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“Türkçe ağzımda annemin sütüdür. Türkçe; ağzımızda, anamızın dili gibi helâl ve güzel olmalıdır.” Yahya Kemal Beyatlı
“Turkish is my mother′s milk in my mouth. Turkish, in our mouth, ought to be as blessed and beautiful as our mother tongue.” Yahya Kemal Beyatlı
Born Ahmet Agah, and later taking the name Yahya Kemal, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı was born in Skopje (Üsküp), in the then Ottoman province of Kosovo in 1884. When his family moved to Thessaloniki, he began high school there where he also wrote his first poem. After the family’s move to Istanbul, Yahya Kemal mingled with followers of the Young Turk movement and identified with their political ideology and literature. He moved to Paris to escape political repression and studied the works of Jean Moreas, Baudelaire and Verlaine. He attended the Meaux College and also studied at the Faculty of Political Science, where he met his mentor Albert Sorel.
On the advice of Sorel he kept reading and learning about Turkish cultural history. Indeed, he drew from these studies in his columns and articles after he returned to Istanbul.
Yahya Kemal lived in Paris for 9 years and returned to Istanbul in 1912 as the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in decades of wars, beginning with the Balkan Wars, World War I and the War of National Liberation. In Istanbul, he joined the ranks of writers and poets and first began teaching on history, Turkish and Western literature at high schools and later lectured on literature at the University of Istanbul. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, the famous poet and novelist who attended Yahya Kemal′s literary lectures at Istanbul University and was his devoted disciple his entire life, said that his master′s tastes and attitudes smelled of Paris. However, Yahya Kemal was a nationalist as much as a cosmopolitan and supported the War of Independence through his writings in Istanbul newspapers.
Yahya Kemal Beyatlı’s accomplishments as a poet were matched by a long and meaningful career as a diplomat and politician in the service of the young Turkish Republic. Notably, he served on the yet to be founded Republic’s delegation to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922, which granted the new nation international recognition. After the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, he was elected as deputy to the Turkish Grand National Assembly. He later was appointed ambassador to Poland (1926), Spain (1929) and Portugal (1931). He served three more terms in the Turkish Parliament (1934-1946). His final diplomatic mission was Ambassador to Pakistan in 1947 from which he retired in 1949 and returned to Istanbul.
Yahya Kemal’s early and lasting influence was by the poets of the Servet-i Fünun movement, particularly Tevfik Fikret. One of the leading representatives of Turkish poetry in the Republican period, Yahya Kemal’s works dealt with Ottoman history and literature and his poems are permeated with a nostalgia for the lost Ottoman glory, the loss of the Balkans, as well as the spiritual and natural beauties of Istanbul. In most of his poems, he pursued tradition of Divan poetry in form and trite phrases, and wrote in metrics.
Yahya Kemal was a great master of our contemporary poetry, with classical simplicity and might in his poems, which were written with a strong cultural and linguistic consciousness, with his efforts and success in synthesizing the national and the modern, the individual and the social, the historical and the contemporary in the core and form of his art.
After his death in 1958 in Istanbul, his friends and admirers founded the Society of Lovers of Yahya Kemal in İstanbul. The Institute of Yahya Kemal (1958) and the Museum of Yahya Kemal (1961) were established. The Institute published the Yahya Kemal Mecmuası (the Review of Yahya Kemal) and his poems, short stories, articles and memoir, which had not been published in his lifetime.
Works:
Poetry: Kendi Gök Kubbemiz (Our Own Sky, 1961), Eski Şiirin Rüzgârıyle (With the Wind of the Old Poetry, 1962), Rubailer ve Hayyam Rubailerini Türkçe Söyleyiş (The Rubais and Rubais of Ömer Hayyam in Turkish, 1963), Bitmemiş Şiirler (Incomplete Poems, 1976).
Essay-Article-Memoir: Aziz İstanbul (Great İstanbul, 1964), Eğil Dağlar (Bow Down Oh Mountains, essays on the National Independence War, 1966), Siyasî Hikâyeler (Political Stories, 1968), Siyasî ve Edebî Portreler (Political and Literary Portraits, 1968), Edebiyata Dair (On Literature, essays, 1971), Çocukluğum, Gençliğim, Siyasî ve Edebî Hatıralarım (My Childhood, Youth, and Political and Literary Memories, 1973), Tarih Musahabeleri (Evaluations of History, 1975), Mektuplar-Makaleler (Letters-Essays, 1977). |
