Orations, speeches, missives, prayers, newspaper articles and parliamentary debates, 1915-1937, compiled and translated to help answer the following questions:
What was the explicit ideological justification for a secular state? How does it compare to the implicit position evinced by government action and legislation in the early Turkish republic?
How was this change of basis in political authority received by different groups in Turkish society? How did these groups react to specific policy changes?
To what extent was political authority resituated on this secular basis? Did religious authority continue to propagate in the state or in alternative power structures, such as Islamic sects and foundations?
Was the feeling that underpins this authority displaced onto secular figures and institutions? If so, how does this displacement manifest in language, media and literature?
Supported by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University over Summer 2024.
This archive is meant to provide short but thorough introductions to various styles and periods of Turkish poetry.
I provide translations together with their historical and literary context. The aim is not only to make these beautiful works accessible to more readers, but also to render the cultural forces behind this body of literature visible to the outside eye.
Each poem has one straightforward, literal translation, adjacent to prose. The real translated work follows, made by me into what I think is closest in spirit and feeling to the original.
lara arikan