Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

A Millennium of Turkish Literature
that those red ants
piercing right through the sand hills
are lovers in great suff ering
Adnan Özer (b. 1957)
Th
e abundance of poetry in the Turkish Republic is such that it is vir-
tually impossible to do justice to it in a concise history. Well into its ninth 
decade, the republic had witnessed the publication of tens of thousands of 
poems in periodicals and many thousands of poetry books by hundreds 
of poets. Even major anthologies oft en fail to deal judiciously with the full 
range of the country’s enormous poetic output. In the present brief history, 
one can only regret the omission of innumerable names, among them such 
masters of syllabic meters as Ahmet Kutsi Tecer, Orhan Seyfi Orhon, Ömer 
Bedrettin Uşaklı, Mustafa Seyit Sutüven, Halit Fahri Ozansoy, Ümit Yaşar 
Oğuzcan; neoclassicists such as Mehmet Çınarlı, Bekir Sıtkı Erdoğan, 
and Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel (a virtuoso equally adept at 
aruz
prosody and 
syllabic meters); Behçet Kemal Çağlar, an exuberant patriotic poet; and 
eff ective users of free verse such as Orhon Murat Arıburnu, Cengiz Bektaş, 
Ahmet Necdet, Ebubekir Eroğlu, Şükran Kurdakul, Güven Turan, Tah-
sin Saraç, Refik Durbaş, Küçük İskender, Lâle Müldür, Ali Püsküllüoğlu, 
Turgay Gönenç, Ahmet Erhan, Tarık Günersel, and scores of others. Such 
richness certainly makes poetry afi cionados happy but frustrates antholo-
gists and literary historians.
Th
e early novels of the republic depicted the disintegration of Otto-
man society, ferocious political enmities, and the immoral lives of some 
members of religious sects, as well as the confl icts between urban intel-
lectuals and poverty-stricken peasants—as in the novels of Yakup Kadri 
Karaosmanoğlu (1889–1974). Turkey’s major female intellectual and advo-
cate of women’s rights, Halide Edib Adıvar (1882–1964), produced sagas 
of the War of Liberation, psychological novels, and panoramas of city life. 
Her novelistic art culminated in 
Sinekli Bakkal
(1936), which she originally 
published in English in 1935 under the title 
Th
e Clown and His Daughter.
Th
e harsh realities of Anatolia found fertile ground in the literature 
of engagement aft er World War II. Sabahattin Ali (1907–48) was a pio-
neer of forceful fi ction about the trials and tribulations of the lower classes. 
Two books, both published in 1950—
Bizim Köy
(Our Village; 
A Village 
in Anatolia
) by Mahmut Makal (b. 1930) and 
Toprak Ana
by Fazıl Hüsnü 

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Republic and Renascence
119
Dağlarca—exerted a shattering impact on political and intellectual circles 
by dramatically exposing conditions in villages. Th
e fi rst, available in Eng-
lish translation, is a series of vignettes written by Makal, a teenage peasant 
who became a village teacher aft er graduating from one of the controver-
sial Institutes for Village Teachers. Th
e book reveals the abject poverty of 
the Anatolian village:
Quite apart from the trouble of earning the wretched stuff , it’s diffi
cult 
even to make bread here in any edible form. . . . Th
e women rise at night, 
knead the dough, and while their husbands are still in bed—that is to 
say, before dawn—they bake enough for the day. If they get up a bit late, 
they get no end of a beating from their husbands, and everyone calls 
them “slatterns.” . . . If you want to know what the torments of Hell are 
like, I’d say it’s baking bread in this village.
Not fi ve per cent of the women in our village wear shoes. All the rest 
go barefoot. Even in winter they do the same, in the snow and the mud 
and the wet. Th
e girls all go barefoot. . . . And in summer these same feet 
go off to the cornfi elds to plough, all cracked and cut with stones.
11
In the mid-1950s, a brave new genre emerged—the “Village Novel,” 
which reached its apogee with Yaşar Kemal’s