In 1943, the major Turkish author Sabahattin Ali published his novel "The Madonna in the Fur Coat," about a chance meeting in Weimar Berlin between a Turkish student named Raif and a German Jewish cabaret singer and painter, Maria Puder. Their tragic love affair takes them through the palace of Sansouci, the winter forests around the Wannsee Lake, debaucherous post-War New Year's bashes at Berlin's lavish dancehalls, and the dark back streets around the Tiergarten park. And yet, this work by a major Turkish literary figure of the twentieth century remained unavailable to German or English readers until it was translated into German in 2008, sixty five years after it was written. Now, German Studies Professor David Gramling and Turkish Studies Master's Candidate İlker Hepkaner are making the novel available in English, with its rich Ottoman language and texture in tow. Hepkaner presents a talk on the task of translating Turkish Berlin from the 1920s for twenty-first century readers.
