PEOPLE / COLUMNISTS
By Semra Eren-Nijhar
Former
Culture Minister of Turkey, a cultural historian, poet and translator Prof. Dr.
Talat Halman once observed that Osman Türkay’s (16 February 1927 – 24 January 2001) work combined
Blake’s apocalyptic vision which Eliot’s gloomy depictions of modern civilisations.
Not only does Dr. Halman make this comparison, but he goes further to say that the
scope of Türkay’s work arches over the entire geography of world culture.
Osman
Türkay was an internationally acclaimed Turkish Cypriot poet and writer. He was
nominated twice for the Nobel Prize for Literature – in 1988 and in 1992 – and has
been accredited with many awards and honours nationally and internationally for
his contribution to literature.
Although
he was Nobel Prize nominee, anyone who wants to buy his books will struggle. Even
though he was one of the few poets whose work was translated into many
different languages, well before world literature circles discovered other Turkish
writers and poets these past two decades, it is nearly impossible to find
copies of Türkay’s works in book shops around the world, especially in
English.
It
is sad to note that Osman Türkay who created a kind of ultra-modernist new
poetry, is on the verge of being forgotten, except in his native country of Northern Cyprus .
As
someone who has been conducting research on Osman Türkay’s work over the last
twelve years, I am still discovering, exploring, uncovering and coming across
something new in his poetry and writings. It is a very deep and wide ocean; the
deeper you dive in, the more you discover. It is an ocean where his thoughts
rises like waves of philosophical wisdom.
I walk and how
thoughtfully, the places towards times
I stand
for a meaning in the abstraction of numbers
Words on
tongues, sounds in stars
And a
bell rings down the throat of a camel
Words
echo, sounds echo, brain echo
As if
they collide and crash the mountains in a fight.
His
writings are like the eye of his mind intelligently going from one planet to
another, to explore the meaning of what is to be being a human on Earth. He
describes planet Earth in his poems with a musical rhythm about the Earth’s soul,
inspired while listening to Beethoven, Bach and Mozart.
Convulsion is a pre-Chaotic silenced
Time
supervenes: Light.
Mask
which descends on a frightful face,
Earth
settles: Water
His freezing heart
beats in a mountain lake
and in
the depth of the sky is Hammerklavier!
His
concept of inner-space is composed in his poems as messages. The messages
reflect the pictures of his spiritual world. Türkay has
seen the universe as part of the creation and focused his theories around
cosmogony. His artistic productivity found a base also in his writings where he
combined Earth’s past and future as a whole which are intertwined with each
other.
We
are witnessing the horrific dangers and the destruction of our environment by
man-made science. The risks are clearly far too high and the price of human
tragedy too heavy and words of the politicians and big business too hollow to
be believed.
Türkay
was well ahead of his time and the technological progress influenced his
poetry. He chose the subjects for his poetry on themes such as nature,
environment and the nuclear age. He had seen the destruction of this universe
by man-made science, which continues its forward march under the veil of ‘progress’.
In
situations through which all roads lead to destruction
Death
loses its natural quality
And
fear becomes a blind alley
In
the depths of the vast city which we call Universe
Stings its virulent pain into your heart
Poison,
the vomit of the cobra,
Like
a loose ink pistol
Türkay
was a poet of the new space age. His model was the universe and the light is
the true meaning of everything in the cosmos and the cosmos the real mother of
mankind. He was exploring the meaning and the roots of the universe by
underlying the importance of light on Earth. His devotion to mountains, sea and
the sky is his affection for nature. Nature nurtured his poetry in his native
country of Cyprus
Your
life is fire,
or,
it is hissing waters.
Heat
is another terminus, outside
the
boundaries of numbers:
-Anvil
steel
marblestone
blood.
O Man, come then, be a
dagger
and
slip out of your sheath;
come, be a sea, a light
or water:
Even
the extensive written words are not sufficient to describe Osman Türkay’s
poetry. Yet
another year has passed without seeing his work acknowledged or published. It
makes me sadder year-by-year that a poet and writer who contributed immensely
to world literature does not receive the appreciation which he rightfully
deserves. How will the new generations know about this space age-poet, how will
the world of literature make progress on the Millennium Poet, when nothing by
him is published in English, so that he may become renowned and celebrated as a
Millennium Poet?
Türkay
was not only a poet, but also as a translator who translated into Turkish the
works of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda and Vladimir
Mayakovski. How his work can go unnoticed by the authorities on literature in Turkey
His
humanism, his abstract formulation of the Universe, the cultural references in
his poem and the various different themes of his poetry should not be kept to
the old publications of his books, but should be shared with the 21st
Century general public to read and enjoy. That was the reason why his work was published
into more than twenty world languages more than a decade ago.
At a
distance far away
the
aching soul of a pigeon
veils
the universal human conditions.
Semra Eren-Nijhar is an
author, sociologist, documentary film maker and policy consultant on diversity,
migration, Turkish people living in Europe and
the Executive Director of SUNCUT.
Thank you for the article. I am waiting for a more thorough analysis and presentation of his work.
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