Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

From:
 the dig
poems must be dug into: you supposed
i saw the manuscript
with its crimson rubrics
buried by those delicate exiles
you found heart-broken papers
their sorrow frozen, leathern their ashes
and 
suddenly,
as their pain touched your pain
(Translated by Walter G. Andrews)
7
Although these three major fi gures are highly individualistic and 
their works drastically diff erent from one another, they all have acknowl-
edged the need for coming to terms with the viable and valuable aspects 
of the Ottoman-Turkish elite poetry. Th
ey have used not its stringent 
forms and prosody, but its processes of abstracting and its metaphorical 
techniques.
Much of Turgut Uyar’s output has conveyed a sense of discontent, if 
not disgust, with humanity and a fi rm conviction of man’s inherent evil, 
which Uyar seems to blame—in poetic rather than moral terms—for the 
past vicissitudes of human history and for its present tragic state. Human 
society, according to his work’s basic philosophical premise, is bent on 
destroying itself: it infl icts confl agrations upon itself and rejoices in the 
ashes. Yet miraculously it arises, phoenixlike, out of those ashes to per-
petuate its existence, albeit in near chaos and in banishment from immor-
tality. Aesthetically, Uyar has a sharp aptitude for recognizing bad habits 
in creative eff orts—in particular, his own.
7. Hilmi Yavuz, 
Seasons of the Word,
translated by Walter G. Andrews (Syracuse, 
N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2007), 40.

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A Millennium of Turkish Literature
Quiet refl ection alternates with eruptions of anger and nausea, moves 
on to nightmarish abstract depictions, then resolves itself into an onto-
logical probe wherein Uyar masterfully fuses the concrete and abstract 
elements of reality.
At its best, Uyar’s poetry is a well-wrought blend of senses and action 
with ingenious metaphor. In “Terziler Geldiler” (And Came the Tailors), 
which is arguably one of the best poems of his entire career, he achieves 
a summation of creation and its attendant anarchy: life’s warp and woof 
constantly restoring itself and disintegrating into death. It is a theme of 
Herculean dimensions, and Uyar does justice to it by eliciting meaning-
ful abstract formulations out of an imaginative juxtaposition of images, 
allusions, and philosophic lunges into the diverse aspects of reality. Death 
became dominant in Uyar’s poetry as a concomitant of his pessimism. He 
was preoccupied with death as the inescapable end and therefore as an end 
in itself: in “Övgü, Ölüye” (In Praise of the Dead), he evokes death’s sundry 
aspects by dint of perhaps the most striking delineation of a corpse in all 
of Turkish literature.
Uyar’s line “on the shore of all possibilities” sums up the dysfunctional 
aspects of this new esoteric poetry, which is marked by such wild thrusts 
of imagination and distortion of language that some critics denounced it 
as “word salad.” “Vanish,” by Edip Cansever (1928–86), is one of the prime 
examples (the fi rst two stanzas quoted here):
I reiterate your face is a laughter
Glance and an armada of life marches into light
A fl ower that hails from subterranean regions
An eagle gone stark-naked
Now pink is pursued by three persons
Upward along your shoulders
Drive them insane in your hair
Carnation multiple
Carnation shrinking shrunk
Most beauty arises in your most secret places
Lovely as animals suddenly born
Glance and I deliver a poem to the world
A poem is made red round wide

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