The authors are thankful to Deniz Malaymar for her valuable comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

On the 12^th of August 2022, the novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed at an education centre in New York, where he was expected to deliver a lecture. The attempt on the author’s life forms part of an extended cycle of violence propelled by the troubled reception of Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). The novel is a complex work of literature that engages with themes such as love, migration, fragmented identity, and life in the metropolis (Kuortti, 2007). It also ludically engages, however, with the biography of Prophet Muhammad, and can thus be read as an irreverent “religious satire” (Al-Raheb, 1995, p. 330). The book was widely branded as blasphemous, a perception which resulted in “mass protests and public book burnings” in the UK, Pakistan and India, as well as in a fatwa declared by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, which called for the death of “Rushdie and all those involved with the publication” (Ranasinha, 2007, p. 46). Ramone (2013) notes that during the 1990s the effect of the fatwa was felt “most severely” (p. 12) in the domain of translation, as attacks targeted publishers and translators in several countries, including Norway, Italy and Japan. In an article responding to the recent Rushdie stabbing, Time magazine makes reference to those attacks and informs readers of their often tragic outcome: “The Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, succumbed to his injuries, and dozens were killed in a fire resulting from the attempt on the life of Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator” (Zornosa, 2022).

In this article, we discuss in more detail the case of Aziz Nesin and his entanglement in what is known as the Sivas massacre, which took place in July 1993. Our study of this event seeks to examine the relationship between acts of intercultural mediation and outbursts of collective violence. We approach this relationship with reference to the work of René Girard, whose writings on scapegoating and sacrificial violence seek to account for the multifaceted interaction between human aggression and imitation. The academic impact of Girard’s work is immense and “has extended across a remarkably wide range of disciplines”, including “literary theory, anthropology, philosophy, classical studies, and psychology” (Fleming, 2004, p. 2). In translation studies, however, what is commonly called Girard’s mimetic theory has not found broad application, as illustrated by the scant references to his work documented in the BITRA database1. Likewise, despite its concern for a broad range of imitative practices, Girard’s work lacks sustained reflections on translation. Such reflections are also scarce in Contagion, the main journal dedicated to the cross-disciplinary critical development of mimetic theory’s “explanatory power” (Johnsen, 2018, p. v). We seek to address this mutual lacuna by examining whether Girard’s work can elucidate the role of translators as victims as well as potential catalysts of collective violence. More generally, we argue that studies concerned with the intersection of translation, narrative framing and violent conflict can benefit from a confrontation with insights from mimetic theory. We first provide a general outline of Girard’s main hypotheses about the social dynamics of scapegoating, before proceeding to discuss the mob violence at Sivas, drawing attention to the discrepancies in framing observed across audiovisual footage, news media and research reports. A central feature of this discussion is the consolidation of a narrative that presents, as the main motivation for the violence, Nesin’s translation of the Satanic Verses, despite the lack of evidence that this act of translation ever took place.

Mimetic desire, scapegoating, and the social position of translators

Girard (1987, 2005) proposes that in any social group, human desires are not primarily guided by autonomous choice or predilection but by the desires of others. People learn by imitation, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills is typically facilitated by a model, another person who serves as a mediator in relation to a particular domain of experience. The mediator, however, does not only shape what one knows and does but also what one wants. People come to covet the objects and positions to which their models attach value, and thus desire is likely to turn models into rivals. Conflicts ensue that may turn violent, and because mimetic relationships guide the behaviour of entire social groups, violence can spread and escalate rapidly. The state of disorder is only resolved when a group’s mimetic gaze converges on a single individual, who is perceived as uniquely responsible for the community’s distress (Potolsky, 2006, p. 149). Such an individual, a scapegoat, is seen as the sole embodiment of behaviours and tensions that are, in fact, shared among all. In an act of collective violence, the scapegoat may be expelled from the community or put to death. Unanimous participation in this sacrificial process restores order, insofar as the group truly believes that they have rid themselves of a malignant element. This belief is enough to dissipate tensions, and consequently the act of scapegoating is interpreted not only as warranted, but also as beneficial.

According to Girard, acts of collective violence are fundamentally constitutive of a broad range of mythological and religious narratives, and the workings of mimetic desire are a crucial driving force in the development of any human culture (Girard, 1987, 2005). He argues that the profound importance of collective violence as a foundational cultural practice has gone largely unrecognized because its traces are routinely concealed. The reason for this concealment is the perceived effectiveness of the violence: if peace is suddenly restored after a victim’s death, this confirms not only the scapegoat’s responsibility for the preceding state of disorder in a particular community but also its divine power to effect social harmony. Consequently, the murder becomes scandalous and is gradually discursively camouflaged, while the victim partially sheds its detestable qualities, which are replaced with descriptions that inspire reverence and deference. To illustrate this point, Girard provides a parodical retelling of the story of Oedipus, the crippled ‘tragic hero’ and exiled king of Thebes, in which the character is stripped of his respectable ‘Greek clothing’:

Harvests are bad, the cows give birth to dead calves; no one is on good terms with anyone else. It is as if a spell had been cast on the village. Clearly, it is the cripple who is the cause. He arrived one fine morning, no one knows from where, and made himself at home. He even took the liberty of marrying the most obvious heiress in the village and had two children by her. All sorts of things seemed to take place in their house. The stranger was suspected of having killed his wife’s former husband, a sort of local potentate, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was rather too quickly replaced by the newcomer. One day the fellows in the village had had enough; they took their pitchforks and forced the disturbing character to clear out. (Girard, 1986, pp. 28–29)

Girard insists that any reader will understand that it is unlikely that “the cripple” committed the crimes he will eventually be accused of. Nevertheless, the myth of Oedipus is commonly interpreted as a meditation on the inescapability of fate, or as a narrative thematizing a supposed universal human proclivity for parricide and incest, the main social transgressions attributed to the character of Oedipus (Freud, 1949, p. 60). In Girard’s view, a much more straightforward explanation is that the story presents an account of collective violence unleashed on a somewhat arbitrary target. He proposes that potential misreadings of historical, religious and mythological narratives proliferate in this manner because stories tend to be told not from the perspective of the victim but in accordance with “persecutors’ representations of persecution” (Girard, 1986, p. 101). We can recognize such representations, however, exactly because victims of persecution are typically subjected to a range of predictable accusations which are closely related to deep-rooted social taboos: the scapegoat is, for instance, likely to be accused of violent sexual crimes such as rape, incest or bestiality (Girard, 1986, p. 17). They may also be accused of religious crimes such as sacrilege or blasphemy, and the transgression is generally depicted as severe enough to threaten the entire social body. Since the victim is held solely responsible for a myriad of tensions that were already present within a particular community, they may well have committed crimes, but this is not a prerequisite for persecution (Girard, 2005, p. 4). Once a victim is singled out, reasons for its condemnation will be found, and once the violence sets in, such reasons need no longer be provided.

The question of guilt, then, is secondary to the scapegoat’s suitability for sacrifice. Indeed, victimization does not proceed completely at random, as persecutors tend to select victims on the basis of a perceived abnormality, such as madness, deformity, disability or illness (Girard, 1986, p. 18). Beyond physical aberrations from the norm, scapegoats may also be selected on the basis of social criteria: the further one’s status deviates from the average “the greater the risk of persecution” (Girard, 1986, p. 18), so that extreme wealth and power are as likely as complete destitution to attract the ire of the crowd. Both the beggar and the king are common targets of collective violence. Beyond individual characteristics, group identification can play an important role in scapegoating, as is evident in the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities (Girard, 1986, p. 17). This factor indicates that scapegoating can target multiple victims simultaneously, as long as they are perceived to form part of a single, identifiable entity. The likelihood of persecution is also heightened for certain occupations: metal workers in preindustrial societies, for instance, wielded materials that offered the promise of both protection and destruction, and their forge, a potential source of weaponry, was therefore relegated to a community’s “outer boundaries” (Girard, 2005, p. 276). Indeed, the central criterion is the position of the victim neither within nor outside the community: slaves, prisoners of war, domesticated animals and children who are not yet initiated into a defined social role are therefore all at higher risk of being subjected to collective violence, either spontaneously or as part of institutionalized sacrificial rituals (Girard, 2005, p. 284).

The prototypical characteristics of the scapegoat are remarkably similar to the observed profile of translators and interpreters across a variety of historical and cultural settings (Baker, 2002). People from ethnic minorities, often captured in the process of war or colonization and relegated to the status of servants or slaves, have played a central historical role as facilitators of intercultural communication. As Baker (2002, pp. 8–10) notes, cross-cultural research on the status of interpreters points towards seemingly enigmatic discrepancies and fluctuations: a profession often occupied by social rejects and derelicts can nevertheless come to attract ample respect and privilege, and even develop into a protected, hereditary occupation of considerable prestige. The dual status of the interpreter is highly similar to that of the metal worker, and can be explained in similar fashion: interpreters, especially in their capacity to direct communication flows in times of conflict, wield a force that is associated with both reconciliation and threat, a force that can both engender violence or keep it at bay, and which thus evokes both awe and distrust. In the twenty-first century, war zone interpreters continue to occupy a highly volatile position. They can form a strong bond with the military unit they accompany and earn a high degree of respect, but they remain “fictive kin” rather than “legitimate members” of the group in which they operate, and they are likely to be under continual suspicion of “working as double agents or spies” (Inghilleri, 2010, p. 179).

While the embodied presence of the military interpreter presents a focused image of risk and vulnerability, the ambiguous position of the intercultural mediator is in no sense restricted to war zone interpreting. As Apter (2007) observes, “even under peaceful conditions, translators naturally arouse suspicion” (p. 96). Indeed, it has been repeatedly argued that mediators of both the spoken and the written word operate within a transformative space that is characterized, either concretely or metaphorically, by “in-betweenness” and “liminality”, transitional states that can perturb the structural stability of individual identity and the self-evidence of social organization, and which thus pose a general “threat to order” (Guldin, 2020, pp. 10–13). It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the term liminality, increasingly called upon to describe the translator’s positioning, was coined to support anthropological reflections on rites of passage, which frequently involve ceremonial violence (van Gennep, 1960). In sum, the figure of the translator takes up a social function that is, by all indications, prone to attract collective violence. In what follows, we detail a historical case that seems to confirm this proposition, namely the Sivas massacre and its relationship to the figure of Aziz Nesin, the rumoured translator of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

The Sivas massacre, the Satanic Verses, and the news media

The Turkish writer Aziz Nesin had been in public view long before controversy erupted around the Satanic Verses. Throughout his life (1915-1995), Nesin experienced cycles of expulsion and imprisonment. He was discharged from the military at the request of his subordinates, after which he worked at a newspaper office that was accused of communism and destroyed by an angry mob in 1945 (Uğurlu, 2015, p. 16). Shortly after, he became heavily involved in Markopaşa, a “satirical political newspaper” (Malaymar, 2021, p. 49). Like other contributors to the paper, Nesin was incarcerated for his writings several times, and was ultimately exiled from Istanbul to the city of Bursa (Uğurlu, 2015, p. 18). Notably, he also faced several lawsuits originating from outside Turkey’s borders: Nesin was imprisoned for six months after charges were brought against him in relation to a 1948 article insulting both the King of Egypt and the Shah of Iran (Uğurlu, 2015, p. 20). A 1977 foreword to his autobiography states that “Aziz Nesin has today almost reached the point of being a folk ‘hero’ with his satire. He represents an unprecedented victory of the written word in exposing intolerance, cruelty, and stupidity in our rapidly changing society” (Kıray, 1977, p. vii). Mübeccel Kıray, the sociologist who wrote the foreword, seems to intuit, with remarkable clarity and long before the events at Sivas, Nesin’s potential suitability as a scapegoat, tragically fit to be sacrificed at the height of a burgeoning social crisis; there is a thin line between exposing a society’s tensions and embodying them. The scare quotes employed around ‘hero’ furthermore reveal, in all simplicity, Nesin’s status as an ambivalently framed, marked man.

In July 1993, Nesin was one among dozens of artists and musicians gathered in the Turkish city of Sivas on the occasion of a cultural festival named after Pir Sultan Abdal, a venerated figure in the Alevi religious tradition, who was reportedly hanged in the sixteenth century for “religious heterodoxy and political subversion” (O’Connell, 2013). Many of the festival’s attendees stayed at the Madımak Hotel. On the 2^nd of July, after Friday prayers, a crowd reportedly departed from several mosques, swelled in the streets, marched on the hotel and set it on fire. Thirty-seven people were killed, and many others wounded. Audiovisual footage of the violent mob is available online, as part of an episode of the Turkish documentary series Son Darbe: 28 Şubat (32. Gün, 2020). The footage, as aired on television in 2012, is necessarily fragmented and selective, given that the event unfolded over several hours and involved a crowd reportedly numbering in the thousands. It can nevertheless provide an approximate impression of events.

The video material as presented by Mehmet Ali Birand for Son Darbe: 28 Şubat shows, firstly, that half-hearted and confused attempts at dispersion by the military were ineffective. A group of soldiers stands surrounded by the mob and is subjected to mocking chants such as “Send the soldiers to Bosnia!” (asker Bosna’ya!) and “The military cannot shield the godless!” (Allahsıza asker siper olamaz!).2 The first statement refers to the Bosnian war, a conflict that was ongoing at the time of the Sivas festival, and which was widely “comprehended as religious in nature” (Flere, 2014, p. 33). Thus, the crowd in part aligns itself with an international religious community, but its positioning can also be understood in the twentieth-century Turkish context, and thus in terms of long-standing tensions between “Muslim society” and the “secular nation-state” (Keyman, 2007 p. 216). Further voices from the crowd confirm the relevance of this axis of polarization: “Turkey is Islamic, and will remain Islamic!” (Türkiye İslamdır, İslam kalacak!); “Down with secularism!” (Kahrolsun laiklik!). It does not take long for the crowd to demand violence. A curse is repeatedly voiced: “May the hands that encroach on Islam be broken!” (İslam’a uzanan eller kırılsın!). Stones are thrown, and the Madımak Hotel is set on fire under the roaring encouragement of the mob: “Burn! Burn! Burn!” (Yak! Yak! Yak!). A man is heard shouting “My God, this is your fire, send it inside!” (Allah’ım bu senin ateşin! İçeriye gönder!). The violence seems to be directed at one person in particular, namely Aziz Nesin, who is the target of several threats and condemnations: “Aziz the Devil!” (Aziz Şeytan!); “Sivas will be Aziz’s grave!” (Sivas Aziz’e mezar olacak!).

The exclamations reveal a number of concerns that occupy the mob, but condemnation figures more prominently than accusation, and there seems to be no single, coherent motivation for the violence. Presumably, the artists at the Madımak Hotel are representatives of neither secularism nor Satan, but in the midst of the turmoil this no longer matters. A major outburst of violence, however, tends to make the global news. The international press must present events coherently and concisely for a readership expecting a narrative that clearly connects cause and effect. The Sivas massacre was widely covered in the UK and the US, and while many newspapers base themselves on a shared template released by the Associated Press (AP), there are subtle but significant differences in how the violence is framed. The Gainesville Sun (“Rampaging Muslims kill 40”, 1993) writes that “rioters were angered by the alleged atheism of the writers, who were commemorating a sixteenth century poet hanged for his defiance of Ottoman oppression”. The Lakeland Ledger (“40 die as rioters burn hotel”, 1993) features the exact same statement but also notes the escape of “Aziz Nesin, a prominent leftist author and the fundamentalists’ main target”. The Albany Herald (“Muslim rampage kills 35”, 1993) and The Telegraph (“Muslim extremists attack gathering”, 1993) report that a government representative “blamed the left-wing writer, Aziz Nesin, for the rampage, saying he provoked the public by openly flaunting his atheism in a speech on Thursday”. The Day (“35 killed in attack in Turkey”, 1993) makes no mention of a speech but prominently states that “Muslim extremists set fire to a hotel hosting leftist writers, including an author who published excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’”.

Some of the mob’s concerns are repeatedly reported on while others disappear from view. Political constraints are likely to have guided this process of selective appropriation: a number of articles draw on reports from Turkish state media, which may have opted, for instance, to focus on the issue of atheism rather than secularism in order to avoid accentuating the complex embedding of secular values in Turkish society. Beyond such framing decisions, another factor merits attention: most of the early newspaper reports do mention Nesin, but do not identify him as the translator of The Satanic Verses. From Nesin’s own writings on the subject, it also appears that he did not, in fact, translate the book; rather, in response to a government ban on the publication and import of the work, he facilitated the publication of excerpts from and commentaries on the novel in Aydınlık, a magazine which he edited (Nesin, 1993, pp. 15–18). From the very beginning, delivering a straightforward account of Nesin’s role proved difficult. An article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune mentions in one paragraph his publication of excerpts from the novel and his role as an editor, and in another focuses on his speech before the events but nevertheless first speaks of “the Turkish translator of Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’”. A pull quote from the article (Pope, 1993b, italics in original), printed in large italic font, emphasizes this reading by quoting a reporter as stating: “People were very angry that the man who translated ‘The Satanic Verses’ was in the town”.

Today, approximately 30 years after the event, the version of the narrative which identifies Nesin as the translator and the version which presents him as an auxiliary agent in a partial translation process co-exist. In both the academic literature and major international news publications, the phrase ‘The Turkish translator’ is used to refer to Nesin uncritically (Ramone, 2013, p. 12; Zornosa, 2022). In contrast, a recent report on parliamentary reactions to the Sivas massacre, published by a Turkish research institute, more cautiously indicates that Nesin “stated that he would translate and publish” the Satanic Verses, but does not further elaborate on the act of translation (Şerali, 2022, p. 3). Yet, even when caution is applied, the line between reported allegation and statement of fact is easily blurred. In response to the 2022 Rushdie stabbing, the major Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet (“Son Dakika”, 2022) wrote online that in 1993, reactionaries justified the violence by referring to “Nesin’s translation of the book The Satanic Verses” (Nesin’in çevirdiği Şeytan Ayetleri kitabını...). While the newspaper clearly distances itself from the accusers, it is not clear whether or not it accords truth to the accusation itself.

The gradual consolidation of the version that decidedly figures Nesin as the translator of The Satanic Verses can of course be ascribed to a number of factors, including the need for communicative economy, unjustified trust in singular sources, and the cognitive appeal of a clear pattern, for instance in relation to the broader targeting of Rushdie’s translators. Nevertheless, these factors do not suffice to explain the primary framing of Nesin as a translator rather than as an author, publisher, public speaker or political agitator. All these roles are shared with Rushdie and provide parallels that could potentially be related to the persecution of Nesin, as illustrated by their mention in early newspaper articles reporting on the massacre. Perhaps Nesin’s role as a translator is accentuated, and ultimately consecrated, because it provides a broad international readership with the most convincing version of events, the version whose pattern of causal emplotment is most easily communicated and understood. That is to say, Nesin’s role as a translator may have been accentuated because it makes intuitive sense that an act of translation can set in motion a process of persecution. This would suggest that even though we might not condone the violence in its wake, we nevertheless acknowledge the potentially deeply provocative nature of intercultural mediation. In sum, the fact that one can write today of “a fire resulting from the attempt on the life of Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator” (Zornosa, 2022), without much need for further explanation, suggests that the relation between crime and punishment is self-evident, and that translation, in some contexts, is perceived as an obvious transgression and plausible offence.

An important detail, however, complicates this assessment: if the crime of translation can be so reprehensible, why do questions about the identity of the actual translator of the Turkish excerpts from the Satanic Verses not figure prominently in any of the sources we have so far considered? Why does it seem as if the accusation needed to be provided with a name, rather than the other way around? Girard (2005) argues that once the mimetic process of persecution is set in motion, “the most groundless accusation can circulate with vertiginous speed and is transformed into irrefutable proof” (p. 83); at the same time, once a mob is already bent on a target, its conviction renders the exact nature of the accusation practically “insignificant” (Girard, 1990, p. 409). This could partially explain the rapid escalation of the violence at Sivas, but it does not clarify why the act of translation gained explicit prominence as a motivation for the mob’s behaviour in accounts produced after the event. In order to understand this particular development, we will first return to Girard’s body of work and consider more closely the relationship between spontaneous outbreaks of collective violence and more extended cultural practices of ritualized sacrifice.

The perspective of the persecutors and the rationalization of sacrifice

Scapegoating can be perceived as a temporarily effective means of dissipating social tensions, insofar as the persecutors truly believe that the violence inflicted on the scapegoat is justified. Violence, in this sense, must be a collective act targeted at a victim that is only partially integrated into the community. One the one hand, a certain degree of assimilation is necessary to ensure that the victim can convincingly embody a community’s social ailments. On the other hand, if the killing clearly constitutes a murder involving fully integrated members of the community, it could set in motion a cycle of personal revenge and “perpetual vendetta” (Girard, 2005, p. 17). The danger of reciprocal violence that threatens to plunge human communities into crisis can thus be warded off by eliminating a particularly ill-fitting member of the social body. In Girard’s view (2005), the prehistoric realization that the deployment of contained violence can thwart the spread of contagious violence gradually gave rise to organized ritual sacrifice (p. 289). It is not possible to provide proof of primordial occurrences of scapegoating, or of early sacrificial developments, but Girard (1987, 2005) insists that conspicuous parallels in stories and ritual practices across vast geographical and temporal distances, in conjunction with observed eruptions of contemporary violent cataclysms, leave little room for alternative explanations. Importantly, parallel ritual practices extend beyond the act of killing and involve both the anticipation of sacrifice and its aftermath. Sacrificial rituals often feature an enactment of social crisis and reconciliation, as well as the careful preparation of the scapegoat, who must come to embody the destructive forces that affect a particular community as well as the creative forces that nurture its renewal. Sacrificial preparation must thus entrench the ambiguous position of the scapegoat “neither outside nor inside the community” (Girard, 2005, p. 287). To illustrate, let us consider three well-known examples invoked by Girard that display obvious structural parallels, despite their widely divergent temporal and geographical settings.

European explorers documented their first encounters in the sixteenth century with the Tupinambá, inhabitants of present-day Brazil, and described in considerable detail the observation of what they perceived as ritual cannibalism (Thevet, 1558). The anthropologist Francis Huxley (1957) summarizes several such accounts and outlines how warriors of the tribe used to capture members of rival communities, who were brought to the village and “adopted into a family” (p. 252). These prisoners were free to roam the village and to participate in the tribe’s activities. They were cared and provided for, sometimes for decades, until the moment of execution, which was preceded by a staged attempt at escape, followed by swift recapture. During the time leading up to the sacrifice, the prisoner was no longer fed and had to resort to theft and violence to survive. Huxley (1957) writes that before executing and consuming a captive, the Tupinambá extracted a confession that confirmed both the captive’s culpability and his heroic might: “Yes, I’m a great warrior, and truly I’ve killed and eaten many of you” (p. 256). A club is “daubed in honey”, the victim is surrounded, and “at last the prisoner is struck down, falls to the ground and has his brains dashed out” (Huxley, 1957, p. 254–257). Later, feasts are held in his honour.

In the late 1950s, the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt resided with the Dinka tribe, a people native to what is currently South Sudan. The introduction to the book recounting his experiences is mostly concerned with the centrality of cattle to Dinka thought and social organization. Lienhardt (1961) argues that “Dinka cattle are integrally part of human social life” (p. 19). Practices of “self-identification with the ox” include the human acquisition of “ox-names” as well as postural approximation: throughout their adult lives, men imitated the appearance and behaviour of cattle in dance or when alone with the herd (Lienhardt, 1961, p. 17). The relation between humans and cattle was intimate and reverential: “cattle have rights according to their kind within the total society, and the Dinka look with disgust upon their non-Dinka neighbours who slaughter cattle merely for meat” (Lienhardt, 1961, p. 21). As the merely in the previous sentence indicates, this does not mean that no slaughter takes place: “Animal sacrifice is the central religious act of the Dinka, whose cattle are in their eyes perfect victims” (Lienhardt, 1961, p. 10). In a Dinka ceremony described by Lienhardt (1961, p. 230–231), a member of the cattle that sustains the Dinka’s social bonds is killed after a gradual build-up of tension accompanied with repetitive invocations and incantations. The violence is brutal, chaotic and contemptuous: “the calf was thrown, and was almost at once hidden under a crowd of people, mostly young men, who slapped it and trampled on it” (Lienhardt, 1961, p. 231). On another occasion, the anthropologist arrives late to the sacrifice and only observes the aftermath: at a distance from the violent scene, people enjoy “beer and conversation” while the victims of the slaughter lie covered with the leaves of a tree used to confer respect, “because it has a particularly sweet smell, and no thorns” (Lienhardt, 1961, p. 267–268).

Finally, the four canonical Gospels, which constitute a major part of the Christian New Testament, all document the arrival of the prophet Jesus in Jerusalem (New International Version, 2011, Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:28-44; John 12:12-19). Jesus is greeted by waving palm branches, and cloaks are spread out on the road in front of him. A few days later, a large crowd demands his crucifixion, which is carried out by the Roman authorities. Before he is mounted on the cross, he is accused of various crimes, mocked and tortured. Today, in uncountable buildings across the globe, it is still impossible to pass through a doorway without encountering an effigy of his starved body, stripped and bleeding, mounted on a cross and wearing a crown of thorns. In many Christian denominations, it is customary to adorn the crucifix with palm branches or, depending on the climate, olive or boxwood leaves.

All three examples clearly display the shifting attitude towards the victim attendant on its sacrifice. As explained earlier, if the scapegoat’s death restores peace, this confirms, from the perspective of the persecutors, not only its responsibility for the social crisis, but also its divine capacity to restore harmony. Or, in aphoristic form: “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims” (Girard, 2023, p. 274). Consequently, in formalized iterations of sacrificial performance and in narratives that recount a victim’s demise, the abhorrent confusion of collective violence is gradually moulded into a mythological outline that, in some accounts, may side with the victim on the moral plane but nevertheless must continue to logically justify the persecution of the scapegoat. The Tupinambá prisoner must be a heroic warrior as well as a wretched thief, and extensive symbolic machinations ensure that both these roles are fulfilled. In the myth of Oedipus, which we addressed earlier, the noble disposition of the tragic hero is maintained by means of an improbable trope that justifies his fate while redeeming his character: Oedipus, we are asked to believe, committed the crimes he is accused of, but did so unknowingly, and to his own discontent. As further explained below, the narrative framing of the Turkish writer Aziz Nesin operates in a similar manner, but in this case the criminal and noble characteristics canonically ascribed to the scapegoat both derive from a single transgression, namely the act of translation.

Transgression, accusation, and the persistence of mimetic desire

It is not uncommon to speak of translation as a transgressive act that is capable of subverting an entire cultural edifice (Lefevere, 1992, p. 2). The words subversion and transgression can signify deeply immoral maneuvers bound to generate the most indiscriminate and chaotic violence but can also be used with a positive connotation when celebrating creative expressions of activism or political defiance in the face of perceived injustice. If we return, then, to the question of why many retellings of the Sivas massacre focus on the figure of Nesin, and particularly on his alleged role as a translator, despite the reductive nature and questionable accuracy of this account, it is possible to argue that this narrative took root because it provided not just a clear accusation but also the promise of eventual vindication. That is to say, both the persecutors and the devotees of the scapegoat, who may well be the same people at different points in time, have a stake in the conviction that by all accounts Nesin openly challenged the cultural order, and that in this sense the brave, despicable victim sacrificed himself. The story of Nesin the translator, nearly martyred at Sivas, thus has the effect of attributing a single, seemingly cogent explanation to an outbreak of collective violence that is at heart multifaceted and deeply irrational, in disregard of presumably relevant features of the event, such as the likelihood that Nesin did not translate the Satanic Verses, and the fact that Nesin escaped from the fire and did not die while dozens of other people did. The story can circulate largely unchallenged because even those who wish to strongly condemn the violence can find meaning and value in the narrative. Simple acts of discursive imitation facilitate the continued circulation of this rationalized sacrificial tale, which can be smoothly embedded into familiar metanarratives because it conforms to the recognizable template of a folk ‘hero’ braving persecution for a noble cause.

Indeed, the entire controversy around the Satanic Verses is often reduced to an ideological conflict between “democratic freedoms” and religious fundamentalism (Said, 1989, p. 17). From this perspective, one might expect Salman Rushdie and Aziz Nesin to recognize and mutually support each other’s commitment to values such as freedom of assembly and expression. At a certain point in time, as will be illustrated shortly, this seems to be exactly what happens. There are, however, complicating factors. After the massacre, the Los Angeles Times published a statement from Rushdie, who reportedly condemned the violence but also “distanced himself from Nesin”: “He said Nesin’s translation of the novel was against his wishes and a “piratical act… a manipulative act”” (Pope, 1993a). Another US newspaper, the Toledo Blade (“Extremist Rampage Kills 35”, 1993), similarly reported on Rushdie’s anger at Nesin for reproducing his work “without permission”. These remarks may come across as strangely misdirected, seemingly more attuned to copyright law than sensitive to human suffering. They are consistent, however, with a broader pattern of enmity between the two writers.

In an autobiographical memoir published after the controversy and written in the third person, Salman Rushdie (2012) characterizes Nesin as “scornful”, “petulant” and a “provocateur” while also lamenting that Nesin, in his writings, had characterized Rushdie as a “charlatan” (pp. 388–392). He recounts an episode which occurred when the German journalist Günter Wallraff invited both of them to Cologne in the summer of 1993 to reconcile them in the wake of the escalating violence. Video footage of the meeting (KulturForum Türkei Deutschland, 2022) shows the men in a motorboat on the river Rhine, since Roman times a classical locus indicating the separation between civilization and barbarian territory. Rushdie (2012) recounts the event thus: “Wallraff’s people had filmed the whole event and put together a news item featuring Nesin and himself [meaning Rushdie] in which they jointly denounced religious fanaticism and the weakness of the West’s response to it” (p. 392). The suddenly enshrined and strangely manipulative opposition between “religious fanaticism” and “the West” and the call for mobilization and retaliation implied by the requested response are worth noting. There is only one direction the violence thus invoked can logically be headed towards: the eternal East, home of “religious fanaticism”. Rushdie’s distant and ironic description of the event, along with his recourse to insults in relation to Nesin, signal that he is fully aware of the ideological masquerade. Rushdie (2012) writes: “In public at least, the rift was healed” (p. 392). In ‘private’, Rushdie (2012) continues to rail against Nesin: “Aziz Nesin and the author whose work he had stolen and denigrated would never be friends” (p. 390). In short, Nesin and Rushdie on the Rhine knowingly present a parody of friendship and a caricature of conscience.

As an explanation for the remaining rift, Rushdie (2012) mentions copyright breaches, unjustified criticism of his work and person, and the fact that Nesin had not sent him a copy before proceeding to publish material from the Satanic Verses, so that the text could not be checked for “quality and accuracy” (p. 389). Underneath these oddly mundane allegations, there is the hint of a more serious offence. Nesin, expressing no concern for “Rushdie’s cause”, had made the author feel like “he and his work had become pawns in somebody else’s game” (Rushdie, 2012, p. 389). Nesin, in short, is accused of “elbowing” himself “into the narrative and threatening to hijack it” (Rushdie, 2012, p. 388). Here, then, we openly encounter the unsettling workings of mimetic desire: the narrative is not just the channel through which values and desires are communicated, it is also the object of desire in its own right. A narrative is not just something that people construct, encounter, promote and negotiate, but also something that is cherished, coveted and claimed as one’s own. The stakes seem to be enormous: Nesin and Rushdie, the satirists, battle for authenticity and find nothing objectionable in reducing the world to their stage, while concealing a raging enmity from the public. The irony is further compounded by Rushdie’s claims of narrative ownership over a story characterized by frivolous treatment of a range of sources and models: in particular, rumours formulated by Satan, the petulant charlatan par excellence.

In Sivas, when the mob chants Aziz Şeytan! there is perhaps need for only minimal interpretation. Satan incarnate may be discerned because Satan has been convincingly impersonated. The act of impersonation is perpetuated through an extended chain of rumour, gossip and satire; an irreverent and hubristic wrestling for, alternatively, control of or distance from a narrative that bears Satan’s signature, not just in the sense of perception but in the bare sense of possession. The memoir quoted throughout the previous paragraphs was published as Joseph Anton: A Memoir, authored by Salman Rushdie, and written in the third person, as mentioned earlier. If we find it logical to accept that Joseph and Salman refer to the same individual, perhaps the crowds condemning those involved in the circulation of the Satanic Verses, authored by Salman Rushdie, can also be forgiven for their reading. At this point, however, it is important to resist the temptation to see the conflict between Rushdie and Nesin as a potential explanation for the violence at Sivas. No good reasons can be provided for collective violence targeted at a defenceless victim, despite our strong inclination in relation to any social crisis to seek accountability, and to reduce the scope of responsibility to a “real and punishable source” (Girard, 1986, p. 86). Rather than a reason for the violence, the element of extended reciprocal rivalry between the two authors reveals that the cycle of mimetic desire, which reached its tragic culmination at Sivas, was set in motion long before the flames were lit and continues to shape the formation of a sacrificial narrative long after the ruins of the Madımak hotel stopped smoldering. Consequently, any account of the massacre that claims to provide a single, coherent explanation may well give undue credence to an interpretation that, in the final analysis, is likely to approximate the persecutors’ representation of persecution. Are we bound, then, to rationalize, and thus to camouflage the ineffable terror of baseless lynching? Can the scapegoat speak in its own name, rather than in support of a myth that renders violence meaningful?

The voice of the victim, and critique of Girard’s methods

While the parallels between the three cases of sacrificial rituals discussed earlier are obvious, Girard (1987, 2001) argues that the third example, the suffering of Jesus, is crucially different and signifies a central turning point in humanity’s understanding of its own violence. The Gospels present four versions of the same story, which may differ in their details but which all clearly illustrate the injustice of the punishment inflicted on Jesus. Rather than represent the perspective of the persecutors, as mythological narratives tend to do, the Gospels give voice to the victim and confirm the truth of his declaration: “They hated me without cause” (New International Version, 2011, John 15:25). Or, in an alternative rendering: “They hated me without reason” (New Living Translation, 1996, John 15:25). The effects of this revelation have arguably been slow to materialize, but if today we recognize in the historical machinations of “witch-hunters” and “totalitarian bureaucrats” unjustifiable practices of persecution, this is, in Girard’s (1986) view, only so because the sacrifice of Christ rendered transparent the workings of mimetic desire and collective violence (p. 212). Today, when news of massacre and mob arson reaches us, and our reaction is to look for stereotypes of persecution, the mythopoetical reflex that conceals the arbitrariness of the violence while consecrating the divine status of the victim is frustrated.

Partly because of his insistence that the Bible provides unique insights, it is unsurprising that in certain circles within and beyond academia Girard has acquired the status of persona non grata. Three repeated and interrelated claims of his seem bound to cause offence: namely, the claim that he is uncovering the truth, that the truth is universally applicable, and that the truth is nevertheless only decisively revealed in the Gospels. Girard (2001) recognizes the scope and magnitude of the horrific violence committed in the name of Christianity at different points in history, but ultimately attributes religious atrocities to a prolonged misunderstanding, rather than a judicious application of the Christian message. A major issue, in this regard, is the question of how Girard, in the light of the alleged omnipresence of misinterpretation, knows that he is speaking the truth. Cynthia Haven (2023), his biographer, records Girard’s retort when challenged on this front after a conference talk: “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor” (p. ix). The reply is rhetorically astute and morally striking, but also epistemologically evasive. Skepticism about Girard’s work is further reinforced by the apparent absence of a transparent method. By his own admission, he traces the outlines of an idée fixe, “a single, extremely dense insight” which does not correspond to a transparent “system” of interpretation (Girard, 2023a, p 181, 2023b, p. 21). A further, related factor contributing to the ambivalent reception of his work is the sustained focus on “illustrations from ancient texts”, which are subjected to a “decoding of representations” (Girard, 1986, p. 95–96). The problem is posited with remarkable clarity by Hayden White (1978): “the obscurity of the data is essential to its status as evidence” (p. 5). The question of what constitutes evidence is further complicated by the fact that Girard (1965, 1991) developed his thought about mimetic desire in large part with reference to novelistic and theatrical works of art. When he shifts focus to myth, ritual and the entirety of human relations, an extensive variety of cultural settings is represented, but each of these cases still seems to be approached as if they constitute single, integral actions on a clearly delimited stage. Reading Girard, in other words, is reminiscent of watching tragedy unfold through theatre binoculars. While the glasses allow one to observe faraway scenes in detail, this is achieved at the cost of awareness of the scene’s surroundings.

The limitations of a view that focuses on developments within a single social setting are most readily illustrated with reference to applications of Girard’s work to modern phenomena such as cancel culture (Wrethed, 2022). Cancel culture refers to the ostracization of individuals or organizations in response to actions or utterances that are deemed unacceptable or offensive. The process is generally initiated or accelerated through the rapid circulation of accusations and condemnations on social media platforms (Ng, 2020). The role of mimetic and persecutory behaviour is immediately relevant to this process, but what constitutes involvement in the victimization process, and where does one draw the boundaries of the relevant community? One can, of course, in the service of the analysis, restrict the meaning of community to its fluid and fleeting manifestation as a vindictive mob, meaning that it only truly exists at the moment of execution. Yet this position naturally begs the question: how many virtual pitchforks does it take to exile a cripple, and how many can be left in the shed, in dissent or indecision, before the sacrificial procedure stalls? Indeed, it is easily observable that the phenomena grouped under cancel culture are often inconclusive. The generally negative connotation of the term itself already indicates the absence of a unified perspective: when a public figure makes a remark labelled as offensive, apologetics and accusations often circulate with equal rapidity, and when the dust settles, it may seem as if, in fact, nothing happened. That is to say: outrage erupted, but violence was deferred. One can of course attempt to salvage the relevance of the scapegoat mechanism by reasoning that the violence was metaphorical, and no less important for its restriction to the field of discourse. Or one can argue, with Girard, that in modern times, exactly because we recognize the signs of persecution, the sacrificial procedure cannot be brought to completion (Fleming, 2004, p. 146). Yet this then introduces the insatiable voracity of the double-edged idée fixe: whenever collective violence is observed, this constitutes proof of scapegoating; whenever it is not observed, this constitutes proof of the revelation of its workings. The scapegoat thus seems to become “a fetish”, a compulsive fixation that must be maintained at all costs, and to which one accords an unreasonable amount of attention (Girard, 2010, p. x).

This acknowledgement should lead us to reconsider the case of Aziz Nesin. His biography seems to present an all-too-obvious example of the sacrificial process, given his experience with expulsion and imprisonment, as detailed earlier. Nevertheless, the range and complexity of the various instances of persecution suffered by Nesin only form a somewhat coherent story once they are listed in succession. The Shah of Iran and Nesin’s colleagues in the military may both have levelled accusations at the author, but are unlikely to have shared a common perspective, and neither set fire to the Madımak hotel. The accrual of unanimity is thus a feature of the narrative’s construction rather than an effect of communal consensus. The question is: after the outbreak of collective violence, once we start connecting the dots, are we analyzing what happened, or are we contributing to the development of a particular mythological account? One could argue, for instance, that our fixation on the figure of Nesin, who displays all the expected characteristics of the scapegoat, increasingly obscures an alternative voice and viewpoint, namely that of the actual victims who died in the Sivas massacre, and those who bore witness to their suffering. As already mentioned, Nesin did not die, while dozens of other people did. Consequently, the events at the Madımak hotel seem to require another telling:

On July 2nd, 1993, the hotel witnessed the event known today as the “Sivas Massacre,” when a rioting mob set fire to the hotel while individuals invited to the city for a culture festival were still inside. As a result, 37 civilians, 33 of whom were festival guests, perished. The festival was organized by an association representing Turkey’s Alevi, a religious cum spiritual community whose practices and rituals differ fundamentally from those followed by the Sunni—the demographically predominant sect of Islam in Turkey. Members of the Alevi community are also the ones today to identify strongly with the victims of the atrocity. (Çaylı, 2014, p. 14)

The article just quoted does not mention Nesin. A research report on the events, as quoted earlier (Center for Democracy Research, 2022), makes no mention of the Alevi community. If we concede that this difference might constitute a mutual oversight, this raises more questions: how many versions of the story are there? What sources should one consult, in which languages and through which media, to arrive at a version that is close to the actual events? The potential accumulation of narratives can do little to dispel the uncertainty revealed by the dual omission: if the victim in a story is interchangeable, the persecutor’s position remains the only source of a stable perspective. The video footage of the massacre follows the violent mob and the fire, but it does not show the fear and confusion of the people confined inside. No matter how one assesses the actions of the crowd, one does so in line with a perspective constricted by its physical movements. On the other hand, one could argue that the availability of an alternative interpretation does not necessarily indicate an open-ended accumulation of valid accounts, and that in fact the suffering of the Alevi constitutes the only correct primary framing, which is concealed in many sources. But how then to avoid a return to the accusatory question: if the Alevi were the actual target, what offence did they cause?

Mimetic theory, deconstruction, and socio-narrative theory

In this article, we argue that insights from mimetic theory can contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between acts of intercultural mediation and outbreaks of collective violence. However, as partly illustrated above, certain aspects of Girard’s conceptualization of scapegoating are inconclusive and potentially disorienting, particularly in relation to broader questions of communication, representation and narrativity, issues which we further address in this section. To begin with, we have so far discussed the scapegoat in the singular, and when applied to the persecution of larger groups of people, it is tempting to retain this singular, identifying reference (e.g., the Alevi community), in disregard of the diversity it erases. While collective violence can concretely be targeted at multiple individuals, it is difficult to imagine how scapegoating can be described without recourse to reductive categorizations that present a group of victims as if they constitute a single entity. In other words, the recognition of a scapegoat, in the singular or the plural, always involves a degree of stereotyping, the fashioning of a caricature fit to accommodate both derision and deference: a statue raised to be toppled, an effigy cast to be cursed, an ethnicity recognized to be persecuted. In this respect, any act of representation seems to invite a simultaneous process of appropriation and exclusion. This is a hypothesis which has been explored in the philosophy of deconstruction, most extensively in the work of Jacques Derrida (1981). Indeed, Girard and Derrida argue along very similar, mirrored lines, in the sense that the former perceives a mechanism of physical exclusion and erasure as the foundation of human culture, while the latter perceives a mechanism of discursive exclusion as the basis of our sign systems, which in turn shape the order of our concrete social relations (McKenna, 1992, p. 12).

This theoretical convergence reflects a remarkable divergence in approach. Deconstructive approaches seek to do justice to the irreducible variety of human co-existence by performatively showing in long, multi-layered and complex revisitations of erudite debates that each claim to accuracy in representation invites a multiplicity of readings, so that the moment of exclusion is always deferred. Girard’s reconstructive approach, however, moves in the opposite direction, and asserts that every claim of difference conceals a shared factor that pervades each particular representation of co-existence, that shared factor being mimetic desire. It should come as no surprise, then, that whereas the writings of Derrida attempt to render the machinations of representation conspicuously visible by drawing attention to the constant interplay of competing languages, voices and discourses, Girard proceeds as if language is only a surface phenomenon, a symptom rather than a cause of conflict, and a distraction from the unspeakable truth of collective violence. The crystallization of this view can be clearly observed in The Scapegoat (1986). The book starts out as if it intends to provide a systematic overview of stereotypes of persecution, and thus seems to be working towards a typology and model of interpretation that can confront the discursive concealment of collective violence. As the work progresses, however, the discursive universe surveyed shrinks considerably, and the attention completely shifts to the Gospels. The Bible comes to figure as the only relevant reference and source. It acquires the double role of cipher and key, frame and picture, figure and ground. In the process, Girard (1986) touches upon the question of intercultural mediation and proposes that the Gospels are “perfectly translatable” (p. 153). It is, he continues, “easy to forget in what language one is reading them”, as they are “all things to all people” (Girard, 1986, p. 153).

This statement reminds us that throughout his work, Girard presents parallels between events and stories across vast expanses of time and space, but there is little reflection on how these accounts concretely travel, through various layers of cultural and linguistic mediation, from experience to interpretation. The absence of sustained reflection on the process of communication is all the more striking given mimetic theory’s central concern with collective performances, as well as divergent interpretations, of highly symbolic actions. The conspicuous evasion of translation and conversation (barring scattered etymological asides) is accompanied by recourse to recurrent figures of speech. It is not uncommon for Girard to describe the mounting threat of violence and social unrest in terms of medical metaphors: mimetic desire effects a “maleficent contagion” for which the scapegoat will provide a “cure” (Girard, 2005, pp. 84, 329). In the end, it seems not to matter whether one coughs or speaks. This is not to say, of course, that nobody speaks in the cases Girard presents, but often it is unclear who exactly addresses whom: authors, readers and representations are all integrated into a single scene and scheme. This is a logical outcome of Girard’s core assumptions. If the traces of collective violence are routinely concealed, and always encountered under erasure, the task of the exegete is to read between the lines, and thus to discard each trace of communicative mediation and disregard differences introduced by re-narration, translation and any other form of manipulation.

Despite its lack of consistent engagement with concrete practices of translation, Girard’s modus operandi is often highly reminiscent of what is commonly called narrative or socio-narrative theory, an influential strand of thought in translation studies. Both approaches attempt to examine the relationship between conflict and the circulation, transformation and consolidation of stories. In the first paragraph of an introductory roundtable on narrative theory, published in a recent special issue, the theory’s core tenet is plainly stated: “we make sense of ourselves and the world by telling stories about ourselves and the world” (Hermans et al., 2022, p. 17). In the first paragraph of a recent introduction to Girard’s ‘essential writings’, Haven (2023) introduces the collection as follows: “We create ourselves out of the tales we tell—both individually and as a community, in our myths and in our histories” (p. vii). The correspondence in framing is striking and merits further consideration of potential compatibility between both strands of enquiry.

Narrative theory schematically operates as follows: first, one establishes a typology of narratives and their characteristic features that can provide an entry point into the complex, intertwined totality of human discursive engagement. We might distinguish, for instance, between personal narratives, which primarily relate to the self, and collective narratives, which can extend in scope from a local to a global level of circulation (Harding, 2012, p. 291). The attempt at categorization, however, is treated as provisional, and as established in line with the researcher’s “own purposes” (Hermans et al., 2022, p. 22). Clear distinctions are thus destabilized from the start, and they become increasingly porous in view of the realization that the same principles of narrative organization characterize the “object of inquiry” and the mode of analysis (Baker, 2019, p. 39). Thus, the notion of narrative comes to serve as both cipher and key, picture and frame, figure, and ground. It requires an external anchoring point to provide specific insights into the particular communicative choices people make.

Thus far, both mimetic theory and narrative theory appear to structurally operate along similar lines, but whereas Girard will opt for a dialectics of imitation, socio-narrative theory tends to draw on Fisher (1987) in order to establish a “logic of good reasons” (pp. 105-123). According to this logic, people are assumed to examine the narratives they engage with, and to assess whether or not they ascribe to the values elaborated within them, cognizant of the power structures in which they are embedded. Acts of scapegoating, however, pose a fundamental challenge to this mode of assessing conflict narratives: one can attempt to render an outburst of collective violence comprehensible by contextualizing it in terms of clashing value frameworks, but the further one looks for ‘good reasons’, the worse the reasons become, not only in their limited applicability to the observed violence, but also in their attendant implications. The explication of a reason tends to approximate the repetition of a double, misdirected accusation: it would be unsound to propose that thirty-seven people died in the flames that consumed the Madımak hotel because there are disagreements between secular and religious people, between Alevi and Sunni, or between devotees and blasphemers. These distinctions can be drawn the day before the massacre, and the day after, without generating violent conflict. At the moment of madness, something else must be at work, and thus an interpretative supplement is needed.

Proponents of narrative theory are typically aware of this conundrum, but often seem to be agnostic about what happens when narratives take hold outside the realm of reason. It is recognized, nevertheless, that the circulation of narratives can be influenced by a variety of factors that do not correspond to clear motivations, such as “laziness, ignorance, pride, arrogance, unexamined privilege, money, exhaustion, inertia, fear, [and] exclusion” (Hermans et al., 2022, p. 23). In addition, narrative scholarship within and beyond translation studies also tends to consider the influence of overarching generic storylines found across widely divergent temporal and geographical settings. Such common modes of narrative emplotment may be called, depending on the tradition one adheres to, skeletal stories, canonical stories, master plots, or archetypes (Harding, 2006, p. 26). From a compatible mimetic perspective, it is possible to argue that as a driving force behind attitudes such as ignorance and arrogance, one will always encounter an element of bare imitation, and an almost organic tendency for narratives to converge regardless of specific motivations, as long as they develop in line with canonical outlines. It is furthermore possible to propose that the sacrifice of a transgressor in order to restore harmony in a community has come to constitute an archetype of considerable proportions. This, then, would be the point where both approaches might inform each other, a suggestion that can be illustrated by returning, once more, to the case of Nesin.

On the day of the Rushdie stabbing, 12^th August 2022, BBC News Türkçe published an online article that mentions the fatwa, and a list of those targeted in related attacks, including “Aziz Nesin, the writer who had the novel translated into Turkish in serialized form” (Romanı tefrikalar halinde Türkçeye çevirten yazar Aziz Nesin). Google’s free online translation service3, at the time of writing delivers the following translation: “Aziz Nesin, the author who translated the novel into Turkish in serials”. While the Turkish article suggests the involvement of another agent, namely the undisclosed translator, the machine translation output promotes the version of the story that directly leads from translation to persecution. Yet one cannot attribute a motive, intention or reason to the digital tool in the context of the events at Sivas. Its reframing hinges on its incapacity to account for a single letter (the t in çevirten), and it simply delivers an expected output; something that is linguistically probable, and perhaps therefore socially plausible. The recent rise in accessible artificial intelligence applications has increased the calls for human control to rectify machine bias, but people are scarcely different in their communicative behaviour from such digital tools. Much of what we say, we say because it has been said before, even if unconsciously so, and embedded in our shared linguistic repertoire are not only descriptions of the world, but also patterned emotions, evaluations, and judgements (Baker, 2010, p. 127-128). There is thus ample room for apparently innocuous statements to mimetically consolidate questionable narratives, with or without good reasons, as long as they adhere to a recognizable, prefigured and prefabricated script.

Conclusion

In this study, we drew on Girard’s conceptualization of the scapegoat in an attempt to elucidate the position of translators as victims as well as potential catalysts of collective violence, with specific reference to the tragedy known as the Sivas massacre. We observed that the relationship between the visibility and the vulnerability of intercultural mediators is of a particularly complex nature and considered the conflicting injunctions of mimetic desire in this respect. Mimetic desire is the reified name for a process that shapes both cooperation and conflict, and which can gradually turn models into rivals, or sources of inspiration into targets of aggression—and vice versa, as long as the pendulum remains in motion. We conclude that we know too little about how narratives in and of translation are shaped and exchanged as objects rather than conduits of desire, and that we can only begin to address this question if we take the influence of imitation on the consolidation of narratives seriously.

In translation studies, however, it may prove challenging to embrace the study of mimetic desire, because a multifaceted taboo prevents us from directly approaching the subject of imitation. The taboo exists because mimetic desire structures the discipline both internally and externally. Internally, in its relationship with its object of study, as particularly evident in the cautious disapproval of terms such as ‘the original text’, which supposedly attribute to translations a covetous and derivative quality. Most strongly, the taboo is operative in relation to the concept of equivalence, which remains the sacred object of mimetic identity at the heart of the discipline, but which must always be carefully presented as a naive relic of a “bygone era” (Sadler, 2022, p. 41). In its gradual development of a disdain for ‘mere imitation’, along with its insistence on uncovering traces of originality, creativity, and manipulation across an ever broader field of intra- and intercultural activity, translation studies has found itself in a strange mimetic struggle to “emancipate itself” (Zwischenberger, 2023, p. 207). A familiar complaint is repeatedly raised: translation studies “has imported massively from other disciplines and fields of research while other disciplines and fields of research have not reciprocated” (Zwischenberger, 2023, p. 207). Everyone wants to have something worth stealing, and the disciplinary models are reproached, in the quote, for not seeing the apprentice as a fully grown, worthy rival. The fear of engaging with anything reminiscent of a copy or a double extends to the discourse about professional translators, who must always be presented as creative, lest it be suggested that they reproduce anything. They should also be credited on the cover of literary works, so that they can visibly vie with the author for ownership of the narrative. It is also in the field of literary translation, however, that the disavowal of mere imitation has already led to its return in the guise of a controversial question: “Who may translate whom?” (Susam-Saraeva, 2020, p. 84). The question means: can an authentic, acceptable translation only be produced by a translator who shares life experiences or even physical characteristics with a particular author? In other words, must the translator be a mimic, an impersonator, an impostor? An improbable question to begin with, one would think, were it not that we know by now that mimetic desire, when left unchecked, ushers in conflict by erasing distinctions.