İlhan Berk

Last updated

Contents

İlhan Berk
Born18 November 1918
Manisa, Ottoman Empire
Died28 August 2008(2008-08-28) (aged 89)
Muğla, Turkey
Occupation Poet, essayist
Nationality Turkish
Period1935–2008
Literary movement Postmodern literature

İlhan Berk (18 November 1918 – 28 August 2008) was a leading Turkish poet. He was a dominant figure in the postmodern current in Turkish poetry (termed, "İkinci Yeni"; "The second new generation") and was very influential among Turkish literary circles. [1]

Biography

Berk was born in Manisa, Turkey in 1918 and as a child witnessed the Fire of Manisa. He received a teacher's training in Balıkesir. He graduated from the French Language Department of Gazi University in Ankara. Between 1945 and 1955, Berk served as a teacher. He later began to work for the publishing office of Ziraat Bank as a translator (1956–1969). He became specialized in translation of poetry notably by translating into Turkish works by Arthur Rimbaud and Ezra Pound. In his later years, Berk resided in Bodrum where he died on 28 August 2008.

Poetry

Berk's poetry evolved from the approach of an epical socialist to the dreamy vision of a lyrical and erotic individual. He made the "object" visible in its glory and aimed to break down the meaning. Berk's poetry takes its roots from the mythology, and a synthesis of Western and Eastern poetry traditions, yet he accomplishes to create a unique and postmodern approach. Peter Riley, in an analysis of Berk's work published in The Fortnightly Review, suggests the poet sometimes "runs poetry itself to an extremity at which it can no longer function as language." [2]

History, geography, visual arts, cities such as Istanbul, Paris and Ankara, feed Berk's poetry and, his themes are supported by a sizable vocabulary that includes colloquial words as well as very specific ones, such as musical terms and local names of plants.

A significant body of Berk's work is now available in English, most notably A Leaf About To Fall: Selected Poems (2006), Madrigals (2008), The Book of Things (2009) and New selected poems 1947-2008 (2016); all translated by George Messo.

Bibliography in English

Awards

See also

Related Research Articles

Nicholas Moore was an English poet, associated with the New Apocalyptics in the 1940s, whose reputation stood as high as Dylan Thomas’s. He later dropped out of the literary world.

Michael Smith (1942-2014) was an Irish poet, author and translator. A member of Aosdána, the Irish National Academy of Artists, Michael Smith was the first Writer in-Residence to be appointed by University College, Dublin and was an Honorary Fellow of UCD. He was a poet who gave a lifetime of service to the art of poetry both in English and Spanish. He has been described as a classical modernist, a poet of modern life.

Peter Robinson (poet) British poet (born 1953)

Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.

Attilâ İlhan was a Turkish poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and reviewer.

M. T. C. Cronin is a contemporary Australian poet.

There were a number of poetic trends in the poetry of Turkey in the early years of the Republic of Turkey. Authors such as Ahmed Hâşim and Yahyâ Kemâl Beyatlı (1884–1958) continued to write important formal verse whose language was, to a great extent, a continuation of the late Ottoman tradition. By far the majority of the poetry of the time, however, was in the tradition of the folk-inspired "syllabist" movement, which had emerged from the National Literature movement and which tended to express patriotic themes couched in the syllabic meter associated with Turkish folk poetry.

Oktay Rifat Horozcu, better known as Oktay Rifat, was a Turkish writer and playwright, and one of the forefront poets of modern Turkish poetry since the late 1930s. He was the founder of the Garip movement, together with Orhan Veli and Melih Cevdet.

Melih Cevdet Anday

Melih Cevdet Anday was a Turkish writer whose poetry stands outside the traditional literary movements. He also wrote in many other genres which, over six and a half decades, included eleven collections of poems, eight plays, eight novels, fifteen collections of essays, several of which won major literary awards. He also translated several books from diverse languages into Turkish.

Ken Bolton is an Australian poet.

Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group loosely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry".

Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born poet, novelist, biographer and literary critic.

Richard Berengarten is a British poet, translator and editor. Having lived in Italy, Greece, the US and the former Yugoslavia, his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His subjects deal with historical and political material, with inner worlds, relationships and everyday life. His work is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth of themes, and variety of form. In the 1970s, he founded and ran the international Cambridge Poetry Festival. He has been an important presence in contemporary poetry for the past 40 years, and his work has been translated into more than 90 languages.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Carrie Etter is an American poet.

Ataol Behramoğlu Turkish poet, writer and translator

Ataol Behramoğlu is a prominent Turkish poet, author, and Russian-into-Turkish literary translator.

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016.

George Messo is an expatriate English poet and translator who was born in rural Lincolnshire, near the town of Barton-Upon-Humber. He moved to Trabzon, Turkey, in 1998 and has since lived in Oman and Saudi Arabia. He was the editor of Near East Review from 2001 to 2007. Messo is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

George Economou was an American poet and translator.

Eduardo Milán Uruguayan author (born 1952)

Eduardo Milán is a Uruguayan author who has written over twenty books of poetry, several collections of criticism, and two anthologies of Spanish-language poetry. He was born in Rivera, Uruguay, in 1952. His mother died when he was a year old, and when he was a teenager his father was sent to prison for being affiliated with the Tupamaro guerrilla movement.

Deborah Meadows

Deborah Meadows is an American poet and playwright and essayist.

References

  1. "İlhan Berk'i kaybettik (Ilhan Berk passes away)" (in Turkish). Europe Media Monitor News Brief. 2008-08-28. Archived from the original on 2012-07-22.
  2. The Fortnightly Review http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/06/ilhan-berk/

Resources