A Brief History of Aranjman Translations: the Earliest Examples of Turkish Pop Music

Abstract

Aranjman in Turkish is a loanword borrowed from French. When used in the context of music, it refers to the 1960s, a formative stage in introducing foreign pop music with Turkish lyrics into the Turkish cultural repertoire. The present study views the aranjman era, which has so far constituted a blank space, from the perspective of translation studies. It first sketches out a theoretical framework fusing Even-Zohar’s «invention», «import» and «cultural repertoire» with André Lefevere’s notions of «rewritings» and «patrons». Briefly reviewing the latest approaches in song translation studies, the study proposes subcategories to the term «rewriting» to refer to instrumentation, voice and lyrics levels as «reperforming», «resinging» and «relyricizing» respectively, which altogether enable the song to be rewritten in another language. These acts cannot be achieved in the absence of music producers, who are the «patrons» initiating the recording or «rerecording» of a song in any given music industry. From a general perspective, it was the collaboration of these patrons and rewriters that introduced first the inventions and then the imports into the Turkish pop music cultural repertoire. 

In line with the political and cultural changes Turkey underwent from the 1950s onwards, the study proposes a periodization of the aranjman era in different stages which eventually led to the inventions within the Turkish cultural repertoire of pop music, this time not rewritten but written by Turkish composers and lyricists at all levels. While the main material the present study bases itself on is made up of song recordings released as albums, it also relies heavily on political and cultural history. All in all, the study underscores the importance of a holistic approach to song translation in redefining aranjman as a culture-specific type of rewriting in the formation of Turkish pop music while at the same time casting light on inseparable historical ties between politics and song translation.