Description
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
I wanted to undertake this large translation project, offered to me by UNDP-ACT,
because I had for a long time been thinking of carrying out or initiating a series of surveys of
Muslim monuments in Cyprus. However the idea was frustrated in various ways. Tuncer
Bağışkan’s book, on the other hand, went a long way towards fulfilling my aims, and it clearly
needed a wider audience. The book contains immense quantities of important information,
some architectural, some historical and especially archival, some ethnographic, some on
aspects of religion and of folklore. In the translation I have tried to convey the author’s own
approach and manner of presentation and to implement it effectively.
In approaching this project, I made up my mind straightaway that the translation
should be in an entirely English idiom and should read like English which has been freshly
written. I felt that there should be no debt to Turkish expression, sentence patterns or
structure; the vocabulary should be rich and the expression should exploit the wide range of
idiom available in the English language. I aimed for a buoyant, simple style which would carry
the reader through the drier sections of text as well as those with an easier and, perhaps,
more appealing content. (…)
