, TürkiyeResumo
The Portuguese writer José Saramago has been very popular in Türkiye in recent years, especially with his dystopic novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, Körlük in Turkish. The distance between Portuguese languages, literature, and cultures combined with Saramago’s distinct writing style, his atheism and communist worldview may make his positive reception in Türkiye seem somewhat unexpected. This paper aims to explain this phenomenon from a social psychological perspective by applying the social representations concept (Moscovici, 1988) to the reception of translated literature and relying on the netnographic method (Kozinets et al., 2014). The findings show that the success of Saramago and Körlük is not a coincidence but a result of trust and shared representations resulting from the interaction among the actors of reception, namely translation agents, professional and non-professional readers. The study also offers insights about how readers read translations and Turkish readers’ representations of translation and translators.
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