Double palimpsest: History and myth in the poetry of the Gallipoli campaign

Richard Hibbitt,Berkan Ulu

doi:10.1177/00472441211033411

Abstract

The Ottoman defeat of the British and French imperial forces during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, known in Turkish as the Çanakkale Wars, had already shown how the theatres of war would extend beyond Europe. While much of the poetry in English that came from Gallipoli is well known in the Anglophone world, the Turkish poetry from Çanakkale is less well known outside Turkey itself. This article analyses selected Gallipoli poems written in both languages in order to show how they had similar recourse to overlapping narratives of history and myth in their efforts to place the experience of war within a wider transhistorical and transcultural framework. By reflecting on the different uses of this double palimpsest, it aims to show how a transnational and transcultural approach to memorial culture can develop our understanding of how the Great War was written.

Highlights

Much of the European literature inspired by the First World War reflects on the harrowing experiences of the carnage on the Western Front and its wider repercussions
Analogous to the merged referentiality to real and fictional places discussed in recent works of geocriticism, history and myth overlap as narratives of the past with symbolic potential for both writing and remembering the First World War
The comparison with myth is used here as a means to suggest the possible futility of the campaign: ‘the fatal second Helen’ that has taken the soldiers to fight at Gallipoli is not the abduction that led to the Trojan War, but the consequences of geopolitical machinations that seem far removed from the initial causes of the First World War

Summary

Introduction

Much of the European literature inspired by the First World War reflects on the harrowing experiences of the carnage on the Western Front and its wider repercussions.

Results

Conclusion