Pickwick

A detective novel written nearly a hundred years ago in Ottoman Turkish featuring an American detective in turn-of-the-century New York is now translated into Modern Turkish and English, perhaps for the first time, to the delight of students wishing to learn Ottoman. A dime novel thriller, this detective story tells the tale of a treacherous woman’s evil plot to seize an inheritance in a case of malicious impersonation. The original text was found in an old Istanbul bookshop by a professor who introduced it to her students as a learning material at Columbia University, located in New York City where most of the book’s action takes place.  As a class, they worked on translating the novel and turning it into the introductory Ottoman reader you hold in hour hands. This work aims to help students transition from Modern Turkish into Ottoman Turkish using an exciting, easy-to-read authentic source text. This instructional material takes you back to the New York of private detectives and horse-drawn carriages, all with a distinctly Ottoman flair.