The literary perspective of cultural distance: from Istanbul to Toledo

Abstract

The article offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the mutual literary reception between Turkey and Spain, focusing on the mechanisms through which the image of the Other is constructed in contemporary Turkish discourse and on the specific features characterizing the reception of Turkish literature in the Spanish cultural environment. The study demonstrates that the image of Spain in the works of Orhan Pamuk functions as a key symbol of an “alternative Europe,” one that combines emotional warmth, historical multilayeredness, and the memory of cross-cultural coexistence most vividly embodied in Andalusia. Spain emerges not as a geographically concrete location, but as an imagined metaphorical topography through which the Turkish novelist articulates Turkish identity within the paradigm of East–West ambivalence. An examination of Elif Shafak’s poetics reveals that the author integrates elements of Spanish and Latin American baroque, magical realism, and intertextual resonances with Cervantes, Borges, and García Márquez, thereby constructing a transcultural narrative model that resonates strongly with Spanish readerships. The article further traces the dynamics of the reception of Spanish-language literature in Turkey, emphasizing the role of translation as a tool of intercultural mediation and as a mechanism for adapting Spanish aesthetic codes to the Turkish context. Translations of Cervantes, the Spanish Golden Age playwrights, and the modern prose of Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel García Márquez establish parallels between Spanish and Turkish cultural spheres, both of which share the experience of post-imperial transformation, historical ruptures, and the search for models of modernization. Special attention is given to the ways in which perceptions of Turkey in Spain are often shaped through orientalist clichés, which nonetheless coexist with a growing interest in the complex multicultural identity of Turkish society. Ultimately, the article argues that Turkey and Spain—despite their geographical and cultural distance—constitute a shared symbolic space of “peripheral Europe,” within which an active transcultural dialogue unfolds, grounded in reciprocal literary projections, mutual curiosity, and the reconfiguration of imagined geographies.