An essay on the seminal Turkish poet Behçet Necatigil, by Gonca Özmen, first published as a preface to Bearing Witness to the Age, Selected Poems of Behçet Necatgil (The Antonym, 2025). Özmen is one of the most well-known Turkish women poets of her generation, dealing with various issues, from war to love, from a feminist critical perspective. Özmen was born in Burdur and graduated from the English literature department of Istanbul University in 2004; she completed her PhD in 2016. Her first poetry book Kuytumda (In My Nook) was published in 2000, and awarded the  Orhan Murat Arıburnu Prize. Her 2019 collection, Bile İsteye (Knowingly, Willingly), won the Yunus Nadi Award for Poetry, one of the oldest and most prestigious literary prizes in Turkey.  

 

Ragpicker Poetry is also proud to publish seven poems by Behçet Necatigil, translated by Neil P. Doherty and Gökçenur Ç, as an accompaniment to Özmen’s essay below.

 

~

 

We know he always left a parenthesis in his poems 

just so we could fill it in one day.

– İlhan Berk

 

One of the cornerstones of modern Turkish poetry, Behçet Necatigil produced a wide range of major works in various forms: poems, essays, letters, radio plays, dictionaries, reviews, and anthologies. He was also known as a distinguished translator who rendered a wide range of poetry and prose into Turkish. He recreated the world in each of his books, and by doing so, managed to broaden his readers’ horizons and furnish them with startling new insights. One might well compare him to an underground stream who silently carved out new paths that transformed and developed the Turkish language and its poetry. He was a multi-faceted, multi-layered poet, and his work has continued to inspire generations of poets and writers. “For many of us,” says Selim İleri, a prominent novelist,“he was a vaccine of civilisation, a declaration of humanity.” The critic Doğan Hızlan also describes his writings as an adventure in civilisation.

   Over the forty-odd years of his artistic life, from 1935, when his first poems were published, to 1978, when his final book of poetry appeared, Necatigil was known as a man determined not to waste even an hour and also as someone who could never be kept away from his study. It was always said that he was shy, emotional, and sensitive. He tended to keep to himself and didn’t engage in conversation much. He was very patient, hardworking, organized, and meticulous, he lived a “life as regular as clockwork” and found happiness and peace in his work. He kept away from the bohemian lifestyle and was known as a poet of the domestic space – one who went out each day to work, and on returning home shut himself up in his study. Necatigil, who, even in his poetry, spoke of the difficulty of making a living, kept lists of his income and expenses and once mentioned that he wore the same pair of shoes for four to five years, used to write poetic sketches on the back of his students’ homework papers. He would also write on cigarette packets or, as Cemal Süreya wrote in one of his poems, “on medicine boxes,” or paper napkins. He always kept a glass bowl on his desk, filled with peeled, iced walnuts and chickpeas. He didn’t like anyone to enter his room and never left before finishing the poem he was working on. 

   His lifelong devotion to poetry gave him a mind that expanded as it narrowed, a heart that expanded as it narrowed, and poetry that still expands as it narrows. He was a poet who shut himself away before blank sheets of white paper; a poet who shut himself away in his own study. Consequently, his room grew to be bigger than the world itself. His room became the universe and he, like an internal exile, silently and patiently waited for the words before the still-white sheet of paper. Necatigil himself once described his study as being his “country and kingdom.” I believe that his was an all-encompassing mind – one that opened to the world from this small study. 

   Necatigil was undoubtedly a poet whose life, in the clearest way, affirmed his poetry and whose poetry affirmed his life. He said he could never find poetry anywhere unless it was already within him. In this context, he stated, “I think of art and poetry as a parallel to the life of the poet, as a reflection of that life.” He was a wanderer in the backyards of the self. Critics hailed him as a poet possessed of a consistent and private world. In a language of the most profound subjectivity, he related this inner world, which was one of loneliness and seclusion. The reader will note that, in the great majority of his poems, the poet persona is alone. He captured the minutiae of life – those small events and situations that often go unrecorded – while at the same time relentlessly questioning his own life, his own being. He wrote a poetry of the unnoticed, of the inconspicuous. Though he explored ways in which individuals embrace their own selves to draw meaning and fulfilment from their own private realms, he would often forge connections between them and whatever was happening in the outside world. In a lyrical, passionate, and inquisitive manner, he sought political truths in both the personal and social spheres. This was a responsibility he never shirked. He found the age in which he lived to be very harsh and was highly critical of it. He had a deep concern for what is good and right in life. This concern, of course, transcended all national boundaries, and that is why he is both universal and uniquely original. The act of writing was an adventure for him – one that took him into the unknown, into new dimensions. In the majority of his poems, he preferred to evoke, to intuit, to make us feel, rather than to state explicitly. Considered one of the most important poets of the Republican period, he depicted the modern individual divided between the public and the private spheres, and he also examined the effects of the modernization process that brought about great social and cultural change. 

   Necatigil was born as Mehmet Behçet Gönül on April 16, 1916, in Istanbul, where – saving a few trips abroad and periods spent teaching in other Turkish cities – he lived most of his life. He lost his mother when he was two years old, and when his father, a preacher from Kastamonu, remarried, he began to live with his grandmother. Moving between his grandmother's house in Karagümrük and his father's house in Valideçeşme in Beşiktaş, he spent a sickly, painful, and troubled childhood. His father was very serious and authoritarian – a man who did not talk much and had little time for laughter. Necatigil never left his room except at mealtimes. He spent his childhood and youth in this small room in a wooden house, taking refuge in books. He began writing at a very early age; indeed, it is known that in 1927–28, he produced fourteen issues of his own hand-written magazine Kücük Muharrir (The Little Writer) which he distributed among friends and family.  

   He studied, and later taught, at Kabataş High School for Boys, an establishment renowned for producing some of the leading figures in many intellectual fields in both the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. Upon graduating with first-class honours, he studied Turkish Language and Literature at the Teacher Training College in Istanbul, where he was taught by Ali Nihad Tarlan, poet and literary historian, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, one of modern Turkey’s finest novelists. Cahit Külebi, Tahir Alangu, Samim Kocagöz, Salah Birsel, and Kamuran Şipal, who were to go on to be poets and writers, were among his schoolmates. Necatigil, who had attended some courses in German philology at the University of Istanbul as a guest student, was later sent to Berlin on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and spent four months in Germany taking language courses at the University of Berlin. In addition, the poems he wrote during his university years were published in leading journals.

   In 1949, he married Huriye Hanım, a teacher, and had two daughters, one of whom is the distinguished prose writer and translator Ayşe Sarısayın. He was a good husband and father who respected his wife and was affectionate towards his daughters. He was devoted to home and family, was self-sacrificing, and always conscious of his responsibilities. Necatigil taught for brief periods in the cities of Kars and Zonguldak before returning to Istanbul in 1943 to take up a position at the Pertevniyal High School. In 1945, he was transferred to the aforementioned Kabataş High School where he worked for some fifteen years. Until his retirement in 1972, Necatigil managed to combine the roles of a hugely respected teacher, leading poet, writer, and translator. 

His first poem, “Gece ve Yas” (“Night and Mourning”) was published in the prestigious Varlık journal in 1935 and his first book Kapalı Çarşı (The Covered Market) was published in 1945. That same year, he enrolled in the German Philology programme at Istanbul University, where he studied for two years. From those initial years to his death in 1979, he published fourteen collections of poetry. It should be noted that he began his poetic journey with a mature voice and a powerful lyrical imagination which were coupled with a keen power of observation and the gift of deep insight. While many poets’ early works can be classified as juvenilia, this is not the case with Necatigil. In his early poems, one can see a mixture of wisdom and irony, leavened by a subtle sense of humour that gives us the opportunity to view the world through a different lens. Written with clear narrative techniques, these poems manage to be both subtle and translucent. However, he quickly grew tired of this mode of writing and moved away from poetry “in which the element of narration predominates” and, in his own words, began to “reduce the element of story to turn instead to a path where it would suffice to merely imply a sensitivity, a suggestion or whole experience.” Through acts of recognition, interpretation, transformation, and liberation, he enriched his work by drawing on the legacy of the Turkish poetic tradition. He was open to innovation and change while also being rooted in the deepest veins of the aforementioned tradition. By incorporating many revolutionary changes and strikingly inventive shifts in his verse, he brought a new diction and form of expression to Turkish poetry.

   The reader approaching Necatigil’s oeuvre for the first time will notice something typologically striking in his mid- to late career work since the later poems are visibly (and audibly) different. They are confronted by what seems more concentrated poetry – one full of ellipses, dashes, parentheses, lines of thought and squares, exclamation marks, and blank spaces. In order to reduce the narrative element in his work, Necatigil chose to write with fewer and fewer words. He tightened the poetic structure of his work by eliding the verbal element and leaving gaps for the reader to fill in. His syntax tends toward the complex, and so the relationships between his points of reference can occasionally be obscure. He also had a predilection for puns, colloquialisms, wordplay, and sound play of all kinds, and these are difficult to understand and, naturally, to translate. However, this is how he managed to extend the limits of the language of the everyday. This dense and compact poetic language resembles nobody else’s, it is a language entirely of his own construction. He shaped it in the most intense and condensed way and this yielded some of the most stylistic, sophisticated, and inspiring poetry that has ever been written in the Turkish language. This unique style demands an intellectual effort on the part of the reader. In fact, as he left much unsaid, it calls for a deep involvement, one that forges a closer bond between poet and reader. He viewed each poem as a self-sufficient entity in which images speak for themselves. Throughout his writing life, he remained independent, refusing to join any literary or artistic movements, and thereby established his own line in our poetry. 

   By drawing on nearly every source in written Turkish, from the Orkhon inscriptions to the poetry of his own era, Necatigil carved out a prominent place for himself within our literature. Though it must also be said that his poetic universe extended beyond Turkish literature to include significant poets such as Goethe, Rilke, Borchert, Trakl, Jandl, Hesse, Brecht, and Hamsun, all of whom he translated into Turkish. In his translations, one can get a strong feeling for the language, structure, and characteristics of German poetry. These translations are the products of a poet working at the pinnacle of his art. This diverse cultural background allowed Necatigil to utilise numerous elements from both Western and Turkish mythology and to forge, in universal ways, conceptual syntheses between the East and the West. He was able to create new horizons by transcending national boundaries, seeing the permanent and the universal in the ephemeral. In his poetic cosmos, by providing insights into ways of seeing and by dramatizing the aesthetics of everyday life, he explored the tensions between past and present, old and new, traditional and modern, and public and private. Throughout the wide range of his work, the poet’s intention to universalize the relationship of the modern individual with time and space gave his poetry its abiding relevance and power.  

  One facet of his poetry that remained constant throughout his writing career was his exploration of the theme of house and home, which he framed within the dialectics of interior and exterior space, so much so that he was called the “poet of homes” by some critics. He portrayed the houses, streets, and people of certain neighbourhoods. Behind the fine details of this poetic vision lies an approach that was focused on the human, a gift for close observation, a sharp eye and sensitive ears, and, lastly, a penetrating intellect. Starting from his early volumes, Çevre (Environs, 1951) and Evler (Homes, 1953), he focused on the concept of “home,” making it his main metaphor. In his work, the home is often portrayed in contradictory ways: on the one hand, it is the place where the persona of the poet can escape from the cruelties and difficulties of the outside world; on the other hand, it is a place that restricts and even suffocates him. Home is ultimately a place from which there is no escape. Necatigil’s work explores the tensions that are coiled up in this triangle of house-family-environs. For him, the modern individual is someone divided between public and private spheres and often ill-at-ease in both. As the twentieth century was the era of great dislocation and alienation, his obsession with the idea of home will strike a chord with readers from all backgrounds. Which of us does not ache for the idea of a secure home, yet also recoil from all the constraints it brings?

   Among the sources that nourished his poetry were the traditions that he both transformed and drew from, as well as his own life and the lives of his close circle of friends. In his poetry, he skilfully captured the experiences of the middle-class, and depicted domestic life and the problems of individuals in an urban setting. The poet’s consciousness reflects the private and public worlds in almost all their aspects. It could be said that, with distinctive stylistic and poetic concerns and with profound subjectivity, Necatigil brought middle-class citizens to the fore in a way that had not been seen before. Using the patterns and rhythms of quotidian language, he forged his work from the smaller details of the everyday. In the majority of his poems, he also engaged in a profound dialogue with the world of everyday objects, each of which may be viewed as a kind of objective correlative, a way of evoking certain thoughts and emotions. He grasped the inner being of things in the most concrete way, and, as a result, a rich and complex poetic universe was revealed. 

   Time also occupies a central position in his poetry. Necatigil believed in an undivided conception of time. Past and present unravel into the future. Past, present, and future intermingle as endings and beginnings merge. It is also worth noting that he was a meticulous archivist, one of those who was unable to discard anything, and this too was reflected in his understanding of time. What brings opposites together in Necatigil is his belief in the idea of unity. Everything exists in tandem with its opposite. Everything is meaningful when viewed together with its opposite. One will find that what at first seemed to be new and strange can be transformed into something ordinary and normal. Thus too, his touch renders the ordinary extraordinary. Since he first entered the literary world in the 1940s, he went on to build many bridges that linked the old and the new. 

   Necatigil was well aware of the potential of the Turkish language and his work fully embodies these potentialities. Over time, his poems became more oblique as he adapted different methods of evocation, employed both abstract metaphors and elusive imagery, and wrote in tones of austere intensity. Here one must understand the nature of the Turkish language which is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. The syntax, when compared to many Western European languages, is very flexible. The word or phrase placed closest to the verb conveys greater emphasis and relevance within the sentence or poetic line. Necatigil benefitted to a great extent from the flexibility, ambiguity, rhythm, and elusiveness of Turkish syntax. His legacy is rooted in a distinct linguistic style that he developed by utilizing all the possible nuances of the language. He not only drew on but also enriched the music of the Turkish syntactical cadence with a brilliant usage of repetition, metre, and rhyme. That is why these poems, with their amazing twists and turns, are full of surprises. They also reflect different ways of looking at the world, coupled as they are with an infinite capacity for expansion. They are innovative, dynamic, intense, and open-ended, and offer the reader new verbal and visual dimensions. The invisible thus become visible. Each poem means more than it seems to utter. The poet’s task is to help us see what is unseen. 

   In this selection of Behçet Necatigil, the first to be published in English, the reader will encounter translations selected from ten of his major collections, beginning with Evler (Houses, 1953), and ending with his posthumous collection, Söyleriz (We Say, 1982). Among these are, “A Pale Rose When I Touch,” “Bearing Witness to the Age,” “The Water Lily,” and “Dying in Books” which are often considered to be among Necatigil’s most popular and well-known poems. Intending to cover as much of the oeuvre as possible, the book is structured chronologically in order to show just how Necatigil’s poetry changed and developed over time. By allowing the English-speaking reader to make a journey of discovery within this intriguing poetry, this book provides invaluable insights into the world of an outstanding poet and thereby the reader will also gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of Turkish poetry – the bedrock of Turkish literature.   

   I am deeply grateful to the distinguished translators Neil P. Doherty and Gökçenur Ç. – himself a poet – for this collaborative effort and their wholehearted dedication to Necatigil’s poetry. As the most intense form of reading, these translations give a clear and coherent sense of Necatigil’s style and poetic drive since the translators keep the source poems’ multiple interpretations by pushing against the boundaries of language and reflecting the strength of their form and content. This rewarding translation process started in an intensive translation workshop at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature (CWTTL), an organisation that made it possible for a large number of Turkish poets and writers to be translated into English. One should also note that Behçet Necatigil would certainly be far better known had Turkish been a more widely spoken language. I hope that this selection will inspire more translations from his exceptionally rich oeuvre in the future.

   I should particularly point out that, for me, it is both a privilege and daunting responsibility to introduce the poetry of Behçet Necatigil, whom I consider to be a poet of the first rank, to Anglophone readers. While exploring new approaches and forging new paths, Necatigil drew circles with language all the while inviting us to join in this innovative collaboration and a creative dialogue emphasizing, as he once did, that “Every thing is a translation”:  

   

[Every thing is a translation]

 

Every thing is a translation

Different is the translation of the same thing 

Examples: 

Whether his eyes were open or shut he could see it 

Eyes open or shut 

With eyes, he could see-

His eyes . . . he could see it 

In between a change, such as this: 

Let’s say he could see it 

With what could he see? Let’s say with his eyes. 

 

Every thing is a translation 

We turn everything (in)to/wards ourselves 

According to the self every thing 

Changes    fragments 

Let’s say “He kept seeing it” is what we mean 

This we may render in different ways 

Examples: 

Whether his eyes were open or shut . . .  

Eyes open or shut . . .

Even if his eyes were shut . . . 

He opens his eyes, he shuts them, and yet . . .  

His eyes . . . 

He kept seeing it (and so on) 

In between, forms change 

Depending on our taste, 

Turn the armchair this way or that, 

It’s the same old chair 

But 

Still

Some things have changed! 

 

I turn everything (in)to/wards myself 

There’s difference in the details 

How we view a news flash, an anguish or an expression of love 

Is one thing to your mind’s eye, quite another to mine. 

 

Behçet Necatigil; translated by Saliha Paker, Turkish Poetry Today 2016 (Red Hand Books), pp. 53-54.