Contemporary Turkish Litera-
ture,
Modern Turkish Drama,
Süleyman the Magnifi cent Poet,
three volumes on
Yunus Emre,
Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes
(with Metin
And),
A Brave New Quest: 100 Modern Turkish Poems,
Shadows of Love
(his origi-
nal poems in English),
A Last Lullaby
(his English/Turkish poems),
Living Poets of
Turkey,
Popular Turkish Love Lyrics and Folk Legends,
and many books featuring
modern Turkish poets (Dağlarca, Kanık, Anday). He is the editor of
A Dot on the
Map: Selected Stories and Poems
and
Sleeping in the Forest: Stories and Poems
by
Sait Faik.
ForeWord Reviews
named his book
Nightingales and Pleasure Gardens:
Turkish Love Poems
one of the ten best university press books of 2005.
Among Halman’s books in Turkish are twelve collections of his own poetry
(including
Ümit Harmanı,
his collected poems published in 2008), a massive vol-
ume of the poetry of ancient civilizations, the complete sonnets of Shakespeare,
the poetry of ancient Anatolia and the Near East, Eskimo poems, ancient Egyptian
poetry, the
rubai
s of Rumi, the quatrains of Baba Tahir Uryan, two anthologies
of modern American poetry, and books of the selected poems of Wallace Stevens
and Langston Hughes. Halman was William Faulkner’s fi rst
Turkish translator;
he has also translated Mark Twain and Eugene O’Neill.
Halman has published nearly three thousand articles, essays, and reviews
in English and in Turkish. He has served as a columnist for the Turkish dailies
Milliyet,
Akşam,
and
Cumhuriyet.
Many of his English articles on Turkish litera-
ture have been collected in
Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature.
Selections from Halman’s Turkish articles and essays have been collected in two
volumes,
Doğrusu
and
Çiçek Dürbünü.
His English reviews of works of Turkish lit-
erature have been collected in
Th
e Turkish Muse: Views and Reviews, 1960s–1990s.
Some of his books have been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Persian,
Urdu, Hindi, and Japanese.
For his work as a translator, he won Columbia Univer-
sity’s Th
ornton Wilder Prize.
His translations of Robinson Jeff ers’s
Medea,
Jerome Kilty’s
Dear Liar
(a
play adaptation of the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick
170
Biographical Notes
Campbell), Eugene O’Neill’s
Th
e Iceman Cometh,
and Neil Simon’s
Lost in Yonkers
were produced in Turkey.
Dear Liar
and
Th
e Iceman Cometh
won best-translation
awards. Halman is the coeditor (with Jayne L. Warner) of
İbrahim the Mad and
Other Plays: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Drama, Volume 1
and
I, Anatolia
and Other Plays: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Drama, Volume 2.
Talat Halman served as the Republic of Turkey’s fi rst minister of culture and
later as its ambassador for cultural aff airs. He was a member of the UNESCO
Executive Board. Between 1953 and 1997, he was on the faculties of Columbia
University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York
University (where he was also chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Lan-
guages and Literatures). In 1998, he founded the Department of Turkish Litera-
ture
at Bilkent University, Ankara, and has since been its chairman. He also serves
as Bilkent’s dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Letters. He is currently serv-
ing as president of the Turkish National Committee for UNICEF and editor in
chief of the
Journal of Turkish Literature.
Halman is also the general editor of a
four-volume history of Turkish literature published in Turkish. Since 2008, he has
served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture
and Arts, which organizes Istanbul’s music, fi lm, and theater festivals and the
Biennial of Istanbul.
Halman’s honors and awards include many literary prizes,
three honorary
doctorates, a Rockefeller Fellowship in the Humanities, the Distinguished Service
Award of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and of the Turkish Foreign Ministry,
the UNESCO Medal, and Knight Grand Cross (GBE), the Most Excellent Order of
the British Empire, conferred on him by Queen Elizabeth II.
J ay n e L . Wa r n e r is director of research at the Institute for Aegean Prehis-
tory in Greenwich, Connecticut. She holds a B.A. in classics, an M.A. in ancient
history, and, from Bryn Mawr College, a Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Anatolian
archaeology. Her
publications include
Elmalı-Karataş II: Th
e Early Bronze Age
Village of Karataş.
Warner has served as assistant editor of the American School
of Classical Studies at Athens and executive director of the Poetry Society of
America (New York). She has also served as director of the American Turkish
Society (New York) and director of the New York Offi
ce of the Board of Trustees
of Robert College of Istanbul. She is the editor of
Cultural Horizons: A Festschrift
in Honor of Talat S. Halman,
Th
e Turkish Muse: Views and Reviews, 1960s–1990s,
and
Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature.
Warner is also associ-
ate editor of
Sleeping in the Forest: Stories and Poems
by Sait Faik,
Nightingales
and Pleasure Gardens: Turkish Love Poems,
and
A Brave New Quest: 100 Modern
Turkish Poems.
