Tevfik Fikret

Tevfik Fikret (Mehmed Tevfik) was born in Istanbul in 1867 and died there in 1915. He was educated at the Galatasaray lycée, where he later taught and served as director. In 1896 he took over the review Servet-i Fünun ("Wealth of Sciences") and made it the organ of the Edebiyat-ı Cedide ("New Literature") movement, the circle of writers who turned Ottoman poetry toward French models and a more modern subject-matter.

His major early book, Rübâb-ı Şikeste ("The Broken Lute", 1900), joins impressionist landscapes and love lyrics to poems of social pity, such as Balıkçılar, and to Sis, a fog poem read as a portrait of Hamidian despotism. He built his house, Aşiyan ("The Nest"), on the hills above the Bosphorus at Rumelihisarı, where he lived withdrawn from public life. His later work is political and often freethinking, and daring pieces such as Târîh-i Kadîm circulated under censorship.

After the constitutional revolution of 1908 he wrote some of the most outspoken political poems of the age, among them Han-ı Yağma, and in Haluk'un Defteri (1911) he addressed his young son in verse of ethical creed and hope for the future. A note on the texts: they are the Turkish originals in the modern Latin-letter transcription that Wikisource uses; the spelling varies from poem to poem as transcribed there.