The Second New

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...