The first Turkish translation of the hugely influential Carlo Cafiero abridgement of the first volume of Kapital, originally published in Italian in 1879, it was one of the earliest abridgements of Kapital and was much admired by Marx himself.
The translation was undertaken by the Turkish journalist, academic and politician Suphi Nuri Ileri (1887-1945), an influential public figure in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. He founded the newspaper Ileri with his older brother Celal Nuri (1881- 1938) and served as the General Secretary of the Turkish Socialist Party (Türkiye Sosyalist Partisi). He was the author of several books on socialism, including one on the Spanish Civil War, and was a lecturer at Istanbul University Faculty of Law from 1931 until 1945, when he was dismissed for his socialist writings. Suphi Nuri’s translation was based on the 1910 French edition of Cafiero’s abridgement by the Swiss anarchist James Guillaume, and also included a five-page Afterword by Suphi Nuri himself.
Suphi Nuri Ileri’s translation was published in direct response to the first book-length appearance of Kapital in Turkish, a translation of the famous Gabriel Deville abridgement by Haydar Rifat published three years earlier in 1933. In a testament to the partisan nature of much left-wing politics, Rifat’s translation proved to be immediately controversial, sparking a series of critiques by various Turkish socialist intellectuals regarding accuracy of translation and conformity to Marxist orthodoxy.
It would also prompt a series of rival translations, the first of which was the present translation of the Cafiero abridgement, followed in the same year by a thirty-two page summary by the Turkish Communist Nevzat Cerrahlar, under the pseudonym Kerim Sadi, drawn from Paul Lafargue’s 1893 French abridgement. Yet another Turkish abridgement was serialised in 1937 by Hikmet Kivilcimli (1902-1971), an influential Turkish Communist and original Marxist theorist in his own right.
“This rather feverish activity of translating Kapital into Turkish, albeit in abridged form, which saw four translations in the five-year period from 1933 to 1937 came to an abrupt end in 1938. Turkey had been moving for some time away from the Soviet Union and towards Nazi Germany, a trend that would last until the final years of World War II. This culminated in a series of attacks on the Turkish Communist movement. In 1938, the one-party regime proceeded to ban certain Marxist works that had been published in preceding years. Kapital was among the list of prohibited works.” (Savran & Tonak, p. 4).
A variant issue of the present translation of the Cafiero abridgement appeared in the same year accompanied by a selection of illustrations by the Hungarian-American artist Hugo Gellert reproduced from his work Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs, originally published in Paris as a portfolio of sixty-two plates in 1933 and in New York as a book edition the following year. We have been unable to establish any precedence between the two issues. The text was republished in 1965.
Rare, no doubt largely owing to the suppression of socialist literature in Turkey from 1938 onwards. OCLC list a single copy, held by Bogaziçi University in Turkey, the record for which makes reference to illustrations. There is also a copy of illustrated variant at the Baker Library, Harvard.
See: Savran & Tonak, ‘Marx’s Capital in Turkey’; Konca, ‘The Turkish Retranslations of Marx’s Das Kapital as a Site of Intellectual and Ideological Struggle’.
