Translating the Ottoman Grotesque: Hande Eagle’s English Rendition of Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s Ghoulyabânî (2024)
Ghoulyabânî, a humorous social critique first published in 1913 by the prominent Turkish author Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar (1864-1944), is a welcome addition to the corpus of late Ottoman texts available in English translation. Ghoulyabânî, which blends supernatural horror with absurdist comedy and pointed social critique, was written as Book I of Gürpınar’s septology titled “The Complete Works of Peculiarity.” In this work, centered on a maid who goes to live and work in a mansion haunted by ghouls, nothing is as it seems.
In its first full English translation, rendered by Hande Eagle and published by Translation Attached in 2024, the novel emerges not simply as a gothic curiosity from a distant culture but as a lively, unsettling, and modern work of literature. Eagle’s translation is exemplary for its precision, readability, and reflective engagement with the complexities of cultural and linguistic transfer.
Hande Eagle’s translation is rooted in a deep commitment to linguistic fidelity and cultural nuance. Eagle worked mainly from Nilüfer Tanç’s 2021 edition of the original text. In an entry titled, “A Fairy is a Peri, Is a Peri a Fairy” in her blog “Live the Questions Now,” Hande reflects candidly on the challenges she faced in translating a text that resists easy assimilation into genre categories. Her commentary reveals a nuanced approach to lexical decisions, genre conventions, and reader expectations. Eagle’s Translators’ Notes sprinkled throughout the translation, and public reflections make visible the act of negotiation that literary translation demands. These notes provide necessary context without overburdening the reader or breaking narrative flow. Eagle’s editorial sensibility is visible here: she assumes her readers are intelligent and curious, but not necessarily familiar with Ottoman Turkish beliefs or Islamic terminology.
Eagle’s prose style strikes a careful balance between accessibility and period-appropriate diction. She avoids flattening Gürpınar’s satirical tone or archaism, while also steering clear of a faux-Victorian voice that would alienate modern readers. I would strongly recommend that readers who want to get a taste of the novel and the translators style explore the excerpt published on the Translation Attached Website (Chapter 3), a scene involving rural servants terrified by tales of ghouls and spirits is provided, with both humor and tension. Eagle’s translation preserves the theatricality of the characters’ speech and the eerie absurdity of their surroundings. For example, the cook’s alarmed chatter contrasts sharply with Ayşe Hanım’s rationalist dismissals—an opposition that Eagle captures not only through vocabulary but through syntax and rhythm. These class and temperament distinctions are crucial to the novel’s satire, and Eagle conveys them with subtlety.
What makes this translation particularly valuable is Eagle’s dual function as both literary translator and critical interlocutor. Her public writing, including the “Translator’s Foreword,” and the essays posted to her website, offers readers an open window onto the decisions that shape the final text. In this sense, the translation itself becomes a valuable tool for students and scholars of Turkish literature and translation studies.
This translation will be of particular interest to scholars of late Ottoman literature, folklore, and gender satire, as well as to general readers interested in ghost stories with a bite. It stands as a welcome contribution to the field of world literature in translation.
Roberta Micallef
August 1, 2025