Mehmet Emin Yurdakul

Mehmet Emin Yurdakul was born in Beşiktaş, Istanbul, in 1869, the son of a fisherman. He made his name with 'Cenge Giderken' ('Going to War'), published in 1897 during the Greco-Turkish War. He wrote in plain spoken Turkish and the syllabic metre of folk poetry instead of the Persian-derived metres of Ottoman court verse, and became known as 'the Turkish poet'.

He served as an Ottoman provincial governor and an Ottoman deputy, and from 1923 until his death in 1944 sat in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. The poems below come from Türk Sazı ('The Turkish Saz', 1914). The text follows the third edition in modern Turkish letters (Atlas Kitabevi, 1979) as transcribed on tr.wikisource.org.