Yahya Kemal Beyatlı

Famous Before His Books

When Yahya Kemal Beyatlı died at Cerrahpaşa Hospital in Istanbul on 1 November 1958, he had never published a book of his poems. His reputation had been built in another way. 

After he returned to Istanbul in 1912, couplets he recited at gatherings passed from person to person, and admirers copied his poems into handwritten notebooks long before they reached print.

The numbers make this unusual. In Diyorlar ki (1917–1918), Ruşen Eşref's book of interviews with the writers of the day, he already appears as the foremost living poet. At that point he had printed almost nothing. By 1918 he had published a single poem, and when he gave an interview in 1924, the total was about twenty-three, most of them printed in 1918 and 1919. The critic Sermet Sami Uysal later described him as a poet who became famous before his poems were published.

He revised for years. According to Mehmet Kaplan, some poems took five years to finish and others twenty. Süleymaniye'de Bayram Sabahı, which the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi calls his most valued poem, is said to have been reworked over about forty years. Yahya Kemal held that a poem is made of nağme, melody, and he wrote for the ear. A printed book would have fixed lines he was still changing.

From Üsküp to Paris

He was born Ahmed Âgâh on 2 December 1884 in Üsküp, today Skopje, then an Ottoman city. His father, Nişli İbrahim Naci Bey, was a court official and for a time head of the Üsküp municipality. His mother, Nakıye Hanım, was a niece of the poet Leskofçalı Galip. She died in 1897. His father remarried, and the family moved back to Üsküp. He went to school in Üsküp and Selanik and was sent to Istanbul in April 1902.

In 1903 he left for Paris, where the Young Turk opposition had gathered. After a year of French at a school in Meaux, he attended the École Libre des Sciences Politiques and followed the lectures of the historian Albert Sorel. He read the French poets in the original. 

Paul Verlaine's "De la musique avant toute chose" served him as a creed, and José-Maria de Heredia's Les Trophées lay behind his early poems on Greek and Roman subjects.

He came back to Istanbul in 1912, after about nine years, without a diploma. Scholars disagree about how much Paris changed him. X. Celnarová traces to these years his idea of a Turkish nation formed on the soil of Anatolia and the Balkans. Fahrettin Arslan argues that Paris mostly confirmed views he already held.

A Tulip Garden Seen from Paris

The years from 1718 to 1730, the reign of Ahmed III and the grand vizierate of Damat İbrahim Paşa, had no special name in the Ottoman chronicles of the eighteenth century. 

According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Yahya Kemal was the first to call them the Lale Devri, the Tulip Era. The historian Ahmed Refik Altınay made the name widely known with a series of articles in the newspaper İkdam in 1913, and he used it again two years later as the title of his book. I tell the longer story of the name, and of the tulip itself, in my post on the Ottoman Tulip Age and the Dutch tulip.

Celnarová connects his interest in this period to Paris, and to Verlaine's Fêtes galantes in particular. Verlaine's book returns to the parks and masked parties of eighteenth-century France. Yahya Kemal, reading it in Paris, turned toward the gardens of Istanbul in the same century.

His own Tulip Era is a cycle of eight poems in Eski Şiirin Rüzgârıyle (1962): six ghazals, among them Bir Sâkî and Mahurdan Gazel, and two musammats, Sene 1140 and Seyfî'ye Refakat. They are set in Sa'dâbâd and its pavilions on the Kâğıthane stream. Sene 1140 takes its title from a Hijri year, roughly 1727 to 1728 in the Western calendar. Several of these poems were first drafted in Paris. Mahurdan Gazel was begun in 1908 and first printed in 1918.

Behind the cycle stands Nedim, the poet of Sa'dâbâd, whose vocabulary and imagery run through Bir Sâkî and Sene 1140. Tanpınar read the cycle as a Turkish classic seen through Nedim's eyes. Nesrin Tağızade Karaca argues that its words move from mazmun, the fixed conventions of divan poetry, toward imge, the image of modern poetry.

The Classroom at the Darülfünun

Back in Istanbul he taught literature and history at Darüşşafaka in 1913. From 1916 to 1919 he taught at the Faculty of Letters of the Darülfünun, with courses on the history of civilization and on Western and Turkish literature. One of his students there was Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who graduated in 1923. In 1962 Tanpınar published a book about his teacher, titled simply Yahya Kemal.

From April 1921 to January 1923, during the National Struggle, Yahya Kemal was chief writer of Dergâh, a fortnightly magazine of forty-two issues to which Tanpınar also contributed. According to Tanpınar, the magazine took its name from Yahya Kemal's poem İthaf.

Old Meter, Istanbul Turkish

Every poem he finished is written in aruz, the quantitative meter of Ottoman divan poetry, except Ok, which is in syllabic hece meter. Into the old meter he put the Turkish of Istanbul and kept out heavy Arabic and Persian constructions. Dinçer Öztürk, following Ahmet Kabaklı, calls this language Kültür Türkçesi, a cultivated Turkish that stays apart from everyday speech.

Açık Deniz gives a sense of his pace. He began it at Roscoff in Brittany in 1910 and published it in 1925. When he explained his method of refining a poem, which he called perfeksiyon, this was the example he gave.

His best-known phrase came out of an argument with Ziya Gökalp, who teased him for keeping his eyes on the Eastern past. Yahya Kemal answered with a couplet in which he calls himself kökü mazide olan âti, a future whose root lies in the past. He dated Turkish history in Anatolia from the battle of Malazgirt in 1071 and treated the centuries before it as prehistory. That idea runs through Süleymaniye'de Bayram Sabahı, where a morning prayer in Sinan's mosque opens onto the long history behind the people praying. His prose on Istanbul, written across several decades, was collected after his death as Aziz İstanbul.

Envoy and Ambassador

He joined the Turkish delegation at the Lausanne Conference in 1922 as an adviser. In the Republic that followed, he sat in the Grand National Assembly for Urfa, Yozgat, Tekirdağ and Istanbul, and served as envoy in Warsaw from 1926 and in Madrid from 1929, covering Lisbon from Madrid as well. The man who dated his history from Malazgirt and wrote ghazals on Sa'dâbâd spent these years in the diplomatic service of a state that was closing the Ottoman chapter. His last post was as Türkiye's first ambassador to Pakistan, and he retired in 1949.

After the Surname Law of 1934 he took the name Beyatlı. The Turkish reference works explain it as the Turkish form of Şehsuvar, the nickname of an ancestor shared by both sides of his family. He never married, and he spent his last years at the Park Otel in Istanbul.

He asked for four lines from Rindlerin Ölümü to be carved on his gravestone. He is buried in the Aşiyan Cemetery at Rumelihisarı, close to Tanpınar. Soon after his death the Yahya Kemal Institute was founded within the İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, and it published his collected works between 1961 and 1977. According to his student Nihad Sami Banarlı, the poetry books were arranged following the poet's own wishes. The society also runs a Yahya Kemal Museum in the Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Medresesi in Beyazıt, where the desk he used at the Park Otel is kept. In December 2024 the society announced that the building would be restored, so check with the İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti before you plan a visit.

The Words Yahya Kemal Left Behind

Rind came into Turkish from Persian. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi defines it as a person who feels bound by no convention or religious custom and is content with God alone. In Sufi language the word also names the act of leaving behind everything other than God. In divan poetry the rind is usually set against the zâhid, the man of outward piety who keeps the rules and expects a reward for keeping them. The rind drinks, sees through that kind of piety, and accepts the world as it passes. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi speaks of a rindlik felsefesi, a rind's philosophy, in Yahya Kemal's old-style poems.

The word also shapes his view of death. The TEİS entry describes his attitude toward death as a rindane teslimiyet, the calm surrender of a rind. In Rindlerin Ölümü a rose weeps over the tomb of Hâfız, and the rinds die quietly into a spring that does not end. 

These were the lines he chose for his own gravestone.

Today's dictionaries spell the word rint. Like kitap and kitabı, it keeps the written t at the end of the word and before consonants, and shows d before a vowel: rindi. Under the current rule the plural is rintler. The title Rindlerin Ölümü, The Death of the Rinds, keeps the older spelling with d.

Ottoman poets also used the Persian plural, rindan. In his writings on literature, Yahya Kemal quoted this line by Nedim as a model of derûnî âhenk, inner harmony, a line whose words cannot be moved without harming both its meaning and its music:

"Dökülen mey kırılan şîşe-i rindan olsun."
Let the spilled wine and the broken bottle belong to the rinds.

In şîşe-i rindan, the bottle of the rinds, the Persian -i joins the two nouns in the order opposite to Turkish rindlerin şişesi.

Gök kubbe means the dome of the sky, from gök (sky) and kubbe (dome). Kendi gök kubbemiz adds -miz, "our", with front vowels to match the e of kubbe. Kendi puts the weight on whose sky it is: our own sky-dome.

Mazi means the past, and âti means the future. Everyday Turkish uses geçmiş and gelecek, and âti now sounds old-fashioned. In kökü mazide olan âti, kökü is kök (root) with the possessive -ü, mazide is mazi with the locative -de, and olan is the participle of olmak. Together: a future whose root is in the past.

Aruz is the meter of divan poetry, built on long and short syllables. Hece simply counts syllables.

Books

Yahya Kemal published no poetry collections in his lifetime. All of the titles below appeared after his death, as volumes of the collected works published by the Yahya Kemal Institute of the İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti.

Kendi Gök Kubbemiz (1961)

The poems in which he brought Istanbul Turkish into aruz. The title comes from Süleymaniye'de Bayram Sabahı, the poem that opens the book. Sessiz Gemi, his poem of a ship that leaves the harbour for good, is in the second section, Yol Düşüncesi. Most readers begin here.

Eski Şiirin Rüzgârıyle (1962)

The book where he writes in the forms of divan poetry, and the home of the eight-poem Tulip Era cycle. It reads best next to Nedim, the poet he answers.

Rubâîler ve Hayyam Rubâîlerini Türkçe Söyleyiş (1963)

His own rubais, printed together with his Turkish versions of the rubais of Omar Khayyam. The Persian quatrain was one of the old forms he carried into twentieth-century Turkish.

Aziz İstanbul (1964)

Prose on the city, including Ezansız Semtler from the early 1920s. These pieces show the historical reading of Istanbul that stands behind the poems.

Eğil Dağlar (1966)
Articles written mostly during the National Struggle, the years when he was also writing for Dergâh.

Siyâsî Hikâyeler (1968)
His political stories, a side of his prose that is much less known than the poems.

Siyâsî ve Edebî Portreler (1968)
Portraits of the political and literary figures he knew.

Edebiyâta Dâir (1971)
His writings on literature, including his views on meter and rhyme and the Nedim line he chose as a model of inner harmony. A useful companion to Tanpınar's Yahya Kemal.

Çocukluğum, Gençliğim, Siyâsî ve Edebî Hâtıralarım (1973)
His memoirs of the Üsküp and Paris years and of literary life in Istanbul.

Târih Musâhabeleri (1975)
Talks on history. They show the reading of the Turkish past that also shapes poems such as Süleymaniye'de Bayram Sabahı.

Bitmemiş Şiirler (1976)
The poems he left unfinished, from a poet who revised some lines for decades.

Mektuplar-Makaleler (1977)
Letters and articles, the last volume of the collected works.