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CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
135 
When the two young intellectuals met in Istanbul (Yakup Kadri was 23 and Yahya 
Kemal 28) just before the Balkan wars in 1912 Yahya Kemal had just returned after 
a long sojourn from Paris where he had become acquainted with the French poetry 
and the literary movements of that time.
As Yahya Kemal explained: 
İkimiz de bir hülyaya kapıldık: İran’dan Yunan’a 
geçmek.
(we were both gripped by a reverie: to pass from Iran to Yunan). 
“…Dövizimiz olarak Eflâtun’un şu sözünü almıştık: ‘Biz medenîler, Akdeniz 
etrafında bir havuzun kenarlarındaki kurbağalar gibiyiz’” (“As our motto we took the 
following statement from Plato: ‘We, civilised ones are like the frogs around the 
shores of the Mediterranean’”). It seems that the two young authors had felt the need 
to turn from the Persian language, heavily adorned with metaphors and similes (
süslü 
ve boyalı, teşbihli ve iştiâreli
), which had infiltrated Turkish literature to the 
accuracy and clarity produced by the unadorned and simple Greek language (
sobre 
ve beyaz
:
 
plain and white
 , sağlam ve oturaklı: 
sound and well chosen). In order to 
create a great national literature they thought they had to draw like the French and 
like all Europeans from the ancient Greeks
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. Yahya Kemal and Yakup Kadri were 
not the first Turkish intellectuals to stress the importance of Greek and Latin classics. 
For example Ahmet Mithat had supported the need to translate the classics and had 
even seen it as a way to perfect the Turkish language but had met resistance; one of 
his articles on the subject which had appeared under the title “İkrâm-ı Aklâm” 
(Honouring the Writers) in 
Tercüman-ı Hakikat
(Interpreter of Truth) on 24 August 
71
Yücel, 255-6. However one can wonder whether Yahya Kemal paraphrased the relevant passage from Plato’s 
Phaedo 
correctly. Socrates is actually saying that we might be like frogs sitting round a pond unaware that there 
is a wider world beyond it.

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