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CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
105 
Turkish literature, which none of the rest of my generation of writers 
have enjoyed. 
As soon as she finished school she married Salih Zeki Bey who was twenty years her 
senior. At that time he was preparing an Encyclopedia of Mathematics and she was 
translating for him from English the biographies of great mathematicians. He also 
very much enjoyed reading the Sherlock Holmes stories in translations made by 
Halide especially for him. Apparently Sherlock Holmes stories were very 
fashionable at the time. The Sultan himself kept one of his interpreters busy with 
these translations! Apart from Sherlock Holmes she also translated Shakespeare for 
her husband. However, Salih Zeki Bey appears to have been very critical of these 
because Halide used an informal language
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The marriage was not a happy one as can be conjectured from the pages about her 
married life to Salih Zeki. The following thoughts are telling
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:
He had an absolute mastery over the abstruse subjects he treated, and he 
illuminated them with a sharp and blinding clarity when he explained 
them to his pupils who gathered around him in the manner of disciples. 
This blinding clarity and simplicity are usually characteristic of the real 
mastery of a subject, but such a treatment was so different from my own 
somewhat dreamy mental temperament that I fell completely under its 
sway. Though it gave my mind a new direction and helped it in its 
development, it also blurred for me for a time the value of spiritual 
things, and I became in a mental sense enslaved to another mind. 
 
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Adıvar 2005, 207 
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Adıvar 2005, 204 

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