Yahya Kemal Research Articles

Some of Yahya Kemal’s Articles that are not Publi̇shed in His Book

Sairlerin ve yazarlarin ortaya koydugu edebi metinlerin tam bir kulliyat hâlinde okuyucu ve arastirmacinin istifadesine sunulamamasi dun oldugu gibi bugun de edebiyat arastirmalarinin temel problemi olmaya devam etmektedir. Cunku cesitli yollarla, zaman icinde sairlere ve yazarlara ait yeni bilgiler, belgeler ve metinler ortaya cikmaktadir. Turk siirinin onemli isimlerinden Yahya Kemal de bu sair ve yazarlardan birisidir. Yasarken eserlerini kitap hâlinde bastirmamis olan Yahya Kemal’in yazi ve siirleri vefatindan sonra Nihad Sami Banarli tarafindan bir kulliyat seklinde nesredilmistir. Yahya Kemal’in yakin cevresinden Nihad Sami Banarli’nin gerceklestirdigi bu nesriyat, gazete ve dergilerde yayinlananlarin disinda ozellikle daha once hicbir yerde yayinlanmamis el yazisi makale, yazi, siir ve notlari da icermesi bakimindan oldukca onemlidir. Bununla beraber sairin bu kulliyatta yer almayan bazi eserleri daha sonra ortaya cikmis ve arastirmacilar tarafindan yayinlanmistir. Bu makalede Yahya Kemal’in 1920 yilinda Aksam gazetesinde nesredilen, ancak sonradan olusturulan kulliyatinda yer almayan “**(iki yildiz)” imzali 7 yazisi konu edilmektedir. Makalenin birinci ve ikinci bolumlerinde, elde edilen ipuclarindan hareketle bu yazilarin Yahya Kemal’e ait oldugu bilgisine nasil ulasildigi tartisilmistir. Ucuncu bolumde yazilar hakkinda kisa notlar hâlinde bilgi verilip, bu yazilarla Yahya Kemal’in diger yazilari arasindaki ortak noktalar tespit edilmeye calisilmistir. “Metinler” bolumunde ise yazilar Latin harflerine aktarilarak verilmistir.

Hellenism without Greeks: The Use (and Abuse) of Classical Antiquity in Turkish Nationalist Literature

Official Turkish nationalism was suspicious of the Mediterranean, considering it a symbol of decadent Ottoman cosmopolitanism. Literary movements such as "Nev-Yunânîlik" (New Hellenism) and "Mavi Anadolu" (Blue Anatolia) provided a counter-narrative that located Turkey within a shared Mediterranean history. Writers like Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Sabahattin Eyüboğlu used Anatolia's Hellenistic heritage to argue for what they saw as Turkey's rightful place in Europe. At the same time, they denied this same European status to the inhabitants of neighboring Greece. This article argues that ambivalence about living Hellenes, and by extension Europe, lies at the center of the contradictory thalassic tropes used in the literature of New Hellenism and Blue Anatolia.

Orhan Pamuk'un Hafızasında Bir Melankoli Kaynağı: İstanbul

Bu makale Orhan Pamuk’un İstanbul Hatıralar ve Şehir başlıklı romanındaki melankolik İstanbul imgesinin yazarın hafızasındaki yansımalarını incelemiştir. Yazara göre İstanbul’dan başka çok az şehir bu imgenin yaratığı derin melankoli duygusuna aynı ölçüde eşlik eden mutluluğa sahiptir. Makale romandaki melankoli yüklü İstanbul imgesini yaratırken yazara ilham veren kaynakları araştırmıştır. Görülüyor ki yazarın romanda da minnettarlığını sıkça ifade ettiği başlıca dört yazar Pamuk’un hafızasında yer eden İstanbul hatıralarını biçimlendirmiştir. Bu yazarlardan ilk ikisi Yahya Kemal Beyatlı ve Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’dır ve her ikisi de Fransız yazarlar Gerard de Nerval ve Theophile Gautier’in İstanbul izlenimlerinden etkilenmişlerdir. Özellikle Gautier’in Constantinople başlıklı gezi yazıları Yahya Kemal ve Tanpınar’ı derinden etkilemiş ve bu yazarların İstanbullular için farklı ve yerli bir İstanbul imgesi yaratmalarını sağlamıştır. Bu şehir imgesini farklı ve özgün kılan, güzel olanla, biçimsiz, sefil ve acınası olanın bir araya gelerek oluşturduğu melankoli duygusunun, çökmüş bir imparatorluğun kalıntıları üzerinde yükselerek şehre hâkim olmasıdır. Romanda esinlendiği yazarların adımlarını takip eden Pamuk bir yandan da yirminci yüzyıl İstanbul’unda meydana gelen kültürel, sosyal, siyasi ve çevresel değişimlerle iç içe geçen kendi çocukluk ve ilk gençlik dönemlerini hikâye etmiştir. Makalenin kuramsal çerçevesini Freud, Kristeva ve Peter Schwenger gibi yazarların görüşleri oluşturmuştur.

"ENDÜLÜSTE RAKS" VE "MOHAÇ TÜRKÜSÜ" ÖRNEĞİNDE YAHYA KEMAL'İN ŞİİRLERİNDE KİŞİSEL VE KOLEKTİF BİLİNÇALTI*

In this study, Yahya Kemal Beyatli’s poems within his books Kendi Gok Kubbemiz and Eski Siirin Ruzgarlariyla are examined, in company with C. G. Jung’s notion of “personal and collective subconscious”. By referring to Nietzsche’s “Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy” and the poet’s own biography, his opinions; it is studied that through which subconscious process the poet wrote his poems. Thereby, it is suggested that Beyatli wrote many of his poems with an “Apollonian” percept, by reflecting the visible world with his personal subconscious; whereas he wrote some of his poems with a Dionysian- collective subconscious

“Grant Neither Equality Nor Freedom”Yahya Kemal and Power

Like other branches of fine arts, literature, and power have always had elbow contact. Over the centuries, Turkish poets established poetic relations with the then-rulers, the sultans, and high-ranking statesmen. They often wrote poems of praise, and sometimes they wrote critical poetry. However, since the beginning of the westernization period, that is, from the gradual decline of central authority, after the demise of the empire and the establishment of the nation-state, these relations gained a completely different dimension. The relation with the power of Yahya Kemal, who was born during the period of Abdülhamid, and who witnessed the Constitutional and National Struggles and the establishment of the Republic, became a matter of debate. Some poets, researchers, and literary historians have heard quite speculative opinions about Yahya Kemal’s attitude over political power. In this study, we critique these comments and evaluations, and we emphasize the neutral position of the poet in relation to the state and its policies.

Yahya Kemal and Nizar Qabbani: Two Poet-Diplomats in Spain and “Andalus” in their Poems

Abstract Yahya Kemal and Nizar Qabbani were two poets who served as diplomats in Spain in the past century on behalf of the governments of Turkey and Syria. Yahya Kemal wrote two poems about Spain, “Dance in Andalusia “ and “Coffee Shop in Madrid”. “Dance in Andalusia,” a poem written about the Flamenco dance, has become very famous. In this poem, he described the traditional dance of the Spanish people and emphasized the place of this dance in their lives and the fun-loving lives of the people of Spain. In almost all of the poems which Nizar Qabbani wrote about Spain, on the other hand, a feeling of sadness rather than joy prevails. He gives a deep sigh in his poems as he regards Andalusia as the one-time land of his ancestors. His most important poem with respect to Spain is the poem entitled “Granada”. This poem is considered to be one of the most significant odes in the Arab literature describing Granada, the pearl of Andalusia, Arab influences there, the Alhambra palace and the sadness felt due to the loss of the city by Arabs. This study analyzes the two most important poems written by Yahya Kemal and Nizar Qabbani concerning Spain, namely “Dance in Andalusia” and “Granada”. Whenever it is deemed appropriate, other poems of the two poets regarding Spain will be dwelt upon and what kind of an influence Andalusia left in their emotional world will be revealed.

Social and Intellectual Origins of Neo-Ottomanism: Searching for a Post-National Vision

This article will unpack the intellectual and sociopolitical conditions under which the idea of neo-Ottomanism was formulated, by focusing on the following questions: What is neo-Ottomanism, who constructed the term, and for what purpose? What aspects of the Ottoman legacy have been incorporated in the ‘self’ definition of a new Turkey? Is this shift temporary or rooted in a more far-reaching transformation of Turkish society that will shape future sociopolitical choices? The article examines the intellectual origins of the term ‘neo-Ottomanism’ by examining the role of cultural entrepreneurs, such as Yahya Kemal and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, along with the interactions among social factors, in the search for a new ‘old’ identity of Ottomanism by reimagining the Ottoman past. It seeks to provide a historical and sociological perspective of the process of reconfiguring the past, and especially its implications in domestic and foreign policy. Due to the oppressive nation-building project of the Kemalist regime, literature, art, music, and poetry became alternative sites for preserving, updating, and reconstructing the Ottoman memory. After explaining the formation of neo-Ottoman discourse in the 1990s, the article will address the debate about the politics of identity under the Justice and Development Party (JDP).

HİLMİ YAVUZ’UN “TEN SONNET”Sİ ÜZERİNE BİR TAHLİL DENEMESİ

Hilmi Yavuz, the Republican era gives great importance sound and image in the poem is among the poets of Turkish poetry individualist. It is important use the modern tradition in a synthesis. In terms of content successfully utilize our ancient poetry poet, he has many elements in the poetry of Western poetry. Hilmi Yavuz's poetry and Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hasim is possible see the effect. He benefited from opportunities in many poetry of Sufism, Sufi lexicon used very well. Ten Sonnet's of Hilmi Yavuz is a poem addressed the issue of exquisite manners. Sufi poets have explored their thoughts on this issue, using the format. You nave in poetry as in many cases the real issue the forefront is a matter of controlling the emotions. Blessing the people of the world conflict, it leads unhappiness. Love the blessing of the world in these poems, it is provided as threatening as a wolf. Keep it under control get rid of yummy, they need neutralize or kill him. Because the exquisite manners of achieving happiness in the end, although very difficult, and there are great prizes such as a perfect human being. Hilmi Yavuz put the issue of purification of the soul of mysticism with different sayings and images here. In the whole of the poem to love, snow, memory, mirror concept has been discussed in the fictional context. Hilmi Yavuz, the Sufi poetry in terms of content format, the way in terms of taking the West has created a successful synthesis using the suffix, which is a form of poetry. In this article, our goal Hilmi Yavuz Ten Sonnet's of the poem is trying examination in terms of content and form

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

Esilio, ibridazione, nazionalismo. L’esperienza poetica di Yahya Kemal e Nazım Hikmet

This essay examines the relationship between the centre and the periphery in the context of the construction of a literary and national subject within the development of Turkish literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Focusing on the figure of the expatriate, who, from the periphery (the Ottoman Empire and afterwards Republican Turkey), travels to those places which he considers the centres of the dominant modernity of his time, it analyses and compares works by two authors. The first of them is Yahya Kemal, who fled from Istanbul to Paris and committed himself to the construction of an idea of Turkishness, able to define itself as reliably modern and capable of relating on an equal basis with European literature and high culture of enlightened progressivism. He found the key of this claim to equality in a historiographical presentation of the modern Turkish people as a composite Anatolian ethno-cultural mosaic and therefore, through the filter of Muslim mysticism, as the direct continuation of the Hellenic heritage so dear to the European conscience. The second author, Nazim Hikmet, was an exile who left the periphery on account of his political convictions which looked to a new centre, Moscow, the centre of a universalist-communist project in the first decades of the 20th century. He described the relation between the centre and periphery not in terms of emulation and the construction of a nationalist project but rather in the elaboration of a different idea of Turkishness, focused on the humble social figures at the heart of a poetics of communist universalism.

Religious, Mystical and Metaphysical Elements in Yahya Kemal’s Poetry

Bilinen âlemin arkasindaki âlem olarak tanimlanan metafizigin arastirma konulari, evren, Tanri ve ruhtur. Bunun yani sira ahlâk, olum gibi kavramlarla da ilgilenen metafizige, akil yoluyla degil, duyular vasitasiyla ulasilabilir. Bati ve Islam filozoflarinca aciklanmaya calisilan metafizik, edebiyat biliminde sezgi, yasanmislik, varlik, fikir veya dusunce kavramlarini inceleyen idealist gorus veya manevi bilimler yontemi icerisinde degerlendirilir. Bu baglamda Yahya Kemal siirinde yer alan Allah, hayat, olum, olumden sonra, tasavvuf, ruh, varlik, yokluk, gonul, hikmet, devriye ve zaman kavramlarindan mutesekkil metafizik ogeler makalemizin konusunu teskil eder.

Eight Months in the Life of Yahya Kemal

With the end of British rule in the Indian sub-continent in 1947 and the establishment of the new state of Pakistan, the traditionally close relations between the Turks and the Indian Muslims were consolidated with the appointment of Turkey's senior poet-diplomat, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, as the fırst Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey to Pakistan. The ageing Ambassador filled this position for eight months under difficult circumstances until after the death of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Based on Yahya Kemal's letters and other available information, the article attempts to capture the atmosphere surrounding Yahya Kemal's sojourn in Karachi.

Yahya Kemal’s Süleymaniye’de Bayram Sabahı Poetry of Time a Dialectical Perspective

The time for the biggest reality and equality of people, with different dimensions is defined as a dialectical process. The study, “Suleymaniye’de Bayram Sabahi” poem by quantitative and qualitative aspects of movement when taken up, were analyzed in the light of individual and social perceptions. Time, existential situations when the projection is detected, the social perception of quality by winning the individual leaves the place. Yahya Kemal, maker of the present situation is the origin of history and memories. Yahya Kemal, human, time and space-centered fiction and poetry in Turkish history and civilization, which stresses expressed.

The Second New

The Second New Sidney Wade (bio) Dirty August. Edip Cansever. Translated by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast. Talisman House. http://www.talismanpublishers.com. 96 pages; paper, $14.95. The trajectory of the development of contemporary Turkish poetry is unique. In the 1920s, as the Ottoman Empire withered on the vine, the "Young Turks" chose to move away from traditional Ottoman verse and turned instead to Western literary traditions, most notably the French symbolists, for models and tone. Once the Turkish Republic was firmly established, however, and the language itself had been radically pruned of its Persian and Arabic vocabulary, slimmed down to its "Pure Turkish" rootstock, the nationalistic spirit of the time no longer wanted to emulate or work from a foreign tradition. In a sense, they had to conjure up an entirely new literary idiom from scratch. They turned not to their Ottoman forebears, but to the purely "Turkish" character, language, and landscape. The first group to make notable progress was called "The Strangers." Writing in the 1940s, Orhan Veli, Oktay Rifat, and Melih Cevdet Anday focused their attention on humble subjects and wrote in very simple free verse, eschewing the formality of not only traditional Ottoman verse, but also their own direct, and rather formalist, forbears (Yahya Kemal, for example). Edip Cansever belongs to the next generation of Turkish poets, known as "The Second New." What these poets did was to take the informal precedents of "The Strangers" and develop from them their own almost purely individual idioms, so personal, in fact, the reading public at first found them to be incomprehensible. Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast have done us the inestimable favor of translating a fine selection from Cansever's collected works. They have brought this deeply idiosyncratic poet, at a very interesting historical juncture, into the currents of a postmodern American tradition that is becoming, some critics assert, ever more opaque. In many ways, Cansever's poetry resembles much that is being written and celebrated in American poetry today. And, as in the work of, say, Matthea Harvey, or Dean Young, it's the vigor of the language, the surprise in the turns, and the freshness of the rhetoric that deeply engage us and keep us reading. "Symbolist," "surrealist," "obscure," even "maddening": these are some of the adjectives the translators use to describe Cansever's verse in their extremely helpful introduction. In preparing the reader for the suggestiveness, the allusiveness of their subject, they assert that Cansever "vigorously manipulates [the] downsized vocabulary, pushing against its limitations in order to suggest by nuance a subtle range of meanings." What Cansever is doing in his poetry, in my opinion, is pushing not only against the limitations of the language, but against received "perception" as well. He is carving out his own idiomatic tradition. He might even be considered a rather prescient postmodernist, anticipating the contemporary issue of reader response as he writes, in one of the three essays included in this volume, "Abstract Concrete," "the impression of the poem's abstractness or concreteness has as much to do with its reader as its writer." Cansever the poet is a magician. My sense of his poetic persona: boyish, passionate, at times faux-naïve, deeply sensitive, lonely, playful, down-to-earth, marked by "huzur," that particularly Istanbulite melancholy, as well as great joy and the showman's mischievous and skillful slight of hand. He pulls the rug out from under us while keeping our attention directed elsewhere. His most famous poem, "Table," is a good example. It begins with "A man filled with the gladness of living" coming home to his apartment and putting things on the table—his keys, his flowers, his eggs and milk. By line five, he's gently nudging us into a very different world, as the poet tells us he puts "the light that came in through the window" on this table. Before long, the table is holding the number nine, "the softness of bread," "the sound of a bicycle," "his sleep and his wakefulness." This is a very special table indeed, and we are in a very special universe. The physical laws of our universe do not apply here. This world...

The Continuance and Re-Construction of the Collective Consciousness from Epic to Modern Poetry: A Reading Practice of Yahya Kemal’s O Rüzgâr (That Wind) and Oğuz Kağan Destanı (The Epic of Oghuz Kagan).

The Continuance and Re-Construction of the Collective Consciousness from Epic to Modern Poetry: A Reading Practice of Yahya Kemal’s O Rüzgâr (That Wind) and Oğuz Kağan Destanı (The Epic of Oghuz Kagan).

Introduction

Introduction

The 1912–13 Balkan Wars and the Siege of Edirne

Depending on the angle of view, the first and second Balkan1 wars of 1912–13 have been considered either as the culmination of a freedom struggle2 for the Christian nations of south-eastern Europe ...