Tanpınar: His Poems and Personality
By Mustafa Aydoğan
Translated by Aysel K. Basci
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar is at war with his words.
In reality, a poet and a poem are like two halves of a whole that conjoin then separate from one another. Just as a poet feels that what is pouring into his soul is a poem, the poem itself is aware of whether it is in the hands of a poet or not. In other words, a poem finds its identity in a poet’s hands, and just as a poet recognizes a poem, the poem recognizes its poet. In fact, poems come not just to poets – they come to everyone. There is a poem that reflects each individual’s world. But only when ‘that thing that comes,’ in other words when the spirit of true creativity falls into the hands of a poet, does it become a poem and find its identity. Otherwise, it evaporates.
On the flip side, these two halves, the poet and the poem, develop their identity by improving each other. Usually, a poem comes to a poet with excesses. Therefore, very often, the poet must make improvements to ‘what came.’ He or she must identify what the excesses are, typically the armor, the protective skin of ‘what came,’ and purify the poem by removing those excesses. It is safe to say that a bad poet is one who can’t see the excesses. Their poems look funny, like girls in clothes that are too big for them.
Similarly, a poem refines the poet. It searches for a space in the poet’s inner world to establish a home for itself, and while digging the soil to build a foundation for its new home, it brings order and harmony. The poem ‘settles’ in the poet’s inner world. However, the interaction between the poet and the poem is a sensitive matter that must be handled carefully. The refinements must be made delicately and with care as if removing the garments of an infant still in its mother’s arms. If the poet does not treat the poem with sanctity and care, the poem responds to the poet in kind. For instance, if a poet directs too much scrupulous attention to the poem, it may shed its skin, and in the process, lose its spirit too. Although not as dramatic, this is similar to Tanpınar’s relationship with his poems. He scrutinizes a poem so much that, as one reads it, one feels sorry for the poem.
Clearly, one of the most important factors in developing this tendency to excessively refurbish his poems is Tanpınar’s perfectionism. His pervasive doubts about whether he has given due justice to his poems or not are beyond remedy. On this issue, Tanpınar is totally hopeless. Some of his letters document the high cost of these doubts to him and his poems. Not only do they delay him, but these doubts also wound his poems. It is as if Tanpınar repeatedly attempts to peel the skin off his poems.
In 1937, in a letter he wrote to A. Kutsi Tecer, he indicated his decision to publish a poetry book the following year and lists the names of 33 poems, 10 of which had been finalized for publication in that book. He then adds, “But with the condition that I can finalize these poems.” Those poems, with countless changes and improvements, are the ones he published a year before his death in 1962. He worked on those 33 poems for 25 years. Not only that, but in a letter, he wrote to Adalet Cimgöz shortly before his book was published, he indicated that there were some problems in some of the poems requiring him to make further improvements. He worked for many years on his two longer poems, Eşik and Zaman Kırıntıları.
This tendency to over refine and fiddle with his poems for too long brings a dryness and coldness to Tanpınar's poems. It seems that if he had refined them less, we would feel the warmness of the blood running in his veins. Sadly, this perfectionism comes at a high cost. For example, the poet himself is the only one responsible for Necip Fazıl’s following criticism, “Hamdi’s poems are like honeycombs without any honey. They leave only a taste of wax in the mouth.” It is obvious that every poet is responsible for his or her poems, but in this case, there is a special situation. We do not see the same dryness in the poems Tanpınar spent less time scrutinizing.
It was a morning hour when you came smiling,
Radiant like a flower in the spring,
As close to the heart as hope, and timid.
Your hair was tousled, your chest naked,
Your face was pure zest, shimmering and clean.
Your countenance as beautiful as any shepherd's dream.
It was a morning hour when you came smiling.
The above poem is included in one of Tanpınar’s letters to A. Kutsi Tecer, but absent from his published books. In the letter, he expresses his opinion of the poem, “Do you call this a poem? Far from it!” Since he did not like it and excluded it from his publications, he probably revised it less than his other poems. However, we can safely say that this unpublished poem is probably one of Tanpınar’s most red-blooded poems. From a technical standpoint, it may not be as solid as his published poems, but it sends a shiver down the spine of the reader, revealing a strong grasp of the human spirit, warmth, and spontaneity. It immediately becomes ours and touches our hearts. The biggest reason for this is because it did not ‘fall into Tanpınar’s hands.’
Now, let’s look at Tanpınar’s poem, “On Awakening,” which he chose to publish and therefore must have scrutinized closely.
This life’s solitary hour, this night,
The day behind the distant cypresses.
This spring garden adorned with sunlight,
The water's distancing, nearing noises.
And the nightingale’s sad song in the air,
The rose wearing its ring of fire.
Although, from a technical standpoint, this poem is stronger than the previous one, it is cold and dry. This is because it was subjected to excess revision by the poet, who altered its fabric.
Tanpınar’s obsessive scrutiny of his poems deprived him of something else he longed for: the street and home-style language. In his book “Yaşadığım Gibi” Tanpınar writes:
“Modern Turkish poetry begins with Yahya Kemal. That is to say, it starts with our man who brought the street and home-style talk into verses… In Turkish literature, this man’s role is similar to that of Valery’s on French literature. In short, he tried to eliminate a lot of superstitions from poetry and he succeeded. I look at poetry from these two men’s perspective.”
The reality is, Tanpınar’s poetry is the exact opposite of the principle stated above. Far from bringing street and home-style talk into poetry, Tanpınar’s poems are written in very formal and highly aristocratic language. Aristocracy is meticulous, while the street is neither measured nor restricted. In this sense, the poems Tanpınar admires and praises and the ones he writes live far apart, on very different streets. While Tanpınar is intellectually close to the street’s wide and free climate, when writing poetry, he looks for a castle in which to express his thoughts.
Even his understanding of time does not fit the style of the street. In the street, it is not the time of ‘moments open to eternity’ that rule, but rather, the free and unrestricted time for buying bread and coming home, gossip and haste, spontaneous gaiety, and passing sadness. The street does not think; it only lives. It is for this reason that Yahya Kemal’s verse, “I cry whenever I remember our laughter” carries the liveliness of the street and home into poetry. Whereas Tanpınar’s most famous verses, “Neither am I inside time, / Nor altogether without; / In the unbroken flow of / An instant singular and vast.” look out at the world from a window made of books. As a poet, Tanpınar almost never goes out to the street, and when he does, his mind is on the books filling the rooms of his palace. We see him talking from within history and eternity, and not listening to some elders chatting under a chinar. It is this—his aristocratic attitude—that pushes him to perfectionism and forces him to write his poems behind his palace’s gates in a powerful but cold climate.
His perfectionism is clear in the objects featured in his poetry as well. His notions of the sea, the woman, the time, the night, and even dreams, are always dressed in their formal and noble attire. They give the impression that they are objects more to look at than to touch and feel.
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Mustafa Aydoğan is a highly accomplished contemporary Turkish poet and author. He was born and raised in Kahramanmaraş and received his higher education at Gazi University. His first poem was published in 1981, in the literary magazine “Esra Yazıları.” Since then, Aydoğan’s poems have appeared in many other magazines including “Mavera,” "Yedi İklim,” “Dergâh,” and “Hece.” Besides poetry, he wrote book reviews and columns for such newspaper as Yeni Şafak, Yenisöz and Milat. For a number of years, he prepared an annual publication of poetry for the literary magazine “Edebiyat Ortamı Şiir Yıllığı.” From 2008 to 2012 he served as the chief editor of that magazine in Ankara. In 2012, he received the “Poetry Book of the Year” award from the Writers Union of Turkey for his book “Bugün Konuştuklarımız.” Aydoğan’s published poetry books are: Kendini Aynalarda Çoğaltan Şehir (1997), Bir Dolu Bakır Yaz (1999), Bahar Köpüğü (2004), Az Önce (2012), Bugün Konuştuklarımız (2012) and Güneşin Ayak İzini Takip Et (2014). His other books are: Yazma Sevinci (2014), Kitabın Kimliği (2015), Yüzdeki Leke (2014), Aşk Yolcuları (2015), Yalnızlık Mahşeri Alâeddin Özdenören (2015), Şiir Beni Korkutmuştur (2017) and İnancın Parıltısı Nuri Pakdil (2018).
Aysel K. Basci is a nonfiction writer and literary translator of both prose and poetry. She was born and raised in Cyprus and moved to the United States in 1975. Aysel is retired and resides in the Washington DC area. Her writing and translations have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Entropy, Critical Read, Bosphorus Review of Books, Aster(ix) and elsewhere.
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