Burcu Karahan's recently published collection of short stories features this translator's note. Following the translator's note is "A Lesson of Love," a story Karahan translates in the collection and mentions in her translator's note. 

I’ve spent a good part of the last two years transcribing and translating One Thousand and One Kisses, a collection of sixty-five delightfully risqué short stories first published in Istanbul between 1923 and 1924, just as the Ottoman Empire was dissolving and the modern Turkish Republic was coming into being. Issued weekly by Amedi Publishing House, these anonymous tales blend humor, eroticism, and satire, which may help explain why they were so wildly popular in their time.

I had known the series for nearly two decades, having worked on it on and off. From the beginning, I was aware of the rumors that linked One Thousand and One Kisses to Mehmet Rauf, a well-known author of the period who had published what is often considered the first Ottoman pornographic novel, Bir Zambağın Hikâyesi (The Story of a Lily) (1910), and had faced legal consequences as a result. Still, no solid evidence connects him directly to this series. I was also aware, just by reading the stories in the collection, that several of them were either adapted from or inspired by European originals—French or English—though most had been Ottomanized in voice and setting. But encountering these stories as a reader or researcher is quite different from approaching them as a translator. Translation demands not just appreciation, but reanimation, and translating erotic texts, in particular, presents unique challenges, not least because the very idea of eroticism can vary widely across cultures.

As is often the case with erotica, and likely, in part, to sidestep legal trouble, One Thousand and One Kisses leans heavily on elusive, seemingly ordinary words that teeter on the edge of decorum and mischief. These terms resist direct translation: they’re provocative, playful, and deeply embedded in cultural context, making them difficult to render cleanly into English. The challenge is compounded by the presence of French vocabulary and other linguistic traces in some of the adapted stories, adding yet another layer of translingual complexity. In especially such cases, translation is never simply about finding lexical equivalents for expressions of desire or pleasure. The real task is to recreate the emotional and cultural effect those words have on the reader, an effect shaped by tone, context, and expectation.

It was precisely this uneasy negotiation embedded in the stories that made the translation journey both joyful and illuminating for me. Each slippery word or phrase felt like a small puzzle waiting to be solved, a linguistic and cultural mystery that I, as a scholar of 19th-century literature, was more than eager to unravel.

I would like to share with you two different examples of such words. Take, for example, the story “Müjgan’s Pussycat” (“Müjgan’in Kedisi” in the original Ottoman Turkish). The word kedi (cat) in Turkish is not commonly used as a euphemism for female genitalia, as it is in French (chatte) or English (pussy). Yet in this story, that euphemism was clearly intended. The deliberate choice to not replace kedi with a more culturally recognizable slang term in Ottoman Turkish suggests two things: first, that the story was either inspired by or directly adapted from a European source; and second, more intriguingly, that the erotic lexicon already included imported terms, familiar enough to contemporary readers in Istanbul that no further localization was needed. The joke, in other words, landed without explanation because these cross-cultural borrowings were already part of the shared vocabulary of the genre.

Another word that intrigued me, but also proved quite challenging in translation, was merkez, Ottoman Turkish for “center” (from the Arabic markaz). While merkez generally means the central or most important part of a place or thing, it carries a range of other meanings depending on context: it can refer to the administrative seat of a city or province, the headquarters of an institution, a center of decision-making power, or, colloquially, even a police station. But none of these conventional meanings applied when I encountered merkez in the story “Aşk Dersi” (“A Lesson of Love”), during a flirtatious exchange between Ferit and İclal, a young married woman he is trying to seduce. When Ferit begins repeating himself, İclal chides him, half-scolding, half-flirting: “You’re joking. You are an eloquent speaker, capable of explaining yourself. Or do you have no tongue?” To which Ferit replies, “My tongue? I have a tongue, hanımefendi, and it is ever ready for the merkez.”

Even if the meaning of merkez in this context were ambiguous, İclal’s coquettish laughter in the next line clarifies everything. “Let’s not go that far,” she says. “I just want you to explain your theory.” Clearly, Ferit’s mention of his tongue being ready for the merkez was considered not just flirtatious, it was sexually suggestive, enough so that İclal felt compelled to draw a boundary.

At first, I was puzzled. I had read my fair share of late Ottoman erotica, yet I had never encountered merkez used as a euphemism for female genitalia. How, then, had a word with no prior erotic connotation found its way into such a provocatively charged context and ended up at the center of a scene so clearly suggestive of oral sex? Was this an isolated instance—a clever, one-off coinage by the author? A playful twist on language? Or was it something subtler: a borrowed euphemism transformed through the act of translation; its erotic charge carried across languages and cultures?

“Center” in English, or centre in French, carries no such connotation either. This is to say that the case of merkez was not as linguistically transparent as, say, “pussycat.” But then I remembered something from Mehmet Rauf’s preface to The Story of a Lily, which I had translated years ago. There, Rauf describes female genitalia as the thing around which the entire world revolves. At the time, that metaphor immediately brought to mind Gustave Courbet’s famous 1866 painting L’Origine du monde, commissioned by Halil Bey, the Ottoman ambassador to St. Petersburg and a notorious art collector in Paris. The painting shows a nude woman lying on a bed, legs apart, her vagina positioned squarely at the center of the painting, visually and thematically echoing its title.

Clearly, the fame of the painting had traveled well beyond the velvet curtains of Halil Bey’s private salon in Paris where it was exhibited. Its symbolism, the female sex as the origin or center of the world, had made its way to Istanbul. What intrigued me even more was how the French origine may have subtly transformed into merkez in Ottoman Turkish, not through direct translation (since centre in the title of Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Voyage au centre de la Terre was translated into Ottoman Turkish as merkez “Merkez-i Arza Seyahat” in 1886), but through a conceptual shift.

In Ferit’s line, then, merkez isn’t just a cheeky euphemism. It’s an allusion to a broader, almost philosophical metaphor of womanhood as origin, as core. And yet translating it literally as “center” or “origin”—as in “my tongue is ready for the center”—would fail to carry either the flirtation or the meaning. In the end, I chose “core”: a word that keeps the innuendo, evokes centrality, and leaves a slight veil over the exact reference, just as the original does: “My tongue? I have a tongue, hanımefendi, and it is ever ready to serve the core of all things.”

In the end, tracing the layered meanings of merkez felt like my own little voyage au centre d’un mot: a journey to the slippery core of a single word. In that word’s surprising erotic charge, echoing both Courbet’s L’Origine du monde and Mehmet Rauf’s metaphors of feminine centrality, I found myself inching closer to the mysterious figure behind the series. Perhaps the old rumors weren’t entirely unfounded. Perhaps Mehmet Rauf, with his fondness for erotica, veiled metaphors, and his fondness for the origin of the world, really was the mastermind behind One Thousand and One Kisses. In that sense, translating merkez didn’t just clarify a line, it cracked open a door.

A LESSON OF LOVE

For the past three weeks, Ferit Hazım Bey, renowned among women for his boundless accomplishments, has been pursuing Dilber İclal Hanım. Until now, İclal has always rebuffed the advances of all her admirers; despite the occasional rumors circulating about her, she has never yielded her will to any man other than her husband. However, Ferit Hazım is confident that his reputation for being irresistible will compel İclal to surrender. To help matters, İclal’s husband left for İzmir on a business trip last week, leaving the young woman naturally vulnerable and weakened by the pangs of loneliness.

The current scene unfolded in a Şişli salon, during a five o’clock tea hosted by a mutual friend. The salon was half-shrouded in the pale darkness typical of winter evenings, and the guests were clustered in small groups, engaged in lively conversation, laughing and exchanging juicy morsels of gossip. Seizing the opportunity presented by the commotion caused by the arrival of a new guest, Ferit approached İclal Hanım, who was sitting alone on the sofa, and addressed her:

“May I have the honor of accompanying you, hanımefendi?”

İclal Hanım, appearing somewhat fatigued by the persistent attention of this young man who had been pursuing her through various means, resignedly responded, “If you wish…”

Ferit Hazım settled onto a low pouf beside the sofa and said, “Rest assured, hanımefendi, that I shall not only be pleased, but also deeply delighted and grateful.” Hoping to steer the conversation into safer waters, the young woman inquired, “What occupies your evenings, Hazım Bey?”

Seizing every opportunity with a unique and finely honed arrogance, Ferit Hazım said, “I think of you, hanımefendi. I think of you, I yearn for you, wondering, ‘Where is she, how can I catch a glimpse of her?’” İclal swiftly countered this with a somewhat stern tone, “Then you’re lamenting in vain and sighing without a cause.”

“Yet,” Ferit Hazım continued, “I find solace in observing you from afar, even if by chance for a couple of days each week and drawing nearer to hear your voice whenever the opportunity presents itself.” The young woman responded with a forced laugh, “Should I perceive this as a compliment, or how should I interpret it, I wonder…” Ferit Hazım retorted, “Interpret it as you wish; know this: I love you.” Suddenly, İclal grew quite agitated and exclaimed, “Yes, yes, it is obvious! You love me. You repeat it incessantly at every turn. But it would be better if you could change your tune.” Flashing a charming smile beneath his exquisite mustache, Ferit replied, “I worship you.”

“If that’s your best attempt, I see you lack imagination. I love you; I adore you; I burn for you… These are the verses you recite repeatedly!”

“Oh, hanımefendi, please pray tell, how else should a gentleman convey his feelings to the lady who holds his heart? In matters of love, one often finds solace in repetition; there’s no alternative.”

“He repeats the same words and employs the same tactics, does he not?”

Ferit replied, “That, hanımefendi, is where you’re mistaken. Not all actions are the same. Just as individuals differ, so do their methods.” İclal, fixing her bright eyes on him in a flash of curiosity, inquired, “How so? Aren’t all tactics similar in matters of love?”

“In marriage, perhaps… I mean, reserved family men remain as such even in their affections toward their wives. But in love – an unrestrained, fervent, genuine love – could it ever be so predictable?”

İclal stirred with crystalline laughter, “Oh, now, you’ve piqued my interest. Pray tell, how do they manage it?”

Ferit Hazım, encouraged by İclal’s intrigue, smiled triumphantly, “This is precisely what I seek to convey to you, yet you remain indifferent and unmoved. If you’re open to it…”

“Of course, I am.”

“Where shall I teach you?”

“Right here.”

“What, here, in front of all these people?”

“What’s the problem? Did you misunderstand my words?”

“I’m afraid so. Let’s be frank, hanımefendi, what is it that you want?”

Flashing an irresistible coquettish smile, İclal Hanım looked at Ferit with sparks of passion in her eyes that would drive any young man wild with hope, and said, “I want the instructions you promised. But please, do not misunderstand my words. The instructions… How should I put it, the oral instructions. I don’t want you to actually demonstrate them.”

“But that’s not possible. I need to personally demonstrate them.”

“You’re joking. You are an eloquent speaker, capable of explaining yourself. Or do you have no tongue?”

“My tongue? I have a tongue, hanımefendi, and it is ever ready to serve the core of all things.”

İclal let out another coquettish laugh at his flirtatious suggestion. “This, this…let’s not go that far. I just want you to explain your theory.”

“But you won’t get it from the oral description.”

İclal responded with a heart-grabbing smile, “Who knows? Maybe I will like your description and then…” Wild with joy, Ferit Hazım exclaimed, “Then you will want to do it?”

İclal gave him an enigmatic smile and said, “Perhaps.”

Ferit took a deep sigh of relief, hopeful of finally getting closer to his desires. “Thank you,” he said. İclal objected, “No need for thanks yet. If you rush like this, you will probably regret it.”

“On the contrary, I’m sure I won’t.”

Acting ambiguously, İclal said, “Who knows,” and after a brief silence added, “Come on now, I am waiting.” Ferit Hazım’s eyes blazed with fiery lust as he moved closer to İclal. He began to whisper to his marveling listener the most secret, most poignant mysteries of love, describing in the clearest and most detailed way how a woman, the instrument of pleasure and lust, could be brought into a frenzied ecstasy; how a woman, delicate and ardent such as herself, could be made trembling with desire. The young woman first grew pink, then blushed, then turned crimson. At last, her body was weak, overwhelmed by tumultuous tremors.

When the lesson was over, İclal’s eyes were drowned in a deep wave of admiration. “Wonderful! Truly wonderful, Hazım Bey. You are indeed a first-class teacher on this matter.”

“So you liked my explanation?”

“It was far beyond a mere explanation.”

“Do you feel a desire to try it out?”

İclal could only say, “Yes.” Her voice was raspy, her eyes languid. Filled with mad joy, Ferit Hazım asked, “When, but when?”

“As soon as possible. But unfortunately, my husband won’t be back until tomorrow. I am sure he will be delighted.”

Ferit Hazım turned red. “But, what? Will you try it out with him?” he managed to ask. İclal had a mischievous look. “But what did you think? Of course, with him,” she replied.

“What about me?”

“Just try to be happy at the thought of it. That’s all. Isn’t it enough for you? Someone else will enjoy the rewards of your lesson.”