This talk will be led by Dr. Başak Çandar (Department of English) and will focus on Turkish novelist Murat Uyurkulak’s novel, Tol, which came out in 2002. The work has been translated into French, German and most recently Italian, no English translation exists as of yet. We will discuss what makes Uyurkulak’s novel, a novel that is primarily a narrative of political violence, so difficult to translate. It will be argued that the novel’s particular resistance to translation is not a result of its cultural specificity, but on the contrary, of its transnational reach. We will discuss how the novel relies on transnational dialogues to construct a resistance to transnational displacements, which then invites questions about circulation, translatability, and transnational understanding.