Saturday, May 15, 2010
Conan in Turkish
A good friend of mine (and the player of Vladimir in the Dwimmermount campaign) recently visited Turkey on a business trip and sent along the following photograph from his travels:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It's got to be better than Turkish Star Wars ...
ReplyDeleteIt's a translation of the old Marvel Comics Conan stories, rather than an original work. If it had been original I might have bought it.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found interesting was that it was in the bookstore at the Istanbul airport. Considering how few translated comics they had (I saw a Spider-man and one or two others) it's impressive that Conan got to be one of the few.
It's got to be better than Turkish Star Wars ...
ReplyDeleteDamn you, Roger! The instant I read this post the exact same quote crossed my mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cufQD5Y31ZA
I'm just back from a holiday in Bodrum and Istanbul. I saw those big stacks of Conan and Red Sonja books in Turkey as well. Very prominently displayed, so I thought they must sell fairly well.
ReplyDeletenothing is better than Turkish Star Wars, IE Encounter Critical: The Movie. :)
ReplyDeleteTurkey had a big barbarian boom in the 70's and 80's, when lots of film companies (mostly italian) used turkey as a cheap and effective location, mostly for westerns, but also fantasy films, with the above mentioned turkish star wars as one of the most notorious. Turkey had their own barbarian hero though, and i belive he was fairly popular: Tarkan. http://tinyurl.com/3xe2qtu
ReplyDeleteI couldn't understand what is so strange about Conan being translated into Turkish. It's a country, like USA and it's people can read, you know. I sense a certain amount of orientalist, colonial-imperialist prejudice and scorn. Get over it, people.
ReplyDeleteWe're Americans. We don't see a lot of books in other languages, in real life, except for selected Great Classics used for learning Foreign Languages. So we always enjoy seeing foreign editions of stuff we know.
ReplyDeleteFor example, American sf/fantasy writers are always pretty boggled at seeing their own foreign covers. Good, bad, indifferent, doesn't matter. It's all fun and weird for us. Harlequin romance novelists are even more boggled by their Japanese manga adaptations.
It's just intrinsically strange to see something familiar transformed.
That said, I really enjoyed listening to Turkish heavy metal songs about Anne McCaffrey stories. Best Adaptation Ever.
Battlorn. That was the Turkish band.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=3935
Haven't heard that but I'll certainly check it out. Thanks for the heads-up.
ReplyDelete