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CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
145 

These words, spoken when he was an old man, reflect the young Yakup Kadri at the 
beginning of his literary career. The issues he had at such a politically inopportune 
time and so much against the current through the 
Nev Yunanîlik
initiative some forty 
five years before the conversation with Hasan-Âli Yücel were still troubling him. 
The literary form of the dialogues had appealed neither to the reading public nor to 
the literary establishment. In addition works stuffed with names from Greek 
literature and mythology such as Hesiod, Hera and Semele and presuming 
knowledge of classical associations such as that of Mount Helicon with the Muses 
were unlikely to mean much to a Turkish readership and could have seemed simply 
pretentious even to the few people who had read enough French to recognise them. 
In this form therefore it is not surprising that the experiment was not repeated very 
often. Nor is it surprising that there is hardly any reference to the Nev Yunanîlik in 
standard histories of Turkish literature and none whatsoever in Kurdakul.
Nonetheless Yakup Kadri never ceased to be fascinated by the Greek and Latin 
classics of antiquity. He continued to use classical allusions. In 1931 he published a 
translation of Horace and allusions to Horace occur in his writings, as for example in 
the reference to Epistles 1.20 in the preface to 
Yaban
89
. English readers can find his 
translation of Odes 1.5 in the anthology which Ronald Storrs compiled of 
89
Karaosmanoğlu 2006, 9 

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CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
146 
translations of that ode into many languages
90
. In 1941 he wrote an introduction to a 
translation of the Odyssey in which we read the following: 
Homeros’un bu ilk tercümesi için şu satırları yazarken kalem elimde 
titremektedir. Kendimi güzellik denen yeğane hakikatin, yegane hikmetin 
ta ilk kaynağı başında hissediyorum ve bu tanrısal pınarın bütün tazeliği, 
bütün serinliği vücudumu kaplanmışsacına ürpermeler içinde 
kalıyorum.
91
 
The pen trembles in my hand when I write these lines for the first 
translation of Homer. I feel the beauty of what is called unique truth and 
wisdom of this early source straight away and my body remains 
shivering submerged in this fresh and cool divine spring. 
As regards vocabulary Yakup Kadri’s Nev Yunanîlik compositions were also 
criticised for unnecessary use of Persian words in the place of Turkish ones. The 
language used in the 
Siyah Saçlı Yabancı ile Berrak Gözlü Kızın Sözleri 
was not the 
spoken language of that time. In terms of the structure and grammar the language is 
unadorned and simple to follow. In terms of vocabulary, though, Yakup Kadri uses 
Persian or Arabic words instead of Turkish ones, ie: 
menba
instead of 
kaynak
or 
pınar
, 
rai
instead of 
çoban
. These are poetic usages and may have been inspired by 
awareness of the use of poetic vocabulary in the Greek classics. One could argue that 
the use of these words provided the wonderful harmony in the dialogue
92
. One can 
argue that the stylistic experiments in his Nev Yunanîlik period left an enduring 
influence on Yakup Kadri’s prose. 
90
Storrs, 187 
91
Ahmet Cevat Emre (1941) 1957, Yücel 296-297
92
Yücel, 268 

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