Translator Zafer Ceylan was awarded the
Talat Sait Halman Translation Award in 2022, which was initiated in memory of Talat Sait Halman to support qualified literary translations. The selection committee decided that the prize money would go to Zafer Ceylan, who translated Taleb Alrefai's poetic short novel
Kaptan, written in 2016, from Arabic to Turkish with great sensitivity and fluency.
His poetic short novel, Kaptan, is a novel about the experiences of Ali Nâsır en-Necdî, a real captain, in 1979. The poetic short novel Kaptan, inspired by the Kuwaiti writer Taleb Alrefai, was among the nominees for the
International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the most prestigious award in the Arab world, administered by the Booker Prize Foundation in London in 2018.
In this book, which was written based on the experiences of the captain who disappeared in a terrible storm, the author paints an intricate portrait of the old captain from the days when he first listened to the call of the sea in his childhood, to his first sea adventures in pearl fishing and to becoming a captain at the age of 14.
The translator skillfully translated the novel, which is full of complex maritime terms, into Turkish, keeping it true to the Arabic original, and at the same time making it one of the unforgettable maritime stories in Turkish. Ceylan, by finding unpretentious and skillful responses to the striking imagery of this seemingly plain text, spoke the dialogues in Turkish with great success and made an important contribution to the literary corpus translated from Arabic into Turkish.
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