Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Republic and Renascence
105
Widest reddest on planes oppressed
A secret is now pursued by three persons
Inward along your eyes
Drive them insane in my lines
Carnation divided
Carnation multiplied multiple
Attilâ İlhan, Turkey’s most successful neoromantic poet as well as a 
major novelist and essayist, attempted to recapture the milieu and moods 
prevailing during the slow death of the Ottoman Empire. Known also as a 
creator of imaginative and touching love poems, he introduced a vigorous 
new style, as evidenced in “Ancient Sea Folk,” quoted here in part:
pebbles chant an odd song there and the sea shepherds
drive their herds into the high seas
while on the mussels’ iris harlot blues crouch
in the boundless western time’s green galleons
unforgettable and emerald and sighted
blood-drenched slab by slab
you hear the ancient sea folk in harbor taverns
those kinky sea people if you listen
spanish songs and italian wine
and godlike you create curses
from fi ft een meridian to twenty you create universal curses
atop the mainmast
you god of blasphemy and tumult and of my enigma
you god of lost treasures
you shall not look behind nor spit at the wind
unless black fl ags are hoisted on the admiral’s mast
no honest breeze shall spark your corsair’s eyes
unless you chew on the rain or on tobacco
I never forgot the mediterranean
I plunged into fl ames and wept voraciously
the joy of creating
and being created fl ared tremulously in the sky
and prayers burst open like titanic sails

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106
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
then lo and behold three crescents arose at once
barbarossa
8
songs released like hawks from their arms
cyclone-sized barefoot mariners of the algerian skipper
who arrested the caravans of ships
and held the straits of messina and septe and all others
there is no god but God
Th
is type of self-serving aestheticism represents a “supreme fi ction” at 
its best and sterile confusion at its worst. A leading critic, Rauf Mutluay, 
deplores its egocentricity and narcissism as “the individualistic crisis and 
this deaf solitude of our poetry.” Th
e language is usually lavish; the poetic 
vision is full of inscapes and instresses; ambiguity strives to present itself 
as virtuosity; metaphors are oft en strikingly original but sometimes run 
amuck. Euphuistic and elliptical writing is a frequent fault committed by 
the practitioners of abstract verse. Th
e best specimens, however, have an 
architectonic splendor, rich imagination, and human affi
rmation.
In obscurantism, the critic Memet Fuat fi nds the malaise of the age, 
calling it “the critique of the time we live in—the poems of individuals who 
are oppressed, depressed, and shoved into nothingness.” Th
e poet Edip 
Cansever calls for, as a principle of the new aesthetics, the “death of the 
poetic line,” whose integrity had been accepted as a fundamental artistic 
value for generations of Turkish poets: “Th
e function of the poetic line 
is fi nished.” Extending this statement to the self-imposed isolation of the 
obscurantists, Mutluay speculates that “perhaps the function of poetry is 
fi nished.” Cansever’s poetic vision is affl
icted with that modern malaise 
that divines man’s obsolescence and focuses its energies on pain and grief 
in the face of his unheroic existence. Cansever occasionally expresses this 
mal du siècle
in simple lyric lines—for example: “our hearts are a dilapi-
dated monastery” or “it is a poet’s face that bleeds from loneliness / a face as 
elongated as days without women.” However, he oft en prefers the unusual 
but meticulous metaphor, which characterizes the better work of Turkey’s 
so-called “Th
e Second New” movement—a school with which Cansever 
had been affi
liated from the beginning of his career.
8. “Barbarossa” Hayreddin Pasha: Admiral of the Ottoman fl eet in the reign of Sultan 
Süleyman the Magnifi cent (sixteenth century).

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Republic and Renascence
107
Cemal Süreya (1931–90), a major fi gure of “Th
e Second New” started 
out in the mid–twentieth century with bold innovations, wild thrusts of 
imagination, and distortions of language. In time, he would move away 
from the esoteric to the lucid.
Rose
Seated at the core of the rose I weep
As I die in the street each night
Ahead and beyond all unmindful
Pang upon pang of dark diminution
Of eyes upheld blissful with life.
Your hands are in my caress into dusk
Hands forever white forever white
Cast into my soul icicles of fright
A train stays at the station for a short while
A man who sometimes can’t fi nd the station that’s me.
On my face I rub the rose
Fallen forlorn over the pavement
And cut my body limb by limb
Bloodgush doomsday madmusic
On the horn a gypsy is reborn.
Cemal Süreya’s eloquent lines, written in 1966, embody the revolu-
tionary experience, the disorientation as well as the optimism and the stir-
ring search of the “New Turkey”:
We are the novices of new life
All our knowledge is transformed
Our poetry, our love all over again
Maybe we are living the last bad days
Maybe we shall live the fi rst good days too
Th
ere is something bitter in this air
Between the past and the future
Between suff ering and joy
Between anger and forgiveness.

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108
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
Ece Ayhan (1931–2002), a confi rmed maverick from his emergence in 
the 1950s on, was a member of “Th
e Second New.” He championed 
anlamsız 
şiir,
meaningless or absurd poetry. Th
e best of this brave new poetry has as 
its hallmarks vivid imagination, an enchanting musical structure, and an 
intellectual complexity that dazzles with its audacious metaphors.
Most of “Th
e Second New” poets marched toward clarity. But Ece 
Ayhan chose arcanum. Every element of his poems became esoteric, 
oblique, indecipherable. In syntactical diffi
culties and inaccessible allu-
sions, few poets came close to the challenges Ayhan posed. Readers and 
critics have racked their brains to make sense of the surface problems as 
well as the unfathomable secrets.
One of Ayhan’s intriguing books is 
Orthodoxies,
9
where underneath the 
ambiguities there are subtle and oft en sly symbols, most of which deal with 
minority cultures—“the nigger in the photograph,” “the secret Jew,” “Ipecacu-
anha the Emetic,” Mistrayim, Armenians, the Greek and Russian Orthodox.
Many degrees of separation lend Ayhan’s poetry its fascination and 
sardonic fury. Th
ere is much clash of cultures and sects here, but the tragic 
core is constituted by homosexual culture, declared anathema by hypo-
critical public mores.
In sharp contrast to urban elite litterateurs, village poets, standing 
media vitae,
serve their rural communities by providing enlightenment as 
well as live entertainment. Th
e minstrel tradition, with its stanzaic forms 
and simple prosody, is alive and well. Particularly since the 1950s, many 
prominent folk poets have moved to or made occasional appearances in 
the urban areas. Âşık Veysel (1894–1973), a blind minstrel, produced some 
of the most poignant specimens of the oral tradition.
I walk on a road long and narrow:
Night and day, on and on I go.
Where am I heading? I don’t know:
Night and day, on and on I go.
Even in sleep I must forge ahead:
No rest for the weary, no warm bed;
9. Ece Ayhan, 
Ortodoksluklar
(Istanbul: De, 1968); 
A Blind Cat Black; and, Ortho-
doxies,
translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1997).

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Republic and Renascence
109
Fate has doomed me to the roads I dread.
Night and day, on and on I go.
Who can tell why my life went awry?
Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
Craving a caravanserai,
Night and day, on and on I go.