Utku Tönel

Doughnuts in Space: Orientalism in Frank Herbert’s Dune

As a neglected genre in the academia, science fiction, silently but diligently, explored the frontier of intellectual horizon through ideas projected into the future in forms of stories woven around outer worlds in distant galaxies. In such endeavours, it relied heavily on world-building, whose foundation stones are alien races, cultures, and languages. In his novel, Dune (1965), American author Frank Herbert depicts the Other in the form ‘Fremen’; the desert-dwelling tribal natives of the planet Arrakis, for his English-speaking audience, and to achieve such an alien effect, he utilizes the vocabulary of Middle-Eastern languages in his portraying of the alien folk of Fremen. This study analyses underlying reasons behind Herbert’s choice of ‘alien vocabulary’ and his utilization of those words for the fictional nation-building in his novel, as well the translation of those words into the Turkish language in the Turkish edition of the novel; it being a language with a shared past with both of the languages aforementioned.

UZAYDAKİ TATLI ÇÖREKLER: FRANK HERBERT’IN DUNE ROMANINDA ORYANTALİZM

Akademide ihmal edilen bir tür olarak bilim kurgu usulca fakat özenle ve sebat ederek, uzak galaksilerdeki dış dünyalara dolanmış hikâyeler biçiminde geleceğe yansıtılan fikirlerle düşünsel ufkun sınırlarını keşfetmiştir. Bu uğraşında, temeli yabancı ırklar, kültürler ve diller olan dünya inşasından çoklukla faydalanmıştır. 1965 yılında yayımlanan romanı Dune’da Amerikalı yazar Frank Herbert Ötekini, İngilizce-konuşan okuyucuları için Arrakis gezegeninin kabile hayatı süren, çölde yaşayan ‘Fremen’leri biçiminde tasvir eder ve bu yabancı etkiyi elde etmek için yabancı bir halk olan Fremenleri tasvirinde Orta Doğu dillerinin sözcüklerinden faydalanır. Bu çalışma Herbert’in “yabancı sözcükleri” seçiminin altındaki nedenleri, bu sözcükleri romanındaki kurgusal dünyanın inşası için kullanmasını ve bu sözcüklerin, romanın Türkçe baskısındaki çeviri hallerini inceler.

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