AN OVERVIEW OF Part 2

Landscapes from My Country6), a sprawling, episodic verse saga of the twentieth century, composed in 17,000 lines, is often touted as his magnum opus. His real masterpiece might well be Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı (The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin7), published in 1936. A moving account of the rise and fall of a heretical sect that preached an incipient form of communism in the early fifteenth century, it contains some of the most poignant poetic narrative passages ever written in the Turkish language.
At his best, Nazım Hikmet has been compared by Turkish and non-Turkish men of letters to such figures as Lorca, Aragon, Esenin, Mayakovski, Neruda, and Artaud. No other Turkish poet has been translated into more languages nor enjoyed greater acclaim in so many countries. Tristan Tzara, who translated some of Nazım Hikmet’s poems into French, paid the following tribute: “The life Nazım led engulfs the experiences of a large segment of mankind. His poetry exalts the aspirations of the Turkish people as well as articulates the common ideals of all nations in humanistic terms.”
Nazım Hikmet’s innovations, although they struck a responsive chord in poetic tastes throughout his life and after his death, by no means established a monopoly. Most of his contemporaries pursued different courses: Necip Fazıl Kısakürek wallowed in the anguish of his own soul; Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel combined neoclassicism with urbanized versions of folk verse; Ahmet Muhip Dıranas, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Ahmet Kutsi Tecer specialized in simple lyrics of genteel sensibilities expressed in tidy stanzaic forms and the traditional syllabic meters.
Asaf Hâlet Çelebi (1907–1958) introduced his own iconoclasm in surrealistic poems that gave the impression of somnambulistic writing with intimations of erudition. “A poem,” he declared, “is nothing but a long word made up of syllables joined together. Syllables by themselves have no meaning. It is therefore futile to struggle with meaning in a poem. . . . Poetry creates an abstract world using concrete materials—just like life itself.”
These theories and movements continued to exert varying degrees of influence on the literature of the later decades, but the
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themes and the tenor of Nazım Hikmet’s verse probably wielded
the widest impact. Effective voices have been raised among poets,
dramatists, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists against the
established order and its iniquities, oppression of the proletariat,
and national humiliation suffered at imperialist hands. The
poetry of social realism concentrates on the creation of a just
and equitable society. It is often more romantic and utopian
than rhetorical, with sensual strains, tender sentiments, flowing
rhythms, but occasionally given to invective and vituperation.
The early novels of the Republic depicted the disintegration of
Ottoman society, ferocious political enmities, and the immoral
lives of religious sects, as well as the conflicts between urban
intellectuals and poverty-stricken peasants—as in the novels
of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1889–1974). Turkey’s major
woman intellectual and advocate of women’s rights, Halide Edib
Adıvar (1882–1964), produced sagas of the War of Independence,
psychological novels, and panoramas of city life. Her novelistic art
culminated in Sinekli Bakkal (1936), which she originally published
in English under the title of The Clown and His Daughter.8
The harsh realities of Anatolia found fertile ground in
the literature of engagement after World War II. Sabahattin
Ali (1907–1948) was a pioneer of forceful fiction about the
peasant’s trials and tribulations. Two books, both published in
1950, Bizim Köy (Our Village) by Mahmut Makal (b. 1930) and
Toprak Ana (Mother Earth) by Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (b. 1914),
exerted a shattering impact on political and intellectual circles by
dramatically exposing conditions in villages. The first, available
in English translation,9 is a series of vignettes written by Makal,
a teenage peasant who became a village teacher after graduating
from one of the controversial Institutes for Village Teachers. The
book reveals the abject poverty of the Anatolian village:
Quite apart from the trouble of earning the wretched stuff, it’s
difficult even to make bread here in any edible form. . . . The 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
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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 five 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. The girls all go barefoot. . . . And in summer
these same feet go off to the cornfields to plough, all cracked and cut
with stones.
In Toprak Ana, Dağlarca gave poetic expression to the same
tragic deprivations, as in the poem entitled “Village without
Rain”:
I’m hungry, black earth, hungry, hear me.
With the black ox I’m hungry tonight.
He thinks, and thinking feeds him,
I think, and thinking makes my hunger grow.
I’m hungry, black earth, hungry, hear me.
One can’t hide it when he’s hungry.
The wind sleeps on the hills of gluttony
In the sleep of bird and beast.
When the fat stars glide,
Darkness get fed.
The wind sleeps on the hills of gluttony.
One can’t sleep it off when he’s hungry.
Hunger is black on our faces, hunger is hoary.
Meadows and hills hunger.
Rain falls no more and the crops are scorched.
How did we anger the skies far and wide?
Hunger is black on our faces, hunger is hoary.
One can’t live on it when he’s hungry.
In the mid-1950s a brave new genre emerged—the “Village
Novel,” which reached its apogee with Yaşar Kemal’s İnce
Memed.10 Yaşar Kemal (b. 1922), the most famous Turkish
novelist at home and abroad has been frequently mentioned, not
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only in Turkey but also in the world press and literary circles, as
a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize. His impressive corpus of
fiction, written in a lithe, virtually poetic style, ranks as one of the
truly stirring achievements in the history of Turkish literature.
Dealing with the merciless reality of poverty, village literature
portrays the peasant threatened by natural disaster and man’s
inhumanity. The drama is enacted in terms of economic and
psychological deprivation, blood feuds, stagnation and starvation,
droughts, the tyranny of the gendarmes and petty officials, and
exploitation at the hands of landowners and politicos. The style
is predominantly lyrical and dialogues record local dialects with
an almost flawless accuracy. A pessimistic tone pervades much of
village literature: its delineations are bleak even when occasional
flashes of humor or a glimmer of hope or descriptions of nature’s
beauty appear. A great strength of the genre has been its freedom
from the rhetoric that has marred much of the poetry of social
protest. When presenting deprived men and women pitted
against hostile forces, the best practitioners offer an affirmation
of the human spirit. Their works are often testaments to the
dauntless determination of the peasant to survive and to resist—
sometimes through rebellion—the forces of oppression.
A growing body of fiction about the urban poor shares
the strengths of the Village Novel—engrossing plot, effective
narration, realistic dialogue, and so on—but, like much of the
literature of socialist realism throughout the world, both types
suffer from lack of psychological depth and subtlety.
Satirical fiction is dominated by Aziz Nesin (1916–1995),
Turkey’s best satirist ever. In more than eighty works, Nesin
provided a strong indictment of the oppression and brutalization
of the common man. His hero is the man in the street beleaguered
by the inimical forces of modern life. He lambasts bureaucracy
and exposes economic inequities in stories that effectively
combine local color and universal verities. Sait Faik (1906–1954)
is admired for his meditative, rambling romantic fiction, full of
intriguing insights into the human soul, capturing the pathos
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and the bathos of urban life in a style unique for its poetic, yet colloquial, flair.
An awakening of interest in Ottoman history, after several decades of neglect, gave rise to a massive semidocumentary novel by Kemal Tahir (1910–1973), Devlet Ana (Mother State), a saga of the emergence of the Ottoman state in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and several excellent works of drama by A. Turan Oflazoğlu, Orhan Asena, and others. The Turkish War of Independence has continued to fire novelists’ imaginations since the 1920s.
In sharp contrast to realist fiction, a group of authors, some well versed in English and French, produced stream-of-consciousness fiction heavily influenced by Joyce and Faulkner as well as by the French nouveau roman. Their works depict psychological crises in lyrical, and sometimes turgid, styles. Some of them offer tragicomic scenes of modern life by means of a decomposed language. The principal themes of modern fiction all over the world also characterize the Turkish nouvelle vague: dehumanization, moral disintegration, absurdity, lack of heroism, ennui, futility, hypocrisy. The protagonists are often abstractions of psychic turmoil, and phenomena are presented in terms of transmogrification.
A frontal thrust for modernization took place in the early 1940s when Orhan Veli Kanık (1914–1950), Oktay Rifat (1914–1988), and Melih Cevdet Anday (1915–2002) launched their “Poetic Realism” movement. Their urge for literary upheaval was revolutionary, as expressed in a joint manifesto of 1941 that called for “altering the whole structure from the foundation up . . . dumping overboard everything that traditional literature has taught us.” The movement did away with rigid conventional forms and meters, reduced rhyme to a bare minimum, avoided stock metaphors, stentorian effects, specious embellishments. It championed the idea and the ideal of “the little man” as its hero, the ordinary citizen who asserted his political will with the advent of democracy. Kanık’s “Epitaph” is precisely this type of celebration:
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He suffered from nothing in the world
The way he suffered from his corns;
He didn’t even feel so badly
About having been created ugly.
Though he wouldn’t utter the Lord’s name
Unless his shoe pinched,
He couldn’t be considered a sinner either.
It’s a pity Süleyman Efendi had to die.
The Garip (Strange) Group, as the Kanık–Rifat–Anday triad is referred to, endeavored to write not only about the common man, but also for him. In order to communicate with him, they employed the rhythms and idioms of colloquial speech, including slang. With their movement, the domination of free verse, introduced in the 1920s by Nazım Hikmet, became complete. They proclaimed with pride: “Every moment in the history of literature imposed a new limitation. It has become our duty to expand the frontiers to their outer limits, better still, to liberate poetry from its restrictions.” Many of Kanık’s poems are frequently quoted by Turks, a favorite one being the three-line poem entitled “For the Homeland”:
All the things we did for our country!
Some of us died;
Some of us gave speeches.
In the late 1950s a strong reaction set in against Poetic Realism. Literature of commitment came under fire in some circles. This is reflected in “Poetry Lesson” by Salâh Birsel (1919–1999):
Take “Love for Mankind” as your topic
And free verse as prosody.
Relevant or not,
Whenever it occurs to you,
Insert the word “Hunger”
At a convenient spot.
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Near the end of the poem
Rhyme “strife” with “the right to good life.”
There—that’s the way to become A Great Poet.
Getting away from the easy intelligibility and the surface simplicities of the poetic realists, a group of younger poets proudly championed obscurantism and “meaningless poetry.” Soon, Oktay Rifat and Melih Cevdet Anday also departed from their earlier convictions and commitments: the former took up neo-surrealism and the latter the poetry of intellectual complexity.
A new generation had initiated obscurantism, continuing from where Asaf Hâlet Çelebi’s surrealism had left off in the 1940s. İlhan Berk, perhaps Turkey’s most daring and durable poetic innovator, who acted as spokesman for the group (often identified as İkinci Yeni, “The Second New”), pontificated: “Art is for innovation’s sake.” Turgut Uyar’s line “on the shore of all possibilities” summed up the autistic aspect of this new esoteric poetry, which was marked by such wild thrusts of imagination and distortion of language that some critics denounced it as “word salad.” “Vanish,” by Edip Cansever (1928–1986), is one of the prime examples:
I reiterate: your face is a laughter
Glance and an armada of life marches into light
A flower that hails from subterranean regions
An eagle gone stark-naked
Now pink is pursued by three persons
Upward along your shoulder
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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Widest reddest on planes oppressed
A secret is now pursued by three persons
Inward along your eyes
Inward along your eyes
Drive them insane in my lines
Carnation divided
Carnation multiplied multiple
Know your hands in circles of hope
Hands are gaped at holding the void in balance
An extension from hope to man
A plane muddled known only to sight
Love is close while forging day out of night
Now love is chased
By three international persons
Drive them insane in infinity
A tea has many a name
A table many a round
Ornaments rotten animals ramcrossed
They all compel us to stare
Now a light is arrested
By three persons dressed in white
Drive them insane in the void
A window too narrow
A window vanishing vanished . . .
This type of self-serving aestheticism represents a “supreme
fiction” at its best and sterile confusion at its worst. A leading
critic, Rauf Mutluay, deplored its egocentricity and narcissism as
“the individualistic crisis and this deaf solitude of our poetry.” The language is usually lavish, the poetic vision full of inscapes
and instresses, ambiguity strives to present itself as virtuosity,
metaphors are often strikingly original, but sometimes run amuck. Euphuistic and elliptical writing is a frequent fault committed by
the practitioners of abstract verse. The best specimens, however,
have an architectonic splendor, rich imagination, and human
affirmation.
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In obscurantism, the critic Memet Fuat found the malaise of
the age, calling it “the critique of the time we live in—the poems
of individuals who are oppressed, depressed, and shoved into
nothingness.” As a principle of the new aesthetics, the poet Edip
Cansever called for the “death of the poetic line,” whose integrity
had been accepted as a fundamental artistic value for generations
of Turkish poets: “The function of the poetic line is finished.” Extending this statement to the self-imposed isolation of the
obscurantists, Mutluay speculated that “perhaps the function of
poetry is finished.”
In sharp contrast, village poets, standing media vitae, continue
to serve their rural communities by providing enlightenment as
well as live entertainment. The minstrel tradition, with all its
stanzaic forms and simple prosody, is alive and well. Particularly
since the 1950s, many prominent folk poets have moved to, or
made occasional appearances in, the urban areas. Âşık Veysel
(1894–1973), a blind minstrel, produced the most poignant
specimens of the oral tradition.
I walk on a road long and narrow:
Night and day, on and on I go.
Where am I heading? I don’t know:
Night and day, on and on I go.
Even in sleep I must forge ahead:
No rest for the weary, no warm bed;
Fate has doomed me to the roads I dread.
Night and day, on and on I go.
Who can tell why my life went awry?
Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry.
Craving a caravanserai,
Night and day, on and on I go.
The forms and values of classical poetry, too, were kept alive by
a group of highly accomplished formalists who clustered mainly
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around the monthly Hisar, which ceased publishing in 1980 after thirty years.
Among the daring, and quite impressive, explorations into Turkey’s own literary heritage have been those undertaken by Turgut Uyar, İlhan Berk, and Attilâ İlhan. Although these three major figures are highly individualistic and their works drastically different from one another, they have all acknowledged the need for coming to terms with the viable and the valuable aspects of the Ottoman-Turkish elite poetry. They have used, not its stringent forms and prosody, but its processes of abstracting and its metaphorical techniques. İlhan Berk’s aesthetics has occasionally striven to forge a synthesis of Oriental tradition and Western modernity. In his Şenlikname (The Festival Book, 1972), for instance, he conveys through visual evocations, old miniatures, engravings, and subtle sonorities the vista of Ottoman life and art; yet the poetic vision, throughout the book, is that of a modern man, neutral rather than conditioned by his culture, in a sense more European than Turkish. Attilâ İlhan, Turkey’s most successful neo-romantic poet, also a major novelist and essayist, has attempted to recapture the milieu and the moods prevailing during the slow death of the Ottoman Empire.
Standing outside of all groups and movements is Behçet Necatigil (1916–1979), who produced refined poems of intellectual complexity with verbal capers and a subdued tone. Some of his poems could be described as cubistic. In most of them, he utilized the subtleties of the language more effectively than did his contemporaries. With a natural disdain for stereotypes, he created a private poetic universe of delicate delineations.
After their innovations of the 1950s ground to a halt, both Oktay Rifat and Melih Cevdet Anday abandoned their earlier insistence on simplicity, the vernacular, concrete depiction, epigrammatic statement, and so on, which had been the hallmarks of the Garip Group. Oktay Rifat took up a fertile type of neo-surrealism, proclaiming that “poetry tells or explains nothing, because beauty explains nothing.” Anday’s work moved toward lucid philosophical inquiry: his new aesthetic formula was, in his
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own words, “thought or essences serving as a context for arriving at beauty.” His long poems of the 1960s and 1970s (Kolları Bağlı Odysseus [Odysseus Bound], “Horses at the Trojan Gates,” [also published as “Horses before Troy”], Göçebe Denizin Üstünde [On the Nomad Sea11]) sought a synthesis of universal culture, and endeavored to construct superstructures of ideas, myths, and legends. The concern for world affairs was an absorption of many Turkish poets. Their motivation was ideological or humanistic; nonetheless, they commented on international events with telling effect. They poured out elegiac poems for John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh, and Salvador Allende, along with indictments of the war in Vietnam, celebrations of man’s conquest of the moon, and moving accounts of the tragedies of Algeria and Cyprus.
The most encompassing poetic achievement of contemporary Turkey belongs to Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (b. 1914), the winner of the Award of the International Poetry Forum (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) and the Yugoslav Golden Wreath (Struga), previously won by W. H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, and Eugenio Montale, and later by Allen Ginsburg et al. His range is bewilderingly broad: metaphysical poetry, children’s verse, cycles about the space age and the quest for the moon, epics of the conquest of Istanbul and of the War of Independence, aphoristic quatrains, neo-mysticism, poetry of social protest, travel impressions, books on the national liberation struggles of several countries, and humorous anecdotes in verse. Dağlarca has published only poetry—about a hundred collections in all. “In the course of a prestigious career,” wrote Yaşar Nabi Nayır, a prominent critic, “which started in 1934, Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca has tried every form of poetry, achieving equally impressive success in the epic genre, in lyric and inspirational verse, in satire, and in the poetry of social criticism. Since he has contributed to Turkish literature a unique sensibility, new concepts of substance and form, and an inimitable style, his versatility and originality have been matched by few Turkish literary figures, past or present.” Dağlarca’s tender lyric voice finds its testaments in countless long and short poems:
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Sparkle
Clearly death is not a loss.
Regardless the brooks
Will flow.
With faith
Weeds will turn green and roses will grow.
Clearly death is not a loss.
Dağlarca’s protest poetry, however, can often be described as
a verbis ad verbera.
Beating
How about it, let’s join our hands.
You hit twice, and I’ll belt two.
Has he stolen
Or sucked the nation’s blood and sweat?
You belt four, and I’ll strike four more.
Twenty sent abroad to buy ships, thirty to select tea . . .
Did the Foreign Minister get a cut,
While our hairless children starve in adobe villages,
And our baby dolls sell their pure flesh night after night?
You hit seven times, and I’ll belt seven more.
How about it, eh, let’s join hands.
Has he sold a plate of beans, 8 cents’ worth for two dollars eighty,
Or did he shake his camel’s head at your petition to squeeze 500 out of you? Elected to Congress did he invest in his own future, trample on progress?
You belt nine, and I’ll belt nine more.
Since the 1980s the art of the novel has taken giant strides
thanks in part to the growing corpus of Yaşar Kemal and to the
impressive work of Adalet Ağaoğlu, Tahsin Yücel, Erhan Bener,
Attilâ İlhan, Erendiz Atasü, Nazlı Eray, et al. In Turkey and
abroad, Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) has emerged as a compelling
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protagonist of new dimensions in the Turkish novelistic art. His major works have been successfully translated into many
languages, the English versions12 attracting wide attention and
winning a number of major international awards.
A most remarkable development in the Turkish arts has been
the explosion of theatrical activity and the strides of dramatic
writing. Very few cities in the world have a broader spectrum
of plays or superior performances presented than Istanbul and
Ankara. Turkish playwrights have turned out a wide repertoire,
including village plays, tragedies in the grand manner,
“boulevard” comedies, vaudevilles, poetic dramas, musical
dramas and comedies, Brechtian “epic” theater, Albee-
like black comedy, modern versions of the traditional
shadow plays, social and political satire, well-made family
melodramas, and dramatizations of mythological themes
and legends.
By the beginning of the third millennium, the
literature of the Turkish Republic could justifiably boast of
a prodigious creative energy and some impressive success
in many genres. It has yet to reach the threshold of
greatness. It is faced with some impediments: these could
be summed up as cultural convulsion (cataclysmic changes
in sociopolitical institutions, faith, and technology);
language crisis (a vast transformation, broader than
the language reform undertaken by any other nation;
vocabulary that consisted of seventy-five percent Arabic,
Persian, and French words in 1920 increased its ratio of
native words to eighty percent and reduced borrowings to
only twenty percent by 1970, and the language functioning at
the turn of the twenty-first century, with less than seventy-
five thousand dictionary entries); critical gap (despite some
fine critical writing, Turkish literature still operates, by and
large, without the guidance of coherent aesthetic theories
and systematic critical analysis); traditional lacunae (the
noticeable absence of philosophy, of the norms of tragedy,
of psychological analysis in depth); and excessive imitation
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of models, movements, and major works that have evolved in
the West.
The dynamism, quality, purpose, diversity, and impact
of modern Turkish literature seem impressive. There is a
fertile versatility at work. Turkish literature has never been
more varied nor more inclusive. Following many decades
of conscious experimentation, questing for new values,
acquisition of deeper literary and human insights, and stronger
expertise in blending form and content, Turkish authors
are creating an authentic synthesis of national and universal
elements.
Cemal Süreya’s eloquent lines, written in 1966, embody
the revolutionary experience, the disorientation as well as the
optimism and the stirring search of the “New Turkey”:
We are the novices of new life
All our knowledge is transformed
Our poetry, our love all over again
Maybe we are living the last bad days
Maybe we shall live the first good days too
There is something bitter in this air
Between the past and the future
Between suffering and joy
Between anger and forgiveness.
Talat S. Halman is currently Chairman of the Department of
Turkish Liteature and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and
Letters at Bilkent University (Ankara). Formerly he was on the
faculties of Columbia University, Princeton University, University
of Pennsylvania, and served as Professor and Chairman of the
Departman of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at New
York University.
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1. E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, 6 vols. (London: Luzac, 1900-1909; reprinted, Cambridge: Trustees of the “E. J. W. Gibb Memorial,” 1963–1984).
2. The original refers to Bedr, a place near Medina where Muslims won a battle in A.D. 624 led by the Prophet.
3. The poet referred to is Hafız, a major Persian poet of the fourteenth century.
4. The city is identified as Shiraz.
5. A section of Istanbul on the Anatolian side.
6. Published in English translation as Human Landscapes, Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, trs. (New York: Persea, 1982) and as a complete translation by the same translators in 2002 (Human Landscapes from My Country (New York: Persea).
7. Nazım Hikmet, The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin and Other Poems, Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, trs. (New York: Persea, 1977).
8. Halide Edib Adıvar, The Clown and His Daughter (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935).
9. Mahmut Makal, A Village in Anatolia, Sir Wyndham Deedes, tr. (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1954).
10. This novel has been translated into twenty-five languages; the English translation by Edouard Roditi is entitled Memed, My Hawk (New York: Pantheon, 1961).
11. On the Nomad Sea: Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday, Talat S. Halman, ed. and tr., also includes some translations by Nermin Menemencioğlu (New York: Geronimo, 1974); for more Anday poems, see Rain One Step Away: Poems by Melih Cevdet Anday, Talat S. Halman and Brian Swann, trs.(Washington, DC: The Charioteer Press, 1980).
12. The White Castle, Victoria Holbrook, tr. (New York: Braziller, 1991); The Black Book, Güneli Gün, tr. (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1994); The New Life, Güneli Gün, tr. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997); My Name Is Red, Erdağ Göknar, tr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), and Snow, Maureen Freely, tr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
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