Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Yahya Kemal Beyatlı
(1884–1958)
This poet attained fame for his poems about the metaphysics of life and death. 
One of his most famous poems deals metaphorically with death and its aftermath:
Silent Ship
If the day has arrived at last to weigh anchor from time,
A ship departs from this harbor toward an unknown clime.
As if it has no passengers, silently it makes way;
No hand nor handkerchief is waved as it sails away.
This journey is distress for those left behind on the quay,
Their tearful eyes scan the black horizons day after day.
Desperate hearts: This will neither be the last ship to go
Nor the fi nal bereavement of a life fi lled with sorrow.
In this world, the beloved and the lover wait in vain
Not knowing that the loved ones will never come back again.
Those who sailed away are surely happy with their sojourn:
Years went by since that voyage, yet not one soul will return.

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organic form, and functional metaphors and images. His poetry created a 
new blend of lyrical, dramatic, and rhetorical elements. His art was at once 
utilitarian and poetically motivated. In his best poems, he seemed to have 
interfused Lorca’s spirit with Mayakovski’s craft . Nazım Hikmet was truly 
Turkish and remarkably universal, both a romantic and a rationalist. His 
vast popularity in Turkey and elsewhere is a testament to a passionate man 
who cared and dared in everything he did in life and art.
Out of despair and wrath against injustice and exploitation, Nazım 
Hikmet always off ered poetic statements of faith and affi
rmation, confi -
dent “that we’ll see beautiful days / we’ll see / sunny / days.” It is regret-
table that simplistic rhetoric rears its head in parts of his massive output, 
which, at its best, features the lyric and dramatic depictions of the human 
predicament without reducing it to economic plight.
His earlier poems, which launched free verse in Turkey, put an eff usive 
lyricism at the service of Marxist ideals and made a synthesis of youth-
ful enthusiasm for the machine age, the mystique of a socialist paradise 
on earth, the rhetoric of journalistic verse, ruthless political satire, and 
the lyrical outpourings of an incorrigible romantic soul. Th
e later poems, 
written in and out of prison by an idealist whose spirit was never broken, 
are oft en battle cries, but they occasionally betray self-pity and self-dra-
matization. By 1941, Nazım Hikmet was angry and vengeful: “Our cause 
/ will be fulfi lled / alas! / drenched with blood. / And our victory shall be 
pulled out / like a nail / without mercy.” In a poem he wrote in 1931, he 
described himself as “I, who am an ordinary proletarian poet, / with a 
Marxist-Leninist conscience.”
Nazım Hikmet’s masterpiece, 
Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı
(
Th
e Epic of 
Sheikh Bedreddin,
1977), came out in 1936. It represents the culmination 
of the best aspects of the poet’s art and is remarkably free of its weak-
nesses. Th
e epic is a lyrical and dramatic account of the uprisings of Şeyh 
Bedreddin and his followers, including a young revolutionary named 
Börklüce Mustafa, who in the early fi ft eenth century founded a religious 
sect advocating community ownership, social and judicial equality, and 
pacifi sm. Nazım Hikmet tells how the Ottoman armies under the com-
mand of Royal Prince Murad crushed the uprisings, killed Börklüce Mus-
tafa, and later hanged Şeyh Bedreddin. Th
is work is a perfect synthesis of 
substance and form, of diction and drama, of fact and metaphor. Bedred-
din and Mustafa are treated as tragic heroes whose ideals are thwarted by 

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A Millennium of Turkish Literature
a cruel death. Fortunately for the poem, Nazım Hikmet’s ideological con-
cerns are woven into the action and lyric formulation. An elegiac tone, 
fully attuned to the historical narrative, precludes the intrusion of the 
polemics and propaganda that had deleterious eff ects on Nazım’s other 
major poems. Th
e epic is perhaps the best long poem written in Turkish 
in the twentieth century.