Ten Turkish Poems Every Reader Should Know
In brief: ten poems, in order of time, from the Sufi hymns of medieval Anatolia to the street-level voice of 1940s Istanbul. Where the archive holds the Turkish original we quote it with our own English gloss; where it holds a classic translation, we quote that.
A word before we begin
Turkish poetry has two great streams. One is the poetry of the Ottoman court, the divan tradition, written in an ornate language rich in Persian and Arabic words and in quantitative metres borrowed from Persian. The other is the poetry of the people: folk songs, minstrel tales and Sufi hymns in plain Turkish and syllabic metre. Modern Turkish poetry grew out of the meeting of the two, and out of the long nineteenth-century argument about what a Turkish poetry for a new age should be.
For the older poets the archive holds the translations of the Victorian scholar E. J. W. Gibb, which keep the rhyme and the music of the originals at the cost of some antique English. For the moderns it holds the Turkish texts. Here are ten places to start.
1. Yunus Emre, "Come and Let Us Two Be Comrades"
Yunus Emre (d. c. 1321) is the founding voice of Turkish poetry in Anatolia. A Sufi poet who wrote in the plain Turkish of the countryside, he made mystical longing for God sound like a song anyone could sing, and his hymns are still sung today. In this poem the refrain is an invitation to set out on the mystic path together:
Come and let us two be comrades, come and let us seek the Loved One;
Come and let us two be helpmates, come and let us seek the Loved One.
The "Loved One" is God. Read the whole poem in Gibb's translation.
2. Fuzûlî, "Breeze, Thou'rt Kind"
Fuzûlî (c. 1483–1556) lived his whole life in Iraq, around Baghdad and Karbala, and wrote in Turkish, Persian and Arabic. He is the great poet of love as suffering, and his Leylâ vü Mecnûn is the classic Turkish telling of the story of the lovers driven apart. This ghazel thanks the morning breeze for bringing news of the beloved:
Breeze, thou'rt kind, of balm to those whom pangs affright, thou news hast brought,
To wounded frame of life, to life of life's delight thou news hast brought.
3. Bâkî, Elegy on Sultan Süleyman
Bâkî (1526–1600) was called the "sultan of poets" in the age of Süleyman the Magnificent. When Süleyman died during the siege of Szigetvár in Hungary in 1566, Bâkî wrote the most famous elegy in Ottoman literature, a terkib-bend in stanzas that move from a sermon on worldly vanity to grief for the dead sultan:
He, to the lustre of whose sword the Magyar bowed his head!
4. Nedim, "But a Glass or Two She Gave Us"
Nedim (c. 1681–1730) is the poet of the Tulip Era (Lâle Devri) under Ahmed III, when Istanbul's court discovered garden parties, pleasure palaces at Sadabad and a lighter, more worldly verse. His ghazels are witty, sensuous and full of the city. Here a girl's wine has made the poet lose his head:
But a glass or two she gave us, yet she drave our thoughts astray;
5. Şeyh Galib, "While the Lovers Circle Here in Mystic Dance"
Şeyh Galib (1757–1799), sheikh of the Mevlevi lodge at Galata, was the last great poet of the divan tradition and the author of the allegorical romance Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty and Love). This ghazel is about the sema, the turning dance of the Mevlevi dervishes, in which the whole cosmos seems to turn with the dancers:
While the lovers circle here in mystic dance,
Sun and moon traverse the sphere in mystic dance.
6. Namık Kemal, "Vatan Şarkısı"
Namık Kemal (1840–1888) brought the words vatan (homeland) and hürriyet (freedom) into the centre of Turkish poetry. A journalist and dramatist as well as a poet, he was exiled to Famagusta in Cyprus after the stormy first performance of his play Vatan yahut Silistre in 1873. His "Song of the Homeland" ends each stanza with the same defiant refrain:
Gavgâda şehâdetle bütün kâm alırız biz
Osmanlılarız, cân veririz, nâm alırız biz.
In battle, through martyrdom, we win all we desire; / we are Ottomans: we give our lives, and win a name. Read the poem.
7. Ahmet Haşim, "Bir Yaz Gecesi Hatırası"
Ahmet Haşim (c. 1885–1933), born in Baghdad, is the great Turkish symbolist. In the preface to his collection Piyale (1926) he argued that the language of poetry stands somewhere between speech and music. His poems are short and dreamlike, full of dusk, water and moonlight. In "Memory of a Summer Night" moonlight wounds the heart:
Oklar gibi saplanmada kalbe,
Düştükçe semadan yere mehtâp...
Like arrows it pierces the heart, / the moonlight, as it falls from the sky to the earth... Read the poem.
8. Sabahattin Ali, "Dağlar"
Sabahattin Ali (1907–1948) is best known as a novelist, the author of Kuyucaklı Yusuf and Kürk Mantolu Madonna. He was imprisoned more than once for his writing and was killed near the Bulgarian border in 1948. His poems often take the form and refrain of the folk song. "The Mountains" is a poem of solitude and pride:
Başım dağ, saçlarım kardır,
Deli rüzgârlarım vardır,
My head is a mountain, my hair is snow; / I have winds that are wild. Every stanza closes on "Benim meskenim dağlardır": my dwelling is the mountains. Read the poem.
9. Orhan Veli Kanık, "İstanbul'u Dinliyorum"
Orhan Veli (1914–1950) changed Turkish poetry almost overnight. With Oktay Rifat and Melih Cevdet Anday he published Garip (1941), which threw out rhyme, metre and poetic diction and wrote about ordinary people in ordinary speech. "I Am Listening to Istanbul" is his most loved poem, a portrait of the city made entirely of sounds:
İstanbul'u dinliyorum, gözlerim kapalı;
Önce hafiften bir rüzgâr esiyor;
I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed; / first a light wind is blowing. Read the poem.
10. Köroğlu, "O My Steed, Thy Father Was Bedon"
Köroğlu, "son of the blind man", is the outlaw-minstrel hero of a cycle of tales and songs told from Anatolia to the Caucasus and Central Asia. Avenging his blinded father, he holds out in the mountain stronghold of Çamlıbel with his wonderful horse Kırat. The archive holds the songs in Alexander Chodzko's English prose of 1842, which spells the names as he heard them. Here Köroğlu calls on his horse to carry him home:
On! on! my worthy Kyrat, carry me to Chamly-bill!
Read the song, and see our study guide to Köroğlu for the whole story.
Where to go next
These ten are only a beginning. The archive holds many more poems by most of these poets, as well as dozens of other Ottoman poets in Gibb's translations, among them sultans, princes and women poets such as Mihrî and Fitnet. If one voice here speaks to you, follow it to its poet's page and read on.