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propaganda fi de.
Th
e literary tastes of the republic’s early years were dominated by
numerous revered poets who had emerged in the twilight of the Otto-
man Empire. Th
ese prominent fi gures included Abdülhak Hâmit Tarhan
(1852–1937), who, according to E. J. W. Gibb, inaugurated what could
be referred to as modern Turkish poetry. He also observed that Tarhan’s
84
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
poems and tragedies in verse made a major impact on the Turkish literary
world. Mehmet Emin Yurdakul intoned the mystique of Turkish national-
ism: “I am a Turk: my faith and my race are mighty.” Ahmet Haşim (1887–
1933), under the infl uence of French symbolists, combined a striking fi ery
imagery with melancholy sonal eff ects to create his lyrics of spiritual exile
(“We ignore the generation that has no sense of melancholy”), articulated a
view that summed up a fundamental aspect of classical poetry, and adum-
brated the credo of the neosurrealists of the 1950s and 1960s: “Th
e poet’s
language is constructed not for the purpose of being understood but to
be heard; it is an intermediary language between music and words, yet
closer to music than to words.” Many of his poems are replete with striking
images and metaphors, as in “Th
e Fountain”:
Evening is gathering once again.
My darling laughs at her old place
Who shuns the daylight and at night
Above the fountain shows her face.
Girdled by moonlight, now, she stands,
Th
e sky above her secret veil—
Th
e stars are roses in her hands.
(Translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu)
1
In the early part of the republican era, poetry served primarily as a
vehicle for the propagation of nationalism. Younger poets branded
Divan
forms and meters as anathema. Native verse forms and syllabic meters
gained popularity. Intense eff orts were systematically undertaken to
purify the language. Th
e group
Beş Hececiler
(Five Syllabist Poets)—Faruk
Nafiz Çamlıbel (1898–1973), who was equally adept at
aruz;
Orhan Seyfi
Orhon (1890–1972); Enis Behiç Koryürek (1893–1949); Halit Fahri Ozan-
soy (1891–1971); and Yusuf Ziya Ortaç (1895–1967)—produced simple,
unadorned poems celebrating love, the beauties of nature, and the glories
of the Turkish nation. Many poets, however, shied away from chauvinism
and evolved individualistic worldviews and styles.
1.
Th
e Penguin Book of Turkish Verse,
edited by Nermin Menemencioğlu and Fahir İz
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1978), 185.
Republic and Renascence
85
Neoclassicism gained considerable popularity under the aegis of Yahya
Kemal Beyatlı. A supreme craft sman, Beyatlı was a much-acclaimed neo-
classicist who produced, in the conventional forms and meters, meticulous
lyrics of love, Ottoman grandeur, and the beauties of Istanbul in poems
memorable for their refi ned language and melodiousness. His “Death of
the Epicures” is a testament to spiritual tranquility and the aesthetic life:
In the garden of the poet’s
2
tomb there’s a rose, they say,
Day in day out it blooms anew, its color is blood-choked;
A nightingale weeps all night, they say, till the break of day:
In its tunes, the dreams of the city of love
3
are evoked.
Death for an epicure is the springtime of calm and peace;
For years his soul smolders like incense burning everywhere
While his tomb lies and endures under the cool cypresses—
Each dawn a rose blooms and each night a nightingale sings there.
Nazım Hikmet (1902–63), one of modern Turkey’s preeminent
poets, famous in his native land and around the world, led the life of a
romantic revolutionary. As a teenager, he witnessed the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire and lived through the Anatolian upheaval that culmi-
nated in the emergence of the Turkish Republic, which he later saw as an
anti-imperialist struggle and a class uprising. In 1921, at age nineteen,
he went to the Soviet Union to study. He stayed there four years, shar-
ing the revolutionary enthusiasm, acquiring ideological orientation, and
assimilating literary infl uences—most notably Mayakovski’s verse. Aft er
his return to Turkey in 1925, he became a living legend. He published
rhythmic, resonant poems of love and justice and sometimes read them
before mesmerized crowds in streets and public squares. Th
eatergoers
were eager to see his plays, which were avant-garde in the 1930s not
only by Turkish standards, but by European standards as well. Accord-
ing to what might be an apocryphal story, he once openly defi ed Mus-
tafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), founder of the Turkish Republic. His was a
resounding voice of social criticism in the Kemalist age when few dared
to say anything unfavorable. He was in and out of prisons on various
2. Th
e poet referred to is Hafi z, a major Persian poet of the fourteenth century.
3. A reference to the Persian city of Shiraz.
86
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
charges between 1928 and 1933, and fi nally in 1938 he was sentenced—
on what seems, in retrospect, to be unsubstantiated charges—to twenty-
fi ve years in jail. Aft er having served about thirteen of those years, he
was pardoned in 1950. He fl ed to the Soviet Union in 1951 and spent the
last twelve years of his life writing poetry and doing propaganda stints
in Eastern European countries, Cuba, France, Italy, and elsewhere until
his death in Moscow in 1963.
Nazım Hikmet’s artistic life was equally revolutionary: in strictly
aesthetic terms, he introduced or consolidated many new concepts and
techniques whose infl uence became decisive on modern Turkish poetry.
Among these innovations were free verse, ideological focus, “broken” lines,
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