Dracula in Istanbul Read online

  DRACULA IN ISTANBUL: THE UNAUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE GOTHIC CLASSIC

  This edition first published in the United States in 2017 by Neon Harbor Entertainment, LLC.

  Copyright © 2017 by Ed Glaser

  Foreword copyright © 2017 by Kim Newman

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar

  Afterword copyright © 2017 by Iain Robert Smith

  Cover Illustration & Design copyright © 2017 by Alex Mitchell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Print Edition ISBN: 0692918418

  Print Edition ISBN-13: 978-0692918418

  Published by:

  Neon Harbor Entertainment, LLC

  Visit our website:

  neonharbor.com

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD by Kim Newman

  INTRODUCTION by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  A Selected Pronunciation Guide

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  AFTERWORD by Iain Robert Smith

  PHOTOS from the film adaptation

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CONTRIBUTORS

  FOREWORD

  by Kim Newman

  In my collection of editions of Dracula, I have versions of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel rewritten in English for various readerships… comic books, film scripts, plays. A Pop-Up Dracula and illustrated retellings for younger readers are at one end of the shelf… at the other are editions with newly-added sex scenes (“a piece of ass is a piece of ass—be it in England or here in Transylvania” begins Jonathan Harker’s diary in The Adult Version of Dracula, published by Calga Books in 1970). Only now, a hundred and twenty years after Stoker’s book came out, are we beginning to explore the non-English language variants of the founding text of modern horror.

  In an afterword to Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula (Duckworth Overlook, 2017)—a translation into English of Makt Myrkanna, Valdimar Ásmundsson’s free Icelandic adaptation (1900) of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1987)—John Edgar Browning suggests “unearthing translations like Makt Myrkanna may become the next cottage industry in Dracula scholarship and entertainment.” The appearance in a new English translation of Kazıklı Voyvoda/The Impaling Voivode proves his case. That a book as well-known as Dracula should exist in such altered versions from territories as far apart as Iceland and Turkey indicates something unique about this particular work (and character).

  Given that this is an area of literary scholarship which has been neglected, it remains to be seen whether other popular works of this vintage—Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), or Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1911)—have such extreme variants. Is there an Egyptian War of the Worlds where the Martian War Machines stride past pyramids to lay waste to Cairo… a Polish Phantom lurking under a Budapest Opera House… a Japanese sleuth unmasking a cat ghost as the scheming heir to a title and fortune? Certainly, when the movies got hold of these key texts, there would be room for a Chinese Phantom of the Opera (Ye ban ge sheng/A Song at Midnight, 1937), multiple American-set Wars of the Worlds from Orson Welles’s radio play through to films by Byron Haskin and Steven Spielberg, a Hindi Hound of the Baskervilles (Bees Saal Baad/Twenty Years Later, 1962), and a Heart of Darkness set during the Vietnam War (Apocalypse Now, 1979). But Dracula seems uniquely mutable, as attested to by the emergence of long-known-about, hitherto-hard-to-assess translations/adaptations/reinventions.

  Outside Turkey, Ali Rıza Seyfioğlu’s Kazıklı Voyvoda first became heard of when people writing books about vampire films—Barrie Pattinson (The Seal of Dracula, 1975), James Ursini and Alain Silver (The Vampire Film, 1975), David Pirie (The Vampire Cinema, 1977)—made mention of Mehmet Muhtar’s Drakula İstanbul’da (1953), a film they knew of but which was then unseen in Europe and America. Donald F. Glut’s The Dracula Book (1975) includes a synopsis of the film and a still of Atif Kaptan as a Dracula with the bald pate of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, eine symphonie das grauens (1922) and cape-and-evening-wear costume of Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) but also the prominent fangs which wouldn’t catch on in Western movies until Christopher Lee bared his teeth in Dracula (1958). Glut states that “the film was based both upon Stoker’s Dracula and upon the novel Kasîgli Voyvoda, by Ali Riga Seifi.” It wasn’t until Pete Tombs’s Mondo Macabro (1997) that anyone wrote in English about Drakula İstanbul’da after actually seeing the film. Then, it was only around as an unsubtitled bootleg VHS recorded off Turkish television. Now, though the print quality hasn’t improved, the film is on YouTube with English subtitles—though some blunt translations add a layer of humor probably not intended by the filmmakers. “I read your book on vampires. I think Miss Şadan is a sucker. She must be the one sucking little kids in Eyup.” “Turan, I know you loved her deeply, but she is a bogey now.” “We should go and garlic the chests before midnight.”

  Drakula İstanbul’da can now be assessed as an important stage of the evolution of Dracula as a film property. For all that it’s an adaptation not of Stoker but of Kazıklı Voyvoda—using (most of) the character names Seyfioğlu invented and shifting the location from London to Turkey—Drakula İstanbul’da follows Bram Stoker’s plot more faithfully than the other four film adaptations of the novel made in the first sixty years of the 20th century. Among other things, Muhtar is the first filmmaker to stage Stoker’s memorable image of the Count crawling head-first down the wall of his castle. Though, of course, Muhtar wasn’t necessarily adapting Stoker’s book—his film is based much more closely on Seyfioğlu’s. Like Tod Browning in 1931, Muhtar (working from a script by Ümit Deniz) opts for a contemporary setting rather than make a period piece. Stoker’s book makes a point of being set roughly in its present day and featuring up to the minute tech like dictographs and blood transfusions, and wouldn’t accrue the patina of Victoriana until Hammer Films started making films set in an era of gaslight and hansom cabs. Seyfioğlu set his version (published in 1928) in the 1920s and made the characters’ involvement in the then-recent Turkish War of Independence (1919-23) a crucial part of their backstory. Muhtar opts for an understated 1950s setting, with motorcars and nightclub scenes, even to the commercial extent of making Seyfioğlu’s patriotic and pure Mina character Güzin a dancer who desports in a harem outfit and is hypnotized by Dracula into giving the vampire a saucy private performance before the heroes stake and behead him. The novel excludes all humor—even Stoker’s comic relief rustics and occasional jabs at Van Helsing’s silly accent and Renfield’s grotesque habits—but the film ends with the vampire-hunting hero secure enough in the monster’s death to insist his new wife throw all the garlic out of the house and never use it in cooking again.

  In 1900, Ásmundsson created his Dracula for a newspaper serial, which forced him to delive
r short episodes with cliffhangers—but he was inclined for some reason to add his own sub-plots and characters, combining Dracula’s three wives into one temptress who might be the historical Countess Elisabeth Bathory and predating Hammer’s later films by giving his Dracula a cult of acolytes, minions, well-connected disciples and a penchant for murderous sacrificial rituals. He also seems to have decided after a year which barely got him past the Transylvania section of the novel to wrap things up quickly. Seyfioğlu can’t possibly have known about Makt Myrkanna when he set out to turn Dracula into something else, though he may have been aware of F.W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu—which changed the character names and set the story in Bremen in a bid to evade copyright—and even of London and Broadway stage adaptations by Hamilton Deane and John F. Balderston, which took their own liberties with the novel and established a framework that Browning would work on when he was put in charge of Universal’s Dracula. It cannot have escaped him that Count Dracula had long since escaped from Stoker, who died in 1912, and become—despite the widow Florence Stoker’s waving of writs and claiming of royalties—what we might now call an “open-source” text.

  In Turkey, as in Romania, the name Dracula meant something before 1897 and Stoker’s novel had to compete with the lasting reputation of Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula. It wasn’t until Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally’s In Search of Dracula (1972) that anything much was made of the relationship between the literary and historical Draculas in the Western world—though the lasting influence of this by-no-means-uncontentious book is felt on almost all subsequent literary and film Draculas. In Turkey, the Florescu-McNally contention that Dracula was Vlad the Impaler was old news, cemented by Seyfioğlu’s book. It strikes me, after quite a bit of research, that Stoker mostly just liked the name Dracula and probably knew little about Vlad beyond the skimpy, not-entirely-accurate historical details he mentions (to be fair, his Dracula is an unreliable narrator). Seyfioğlu, writing for a readership with more awareness of Turkish-Romanian history, makes much more of the Vlad connection and, indeed, includes historical details and anecdotes which feature in In Search of Dracula and have been recycled over and over in fiction, documentary, history, and film ever since. How many times have you heard the turbans-nailed-to-heads story or seen the forest-of-impaled-enemies tableau?

  For Bram Stoker, Dracula is an ultimate foreign threat (likened to Attila, a barbarian not only from the geographic East but the historic past) who comes to London with his ill-gotten riches (when stabbed, he bleeds gold coins), apes British manners (memorising railway timetables) and dress (“a straw hat which suit him not”) and sets out to seduce the fairest daughters of Albion (Lucy and Mina). That Stoker, an Irishman, includes an American cowboy and a Dutch Professor in his array of mostly English heroes suggests his own notions of Western civilisation are broader than the average Brit of his day, though Quincy Morris and Dr. Van Helsing are, for all their qualities as stalwart and wise, “funny foreigner” stereotypes too. Seyfioğlu is even more bluntly propagandist. Dracula is an old enemy, and a disgusting threat, and the good guys are all emblematic Turks, free of the flaws (like Dr. Seward’s drug abuse) Stoker allows his heroes. Quincy becomes Özdemir Oğuz, an Anatolian whose swashbuckling outdoorsy persona makes him roughly analogous to a Wild West gunslinger/cowman… while Van Helsing is Resuhî Bey, a Turkish expert in mental illnesses acknowledged even in France as a credit to his nation. Seyfioğlu also has to Islamicize the action, though the Transylvania sections of the book feature Christian crosses as per Stoker—this vampire is seen off by verses from the Koran rather than communion wafers.

  Upon its first appearance, few realized how significant a book Dracula would be. It was respectfully reviewed, sold reasonably well without making its author rich, and lingered in the memory long enough to attract theatre and film adaptors a generation later. Only Bram Stoker’s mother—who might have been prejudiced—suggested that it was an instant horror classic (“Poe is nowhere,” she wrote to Bram). In his lifetime, he was responsible for a cut-and-paste first theater version (supposedly to secure copyright), saw the book translated and reprinted, and might have begun to sense that it would last—though he made few attempts to capitalize on it, despite writing another vampire novel (sort of—The Lady of the Shroud). “Dracula’s Guest,” an offcut from the book, didn’t appear until after his death, when Florence began to sense that Dracula might afford her a widow’s pension. But Dracula remains undead—an evolving, mutating, constantly self-referential multi-media text, yet also a cornerstone contemporary myth. Dracula’s career in English has been thoroughly mapped, but—as John Edgar Browning noted, vast areas beyond that are still unexplored. With this translation of a translation, a significant patch of the collage is filled in. Many more remain.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a text that has had many resurrections and reincarnations around the world, in many languages, through various print and visual media. The novel has endured the eroding effects of time and continues to appeal to radically different readerships than it was initially intended for. Now, in the 21st century, it is stronger than ever, and Count Dracula is a figure recognized by all—even those who have not read the novel or seen the screen versions. It is funny how the book seems to have come closer to what Count Dracula has lost forever: an immortal life—at least for over a century. To me, Dracula’s resilience owes to the way it has let itself be ingested and cannibalized in various translations, adaptations, and rewrites—only to emerge stronger from each ordeal. The Turkish adaptation you are about to read in English translation is only one aspect of the larger Dracula picture, but it is one that perfectly illustrates the transformative power of translation in multiplying the lives of a literary work in different cultures.

  Ali Rıza Seyfioğlu’s Kazıklı Voyvoda, the source text of Dracula in Istanbul: The Unauthorized Version of the Gothic Classic, was published in Istanbul for the first time in Ottoman script in 1928, shortly before the alphabet reform that led to the adoption of Latin letters and irrevocably transformed the cultural landscape in the newly-founded Republic of Turkey. Although a close comparison reveals that the book is indeed a translation of Dracula, it was presented as an original Turkish novel, and Ali Rıza Seyfi (as he was sometimes known) was indicated on the cover as the author. In 1946, the novel was reprinted in the Latin alphabet. The second edition preserved the content and structure of the first edition, while the Ottoman vocabulary was modified to reflect the changes the Turkish language had undergone in the eighteen years that had elapsed. There is no clear information as to why Ali Rıza Seyfi claimed to be the author of the book and why he did not introduce it as a translation. I assume that he considered the text as a fruitful ground upon which he could build a historical novel drawing on Ottoman sources and readily appropriated the structure, plot, and characters of Dracula to further his own literary and ideological aspirations. Moreover, the changes he made to the text were too comprehensive to present it as a conventional translation.

  Kazıklı Voyvoda was not only produced and received as an indigenous novel; it was also adapted to the screen. Ümit Deniz, a popular writer of detective fiction, wrote a script based on Kazıklı Voyvoda, and the film Dracula İstanbul’da (Dracula in Istanbul) was released in 1953. The credit titles of the film explicitly acknowledged Ali Rıza Seyfi as the author of the book. You can read more about the film in the afterword to this book. Kazıklı Voyvoda was reprinted in 1997 under the title Dracula İstanbul’da, this time accompanied by a preface by late Giovanni Scognamillo, who formally identified the translation status of the novel for the first time. Nevertheless, the readers were clearly already aware of this, as the title of the film alluded to Dracula rather than Kazıklı Voyvoda.

  In his translation, Ali Rıza Seyfi renamed the novel Kazıklı Voyvoda and associated it right from the start with an evil figure from Ottoman history.[1] This is a feature that created some auth
enticity and built a historical context for the novel. This context enabled the author to use his translation as a platform through which he relayed his version of Ottoman-Turkish history and addressed a strong nationalist sentiment.

  In Kazıklı Voyvoda, Ali Rıza Seyfi retained the narrative structure of Dracula by keeping the epistolary style and using diary entries as the main narrative tool. The plot is also quite similar to that of Dracula, with the exception of a number of omissions and additions.[2] Ali Rıza Seyfi domesticated the setting and moved the story to Istanbul, while he also gave the characters Turkish names and equipped them with a number of new traits associated with heroism and patriotism. The additions Ali Rıza Seyfi made to the novel mainly served to evoke nationalist feelings in the readership. These additions create a sense of shared history and continuity between the heroic deeds of the former Ottoman army and the Turkish population of the 1920s. The fight against Count Dracula in Stoker’s original novel has often been read as a fight between the good and evil forces of human nature. Ali Rıza Seyfi turns this fight into a national one and has his characters finish off the battles raged against Vlad the Impaler by Ottoman forces centuries ago. In return, these historical references stand as a metaphor for a more recent national struggle—that of the Turkish War of Independence, which had only been over for five years when the novel was first published in Turkey. This subtext can only be understood, and Ali Rıza Seyfi’s adaptation properly appreciated, in the light of these historical facts.

  Ali Rıza Seyfi’s Kazıklı Voyvoda is more than a historical curiosity—it demonstrates the manipulative power of a translator and a translation in its most acute form. Yet, it also recreates Dracula in a new historical and cultural context and by doing so, joins the giant vortex of Dracula representations that breathe new life into the work. We know that Ali Rıza Seyfi was not unique in his attempts at radically rewriting Dracula for a local readership. Among over thirty translations of Dracula (see http://www.cesnur.org/2003/dracula/ for an incomplete list), Kazıklı Voyvoda was not the only version that reigned free and broke the chains of servitude. A recent book[3] tells the story of the first translation of Dracula into any language, the Icelandic Makt Myrkanna (Power of Darkness) by Valdimar Ásmundsson. This translation also features extensive omissions, changes and new elements, as well as new characters inserted into the story. Although there are attempts to explain the changes in this particular translation by the fact that Stoker collaborated with Ásmundsson, the degree of involvement by Stoker is unclear, and the line between the authorial interventions of Stoker and Ásmundsson is blurred. It would not be a surprise to discover similar cases in different languages, since Dracula seems to tease creative imagination and invites its translation through its polyphonic structure and universal motifs.