Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Two Solitary Trees
Two trees by an odd creek that fl ows alone
Stand young strong full-grown;
Th
ey have something to say, they do, and yet,
Dead or alive, they always keep quiet.
Aft er sunset, under the stars, see the way
Th
e trees sway,
Whatever they have to hold back or declare,
Dead or alive, it is all laid bare.
By the creek two desolate trees stand
Pegged onto the ground;
Th
ey have something to say, they do, and yet,
Dead or alive, they have said it—or not.
Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1905–83), who started out as a poet of romantic 
agony and spent the latter part of his career as a confi rmed Islamic funda-
mentalist, made an impact with his polished verses, which express suff er-
ing as a literary conceit. His major poem “Anguish” stands as a tantalizing 
poetic examination of the soul’s vicissitudes, as evinced by this excerpt:
Month aft er month I roamed broken, aghast:
My soul was a cauldron that my mind drained;

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92
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
With the madmen’s town one horizon past,
My brain’s fantasies were bridled and chained.
Why do all things in the distance dwindle?
In eyeless dreams who gives me piercing sight?
Why the dance of time in the globe’s spindle?
I crave wisdom to see my life’s twilight.
Th
oughts burn as vitriol in the wound’s grail
Clinging like leeches to the brain’s membranes,
Hail, most majestic of agonies, hail,
Magic log that blooms as it sears and pains.
Asaf Hâlet Çelebi (1907–58) introduced his own iconoclasm in sur-
realistic poems that give the impression of somnambulistic writing with 
intimations of erudition. “A poem,” he declared, “is nothing but a long word 
made up of syllables joined together. Syllables by themselves have no mean-
ing. It is therefore futile to struggle with meaning in a poem. . . . Poetry cre-
ates an abstract world using concrete materials—just like life itself.”
Th
ese theories and movements continued to exert varying degrees of 
infl uence on the literature of the later decades, but the themes and the 
tenor of Nazım Hikmet’s verse probably had the widest impact. Eff ective 
voices were raised among poets, dramatists, fi ction writers, essayists, and 
journalists against the established order and its iniquities, oppression of 
the proletariat, and national humiliation suff ered at imperialist hands. Th
e 
poetry of social realism concentrates on the creation of a just and equitable 
society. It is oft en more romantic and utopian than rhetorical, containing 
sensual strains, tender sentiments, and fl owing rhythms, but also occa-
sionally given to invective and vituperation.
One of Turkey’s earliest progenitors of free verse was Ercüment 
Behzad Lâv (1903–84). Ahmet Oktay (b. 1933), an astute critic, defi ned 
Lâv’s aesthetic strategies as “surface modernism”—an observation that has 
considerable validity in view of the fact that Lâv was virtually an innovator 
for innovation’s sake. Th
ere are few affi
rmations in what he wrote, little of 
what made other poets appealing to those who seek pleasure, and certainly 
none of the easy communicability of the ideological rhetoric that turned 
some of his contemporaries into heroes. One tends to concur with the bril-
liant scholar-critic Orhan Burian (1914–53), who observed in the late 1940s 

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Republic and Renascence
93
that Lâv is “committed to the cause of creating a new type of poetry out of 
half-baked ideas and hidden sound structures.” “Th
ere is a dryness in his 
poems,” Burian continued. “His short poems, which give voice to momen-
tary emotions, are more attractive.”
Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı (1910–56), an accomplished master of syllabic 
verse, expressed simple sentiments distilled into exquisite yet sometimes 
excruciating lines. One of his best poems, “Aft er Death,” is a chilling lyric 
of shattered faith in life and in life aft er death:
With many hopes about death we perished,
But the charm was broken in a vacuum.
Our song of love we cannot help exhume,
A view of the sky, tuft of twigs, bird’s plume;
Living was a habit we had cherished.
No news comes from the world now or ever;
No one misses us, no soul cares to know,
Th
e darkness of our night is endless, so
We might just as well do without a window:
Our image has faded from the river.
One of modern Turkey’s most popular poets, Cahit Külebi (1917–
97), has as the hallmarks of his art a sensuous, sentimental involvement 
in human experiences, an admiration for ecological beauty, an infatua-
tion with life’s simple joys, and a lucid style that revels in the colors and 
rhythms of the Turkish vernacular.