Phase III – Stealth Is.

A winner of the International Publishers Association’s Freedom to Publish prize, Irfan Sanci has previously been sued under Article 226 of the Turkish penal code, for publishing books including Guillaume Apollinaire’s Adventures of the Young Don Juan, but was acquitted in December. He and his translator are now facing further obscenity charges for publishing 2,500 copies of a Turkish edition of the Burroughs novel in January, which could mean a jail sentence of up to nine years.

The International Publishers Association called the situation “mind-blowing and disappointing” and called for Sanci and his translator’s immediate acquittal, saying that the obscenity charges violate Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European convention on human rights. Last year Turkey was found guilty of violating the article by the European court of human rights when it banned Apollinaire’s erotic novel The Eleven Thousand Rods.

Released two years after his best-known work Naked Lunch – which saw Burroughs himself prosecuted on grounds of obscenity in the US in 1962 – The Soft Machine is the first book in the Beat writer’s surreal “cut-up trilogy”. Featuring scenes of drug addiction and homosexuality, The Soft Machine develops “attitudes that were permissive to crime by concentrating on the banal, vulgar and weak attributes of humanity”, according to a report by the Turkish Prime Ministerial Board for the Protection of Children from Harmful Publications, quoted in Turkish paper Hurriyet.

The Council also accused the novel of “incompliance with moral norms” and “hurting people’s moral feelings”.