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All of a sudden...
Orhan Veli Kanik
ORHAN VELI KANIK collapsed on November 14, 1950 in the city of Istanbul. He was rushed to the hospital, fell into a coma and died before midnight. He was 36, but already a legend in his lifetime. He was the enfant terrible of Turkish poetry, the man who had written the notorious line, "I just wish I were a fish in a bottle of booze." Attending physicians must have felt that his wish had been granted for they first assumed that death was the result of "poisoning due to intoxication." Later, world got around that the poet had fallen into a ditch in Ankara a few days before and had been complaining about an unbearable headache ever since. As a result, a number of people concluded he had suffered a brain concussion. A few intimates also recalled that the poet had never fully recovered from a serious automobile accident in 1939. Then he had been in a coma for 20 days.
Officially it was a cerebral hemorrhage which ended the life of Turkey's most talked-about, most colorful poet. But alcohol could lay claim to being the unofficial cause, for the fall into the ditch in Ankara had followed a bout of heavy drinking.
Orhan Veli Kanık's death shocked the Turkish literary world. His vitality had seemed indestructible, his perconality a catalytic force on the Turkish scene. Kanık's poems reaffirmed faith in the sheer joy of being alive. Some of his lines were so well-known that they had become household phrases. The lucid colloquialism, the humor and verve, the effective but gentle satire of his verse were such celebrations of life that Kanık and death seemed irreconcilable. After a moving funeral ceremony, Orhan Veli Kanık was buried on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus as though in death, as in life, he would be "listening to Istanbul" and rejoicing in its beauty.
Kanık, more often referred to as Orhan Veli, was the leading modernist in Turkish poetry in the 1940's. Few literary upheavals have had an impact comparable to that produced by the stylistic and substantive innovations he made in Turkish poetry, a tradition which dates back to the 8th century A.D. (Even earlier references in Chinese sources allude to translations from Turkish poetry in the 2nd century B.C.) Within the decade or so that spanned his career, Orhan Veli revolutionized not only the form and content but also the function of Turkish poetry.
He presided over the demise of strict stanzaic forms and stood squarely against artifice, hackneyed metaphors and a variety of clichés and literary embellishments which had rendered much of Turkish poetry sterile. Orhan Veli's poems dealt with everyday life expressed in direct terms. While the use of free verse had been established earlier, (the leftist poet Nazım Hikmet had introduced it in the 1920's), it was Orhan Veli who made vers libre and the French modernists relevant to contemporary Turkish poetry.
Orhan Veli wrote about the man in the street using the natural rhythms and idioms of colloquial Turkish. Together with his fellow-poets Oktay Rifat (1914-1988) and Melih Cevdet Anday (1915- ), he led an aesthetic movement which can be described as "Poetic Realism" in which the embattled common man emerges as the contemporary hero. Orhan Veli's iconoclasm paved the way for a poetry steeped in the vernacular and stripped of adornments. By liberating his contemporaries from the stultifying weight of the past, he made them conscious of the life and values of "everyman." Any and all topics could be treated poetically and poets were free to use all the expressive resources of the Turkish language.
The man responsible for this transformation of Turkish poetry was born in Istanbul in 1914 just as Europe plunged into World War I. By the time of his death he had witnessed a second calamitous war, seen empires collapse, ideologies clash, and watched technology rise, first as boon and then as threat. Millions had fallen prey to genocide; many more millions were liberated from colonialism, and mankind grew conscious of the prospect of self-annihilation.
At home Orhan Veli saw the Ottoman Empire crumble and the Republic of Turkey emerge from the ruins following a massive war of national independence. The transition from empire to republic enabled Turkey to launch intensive reforms. Traditional patterns of life and culture were abandoned, values and institutions changed, religion and state were separated, and the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script. The powerful Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder and first President of the Turkish Republic, was himself a major force in turning Turkey from East to West so that a commitment to a European life-style became a dominant feature in Turkish literature and segments of society. A further westernization followed World War II when the country switched from autocratic one-party rule to a democratic multi-party system.
Upheavals in Turkey and elsewhere were the major historical events in Orhan Veli's life. His education began at Istanbul's Galatasaray Lycée where he acquired a good command of French. His talent was apparent from early childhood, and he was fortunate in getting advice and encouragement from a number of first-rate teachers. Some of them were leading poets, including Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who was also a prominent literary critic and historian. Orhan Veli printed his earliest poems in a school paper he published, Sesimiz (Our Voice). He graduated from the Gazi Lycée in Ankara in 1932 and attended the Faculty of Literature at the University of Istanbul. He worked for a while as a teacher's assistant at the Galatasaray Lycée, but he decided not to pursue graduate studies and returned to Ankara. There he worked for the Turkish Postal Administration from 1936 to 1942. He served in Turkish Armed Forces as a reserve officer from 1942 to 1945. Later he joined the staff of the Translation Bureau at the Ministry of Public Education. He quit after two years during which he translated many books from French into Turkish. From January 1949 until his death the following year, he edited a one-page literary periodical, Yaprak (Leaf). This appeared 28 times and ceased publication with a special memorial issue after his death.
Orhan Veli never married even though, or perhaps because, as he admitted, "I have been in love many times." His brother Adnan Veli Kanık comments: "Orhan's first love affair (if it can be called that) started when he was twelve," and adds that there was a succession of attachments to young women, some of whom he remembers by name: "When he was a lycée student, he fell in love with a girl called Cazibe. His first serious affair was when he was attending the University... But his greatest love started much later and continued until his death."
Source: http://www.orhanveli.org/
