Re: [xmca] On the occasion of 11th of June

[ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com>]

Thanks to you David.

Now, firstly, about Benerci. I think that this is not about the suicide of
Mayakovsky. It is about an imaginary suicide of an again imaginary communist
in the 1930s...An imaginary communist but possessing many traits from the
poet himself...

The explanation is that there were some disagreements between Nazim Hikmet
and other Communist Party of Turkey leading cadres. The latter were trying
to draw the party to a line closer to bourgeois republic, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk's line, whereas Hikmet was aiming a class struggle against the newly
established bourgeois repoublic.

The result was that Hikmet is expelled from the party and blamed (Later he
lived as a party member until his death). The poem is in fact about Hikmet
and his internal and external struggles...

I know that Hikmet purified Turkish language a lot. I have some information
about Hikmet's literary contribution and characteristics
but since I do not know the exact concepts in English that I know in Turkish
, I need to match my knowledge with your question in English and also ask
to some close friends who are better than myself in literature.

I will return to you with some answers.

Ulvi




On 12/06/2009, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Ulvi:
>
> Thanks very much for this, and above all thanks for the link to HIkmet's
> other work.
>
> Nazim Hikmet was the man who wrote the poem about the little girl in
> Hiroshima that David Preiss shared with us (made into a rather lugubrious
> hit by the Byrds in the 1960s).
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0CDpU44fA
>
> When I was younger, I read a play by him in French about the suicide of
> Mayakovsky ("Pourquoi Benerdji s'est suicide?").
>
> I think I read somewhere that he was one of the first to use the Turkish
> language to write blank verse, and that prior to his work Turkish poetry
> borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian to create meter, because Turkish
> has no long vowels.
>
> I even seem to remember something very historical he said to defend the
> practice; something like, "Primitive man used rhyme as a mnemonic tool to be
> able to remember the next line of a long poem, but with the invention of
> written language rhyme became obsolete."
>
> Do you know anything about this?
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca