AN OVERVIEW OF Part 1

Revolution, innovation, and Westernization have been the driving forces of the Turkish nation in the twentieth century. In the transformation of sociopolitical structure, economic life, and culture, the men of letters have served not only as eloquent advocates of progress, but also as catalysts, precursors, pioneers—and creators of brave new ideas of innovation. Today, as in the past thousand years, Turkish literature seems to bear testimony to Carlyle’s dictum—“The history of a nation’s poetry is the essence of its history: political, scientific, religious”—and to Gustave E. von Grunebaum’s observation that “literature has always been the art of the Muslim world, masterpieces of painting and architecture notwithstanding.”
Poetry, or literature in general, has been the quintessence of Turkish culture until modern times and a most faithful mirror of socioeconomic realities in Turkey since the inauguration of the Republic. Virtually all of the salient aspects of Turkish life, politics, and culture have found their direct or indirect expression in poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as in critical and scholarly writing. The themes and concerns have included nationalism, social justice, search for modernity, Westernization, revival of folk culture, economic and technological progress, human dignity, mysticism, pluralistic society, human rights and fundamental freedoms, democratic ideals, hero-cult, populism, Atatürkism, proletarianism, Turanism, Marxist-Leninist ideology, revival of Islam, humanism—in fact, all aspects and components of contemporary culture.
The function of literature, however, has not been confined to that of a mirror held to society and to intellectual life. The basic genres have not only embodied ideas and ideologies, values and verities, beliefs and aspirations, but have also served as vehicles of criticism, protest, opposition, and resistance. Literature in Turkey is a concomitant and catalyst of change: it strives to achieve self-renewal in aesthetic terms, to give voice to cultural and socioeconomic innovation, to provide impetus to progressive or revolutionary change, and to serve the cause of propaganda fide.
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Turkish literature is among the world’s oldest—and youngest—literatures. Its creative tradition, according to the claims of numerous scholars, dates back to before Christ. It is commonly accepted that its legacy of written works spans close to thirteen centuries.
In their long history, the Turks have gone through more changes than most nations, and yet—paradoxical as it may sound—they have preserved most of their basic cultural traits. Throughout the centuries they lived as nomadic tribes, built small and large states in parts of Asia, created the Seljuk state in Asia Minor and later the sprawling Ottoman Empire, which endured from the thirteenth to the early twentieth century, and finally established the modern Republic. At different stages of their history, Turkic communities embraced shamanism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeanism, Zoroastrianism, and other creeds until most of them accepted the Islamic faith more than a thousand years ago. Their language, one of the world’s most regular in grammar, and most agglutinative, has used five separate scripts: Köktürk, Uyghur, Arabic, Cyrillic, and (since 1928) Latin.
The lyric and epic traditions of the early centuries led to the masterworks of the pre-Ottoman period: Divan ü Lûgat-it-Türk, an encyclopedic compendium of Turkish linguistics and poetry; Kutadgu Bilig, a mirror for princes; and Yunus Emre’s mystic folk poetry which is notable, inter alia, for its universalist humanism.
Ottoman literature, which stressed poetry as the superior art, utilized the forms and the aesthetic values of Islamic Arabo-Persian literature. The educated elite, led by the sultans (many of whom were accomplished poets themselves), produced a huge body of verse whose hallmarks included refined diction, abstruse vocabulary, euphony, romantic agony, and dedication to formalism and tradition, and the Sufi brand of mysticism. Prose, although not held in high esteem by the Ottoman literary establishment, accounts for some excellent achievements, particularly the travelogues of the seventeenth-century cultural commentator Evliya Çelebi. The Ottoman Empire nurtured a rich theatrical tradition, which consisted of Karagöz (shadow plays),
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Meddah (storyteller and impersonator), and Orta oyunu (a type of commedia dell’arte).
The oral tradition, in addition to the early Dede Korkut tales, which recount the Turks’ heroic exploits, produced a large body of legends and stories. Its principal achievement is folk poetry, composed by minstrels and troubadours, who voiced in a spontaneous, sincere, and simple language the sensibilities, yearnings, social protests, and critical views of the uneducated classes. Utilizing Turkic verse forms and syllabic meters, often extemporized and sung to musical accompaniment, replete with assonances, alliterations, and inexact rhymes, folk poetry harped on the themes of love, heroism, the beauties of nature, and, at times, mysticism.
Classical poetry remained under the pervasive influence of Persian and Arabic verse: it imitated and tried to emulate the same verse forms, rhyme and rhythm patterns, meters, mythology, and even the same Weltanschauung. It adopted a substantial corpus of vocabulary from the Persian and Arabic languages.
Until the twentieth century, two literary mainstreams, seldom converging, constituted the flow of Ottoman Turkish creative arts—poesia d’arte and poesia popolare—to use Croce’s two categories. The first embodies elite, learned, ornate, refined literature; the second represents spontaneous, indigenous, down-to-earth, unassuming oral literature. Poesia d’arte is almost always an urban, and often upper-class, phenomenon, while poesia popolare flourishes mainly in the countryside. The former, as the name suggests, has a strong commitment to the principle of art for art’s sake, whereas the latter is preponderantly engagé or utilitarian in function and substance.
The conventional devices—strict formalism, stock similes, and metaphors—as well as some of the basic themes and concerns of classical Ottoman literature, may be found in a gazel (lyric ode) by Fuzuli (d. 1556), one of the greatest masters, in a faithful, but grotesquely archaic, translation by E. J. W. Gibb, the indefatigable British scholar who produced the most comprehensive study
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of Ottoman verse,1 but who perhaps did irreparable damage to
Turkish literature because of his anachronistic translations:
Feres are heedless, spheres are ruthless, Fortune is inconstant quite;
Woes are many, friends not any, strong the foe, and weak my plight.
Past away hope’s gracious shadow, passion’s sun beats fierce and hot;
Lofty the degree of ruin, lowly is the rank of right.
Little power hath understanding, louder aye grows slander’s voice,
Scant the ruth of fickle Fortune, daily worsens Love’s respite.
I’m a stranger in this country, guile-beset is union’s path;
I’m a wight of simple spirit, earth with faerie shows is dight.
Every slender figure’s motions form a stream of sorrow’s flood,
Every crescent-brow’s a headline of the scroll that madness hight.
Learning’s dignity’s unstable as the leaf before the wind;
Fortune’s workings are inverted, like the trees in water bright.
Sore desired the frontier, fraught with anguish lies the road of trial;
Yearned for is the station, all the path of proof beset with fright.
Like the harp’s sweet voice, the longed for beauty bides behind the veil;
Like the bubbles on the wine, reversed the beaker of delight.
Separation is my portion, dread the way to union’s land;
Ah, I weet not where to turn me, none is here to guide aright.
Tears of cramoisie have seized on Fuzuli’s sallow cheek;
Lo, what shades the Sphere cerulean maketh thereupon to light.
A century after Gibb’s work, I offer the following
(less distorted and more idiomatic) translation of
another lyric ode of Fuzuli. This translation tries to
replicate the formal structure, rhyme-pattern, and
rhythmic effects of the original.
Ah, I weet not where to turn me, none is here to guide aright.
Tears of cramoisie have seized on Fuzuli’s sallow cheek;
Lo, what shades the Sphere cerulean maketh thereupon to light.
A century after Gibb’s work, I offer the following
(less distorted and more idiomatic) translation of
another lyric ode of Fuzuli. This translation tries to
replicate the formal structure, rhyme-pattern, and
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I reap no gains but trouble at your place when I come near;
My wish to die on your love’s path is all that I hold dear.
I am the reed-flute when griefs assemble. Cast to the winds
What you find in my burnt-up, dried-up body except desire.
May bloody tears draw curtains on my face the day we part
So that my eyes will see just that moon-faced love when they peer.
My loneliness has grown to such extremes that not a soul
Except the whirlwind of disaster spins within my sphere.
There’s nobody to burn for my sake but my heart’s own fire;
My door is opened by none other than the soft zephyr.
O waves, don’t ravage all my surging teardrops, for this flood
Has caused all welfare buildings save this one to disappear.
The rites of love are on; how can the poet hold his sighs:
Except for sound, what profit could be found in me to clear?
Yunus Emre (d. ca. 1321) was the wellspring of Anatolian Turkish folk poetry, and remains its paragon. He is best known for quintessential verses and devotional hymns written in syllabic meters and a simple style. He once cautioned against effusive language: “Too many words are fit for a beast of burden.” His message to the rural masses is direct and forceful, full of love and humanism:
I am not here on earth for strife,
Love is the mission of my life.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I love you in depths beyond my soul.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Come, let us all be friends for once,
Let us make life easy on us,
Let us be lovers and loved ones,
The earth shall be left to no one.
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The nineteenth-century men of letters inherited the classical and the folk traditions, but turned their attention to the literary tastes and movements of the West—particularly of France and, to a lesser extent, England. The Ottoman state, beset by military defeat and atrophied social institutions, embarked upon a process of transformation usually referred to as Westernization. In 1839 the Tanzimat (Reforms) Period started to introduce legal, administrative, educational, and technological innovations. Cultural and literary changes followed in quick succession. New genres, adopted from Europe, gained ascendancy: fiction, drama for the legitimate stage, journalistic writing, the critical essay, and others. Translations and adaptations, mainly from the French, accelerated the Europeanization of Turkish literature.
When the Ottoman state collapsed after nearly 625 years and gave way to the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) devoted his prodigious energies to the creation of a homogeneous nation-state dedicated to modernization in all walks of life. The hold of Islamic thought and institutions over the nation was broken: secular education replaced Koranic instruction, and the government stressed nationalism as the official ideology, declaring religious allegiance and practice a stumbling block to progress. The legal system adapted the Swiss Civil Code, the Italian Penal Code, and German Commercial Law. Perhaps the most difficult of all reforms, the Language Revolution, was undertaken with lightning speed in 1928, and since then it has achieved a scope of success unparalleled in the modern world. The Arabic script, considered sacrosanct as Koranic orthography and used by the Turks for a millennium, was replaced by the Latin alphabet. A massive effort, still maintaining its momentum, has effectively purged the language of the vast majority of borrowings from Arabic and Persian. Atatürk’s “New Turkey,” which he defined as a “Republic of Culture,” seemed to uphold the statement made in 1913 by Abdullah Cevdet, an influential intellectual: “There is no other civilization: Civilization means European civilization, and it must be imported with its roses and thorns.” Although the sweeping reforms did not extend into the rural areas, in the urban
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centers drastic changes took place: political system, religious faith, national ideology, educational institutions and methods, intellectual orientation, daily life, script and language—all underwent transformation. Literature was also caught in the maelstrom.
All stages of modern Turkish history (reforms under Atatürk, 1923–1938; consolidation under İnönü, 1938–1950; democracy under Menderes, 1950–1960; junta, coalitions, caretaker cabinets, parliamentary governments since 1960) have been marked by the thrust of literary modernization. Today’s Turkey is homogeneous in population (more than ninety-nine percent Muslim) and integral in political and administrative structure—yet pluralistic, full of inner tensions, a battleground of traditionalists vs. revolutionaries, Islamists vs. secularists. Its literature is vibrant with ideologies, with a feverish search for values old and new, for diverse styles and tastes, for elements that can be employed to revive the traditional national culture, and for significant borrowings from the West as well as from other traditions.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the most vital debate of Turkish literature has been between the proponents of art for art’s sake and the advocates of commitment to realism and social causes. Mustafa Kemal Pasha himself, in a conversation that took place in 1921, about two years before he proclaimed the Republic, exhorted the nineteen-year-old Nazım Hikmet, already a famous poet, who would soon embrace the Communist ideology and influence the course of modern Turkish literature, particularly poetry, more profoundly than anyone else, to “write poems with a purpose.” The advice was heeded by each generation of writers since then, giving rise to patriotic verse in abundance on the one hand, and to socialist realism on the other. Especially from the 1950s until the 1980s, there was a massive output, in all genres, depicting the plight of the lumpenproletariat. But surrealism, neo-symbolism, theater of the absurd, stream-of-consciousness techniques, hermeticism, black comedy, and obscurantist verse have also flourished.
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The literary tastes of the early years of the Republic were dominated by numerous revered poets who had emerged in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. These prominent figures included Abdülhak Hâmit Tarhan (1852–1937), who, according to E. J. W. Gibb, inaugurated “the true Modern School of Turkish poetry, and whose elegiac, philosophical and metaphysical poems and stentorian verse tragedies fired the imagination of the Ottoman elite.” Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869–1944) intoned a mystique of Turkish nationalism: “I am a Turk: my faith and my race are mighty.” Ahmet Haşim (1887–1933), under the influence of French symbolists, combined a striking fiery imagery with melancholy sonal effects to create his lyrics of spiritual exile (“We ignore the generation which has no sense of melancholy”), articulated a view that summed up a fundamental aspect of classical poetry, and adumbrated the credo of the neo-surrealists of the 1950s and 1960s: “The poet’s language is constructed not for the purpose of being understood but to be heard; it is an intermediary language between music and words, yet closer to music than to words.”
Mehmet Âkif Ersoy (1873–1936), a master of heroic diction, devoted much of his verse to the dogma, passion, and summum bonum of Islam. His nationalism has a strong Islamic content, evident in the lyrics of the Turkish national anthem that he wrote. His elegy “For the Fallen at Gallipoli” is a celebrated expression of the values he upheld:
Soldier, for these hallowed lands, now on this land you lie dead,
Your forebears may well lean from Heaven to kiss your forehead.
How mighty you are, you safeguard our True Faith with your blood;
Your glory is shared by the braves of the Prophet of God.2
Who could dig the grave that will not be too narrow for you?
If we should bury you in history, you would break through.
That book cannot hold your epochs with all their rampages:
You could only be contained by everlasting ages.
If I could set up the Kaaba at the head of your pit
And carve on it the inspiration that stirs my spirit;
If I could seize the firmament with all the stars within,
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And lay it as a pall over your still - bleeding coffin;
If I could hitch spring clouds as ceiling for your open tomb,
Hang the Pleiades’ seven lamps in your mausoleum,
As you lie drenched in your own blood under the chandelier;
If I could drag the moonlight out of night into your bier
To stand guard by you as custodian until Doomsday;
If I could fill your chandelier with dawn’s eternal ray,
And wrap your wound at dusk with the sunset’s silken glory—
I still cannot say I have done something for your memory.
“I am,” wrote Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (1884–1958), “the future with roots in the past.” He was the much-acclaimed neoclassicist who produced, in the conventional forms and meters, meticulous lyrics of love, Ottoman grandeur, and Istanbul’s natural attractions. His “Death of the Epicures” is a testament to spiritual tranquillity and to the aesthetic life:
In the garden of the poet’s3 tomb there’s a rose, they say,
Day in day out it blooms anew, its color is blood-choked;
A nightingale weeps all night, they say, till the break of day:
In its tunes, the dreams of the city of love4 are evoked.
Death for an epicure is the springtime of calm and peace;
For years his soul smolders like incense burning everywhere
While his tomb lies and endures under the cool cypresses—
Each dawn a rose blooms and each night a nightingale sings there.
Among the dedicated revolutionaries in twentieth-century Turkish poetry Nazım Hikmet (1902–1963) ranks the highest. He had been a modernizing force since the early 1920s, remaining significant in aesthetic and political terms. He launched and popularized free verse under the early influence of Mayakovski. A communist, he spent many years in Turkish jails, fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, and died in Moscow in 1963. His poetry fuses social protest and a lyricism full of rhythmic effects and ingenious onomatopoeia. He practiced functionalism by doing away with the conventional molds, and created formal structures
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as the embodiment of content. Much of his large body of work laments social injustice, complains of the oppression of the masses, and yearns for revolutionary change. He composed many tender love lyrics, but his followers remember him more for his battle cries—“We can only reach our goal / amid bloodletting”—and for his concern about his comrades in other countries, as voiced in “Angina Pectoris,” written while he was in prison in the late 1940s:
Doctor, if half of my heart is here,
the other half is in China,
with the army
streaming toward the Yellow River.
Also, doctor, every morning,
as the sun rises, my heart
is shot in Greece.
And, in here, when the prisoners fall asleep
and the last steps leave the infirmary desolate,
my heart goes to a dilapidated wooden house in Çamlıca5
night after night, doctor.
And then, doctor, for ten years now
all I have that I can offer my poor people
is just this apple in my hand:
just a red apple:
my heart.
It’s not because of arteriosclerosis nor nicotine nor prison,
but because of this, dear doctor, because of this
that I have angina pectoris.
I gaze at the night through the iron bars
and despite the pressure on my breastbone
my heart beats together with the most distant star.
Turkey’s romantic revolutionary produced a prodigious amount of poetry, many plays—conventional as well as avant-garde—which have been staged not only in Turkey but also in the Soviet Union and numerous European countries, and several inept novels. His “Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları” (Human