The Complete Poems

by Orhan Veli Kanık, George Messo (Translation)

Orhan Veli Kanık (1914—1950), more commonly known as Orhan Veli, was a pioneering Turkish poet and one of the founding members of the Garip (Strange) movement. His innovative poetics wore a unique signature of austerity and accessibility. With arresting insight and playful irreverence Veli’s poems transformed the Turkish literary world. When he died at the age of 36, he was acknowledged as one of the most important Turkish writers of his generation. Now, at last, this edition of The Complete Poems makes the full breadth of his achievement available in English for the first time. It brings together poems from the five collections published during the author’s lifetime, as well as uncollected material from newspapers and magazines, and poems only published posthumously. The Complete Poems includes an informative introduction, endnotes, and chronology, placing the poems in their historical context and touching on many of the themes which shaped Orhan Veli’s distinctive voice.

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 18, 2016

About the author

Orhan Veli Kanık or Orhan Veli (14 April 1914 – 14 November 1950) was a Turkish poet. Kanık is one of the founders of the Garip Movement together with Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet. Aiming to fundamentally transform traditional form in Turkish poetry, he introduced colloquialisms into the poetic language. Besides his poetry Kanık crammed an impressive volume of works including essays, articles and translations into 36 short years.

Orhan Veli shunned everything old in order to be able to bring about a new 'taste', refusing to use syllable and aruz meters. He professed to regarding the rhyme primitive, literary rhetoric techniques such as metaphor, simile, hyperbole unnecessary. Set out "to do away with all tradition, everything that bygone literatures taught", although this desire of Kanık limits the technical possibilities in his poetry, the poet broke new grounds for himself with the themes and personalities he covered and the vocabulary he employed. He brought the poetic language closer to the spoken language by adopting a plain phraseology. In 1941 his poems embodying these ideas were published in a poetry volume named Garip, released jointly with his friends Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet, which led to the emergence of the Garip movement. This movement had a huge influence especially between the years 1945-1950 on Republican era Turkish verse. The Garip poetry is accepted as a touchstone in Turkish verse for its both destructive and constructive effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orhan_V...
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orhan_V...

Reviews

[Henry Smith]

An excellent travel companion for my trip to Istanbul, Orhan Veli captures the conflicting joy and sorrow that can simultaneously control us and muddies the path forward in life. I especially loved the moments of clarity he was fond of writing about, small snapshots of life that suddenly feel notable, but that you must dismiss when the moment is over. He was incredibly skilled at creating a strong mood in just three lines and then turning it all on its head in a coda. It was at once comedic and melancholic, and offered a beautiful portrait of his inner idle thoughts. Veli could only write what he felt, and in doing so created a world on every page to glimpse into. Some were explicitly real, name dropping actual places and roads that make you feel like you could wonder over and find his ghost; others were abstract and could be about anyone anywhere, perhaps even about you.

[Jessica]

I got this book when I traveled to Turkey. It will always have a special place in my heart.