Poetryzine Magazine presents the interview with Turkish poet Şükrü Erbaş made by Murat Y urdakul
When we look back at the very important poets of our contemporary literature, you have provided us with a memory. You made thin sensibilities weep for your writings. What was that feeling, that sense of responsibility? There were two points that brought your generation together in literature. First of all, you were in the rush and excitement of creating, producing and conveying to others. The second is about the history of the work you are doing. Can you talk about the accumulation of collapse that today's generation does not have enough of that consciousness?
At a very early age, I learned to oppose people being oppressed, oppressed, subjected to violence, and hindered by any force. My child heart learned this from fairy tales, folk tales and folk songs. After I started reading, books continued to teach me this great value. The social order I live in hurt my sense of justice. I was free but others were captive! I did not get it. I started writing where I saw and understood that such a life was wrong.
Writing is written on time, not on paper. What are the ways you searched and found for literature written in time?
Fairy tales and books taught me that that invisible god we call time is not just the time we live in, it is an eternity with two doors, that it is constantly changing and transforming, that it both creates and destroys us. Tales and books taught me that eternity is a ringing. This knowledge imparted a broad-time writing attitude. Secondly, books and fairy tales taught me that human beings also have properties and values like time. After grasping the spirit and common subconscious of the time I lived in, all that remained was to transform this destructive and magical reality into the depth of the language I wrote.
Poetry is a literary genre that tries to explain people to people and helps them to know and define themselves with different perspectives. How do you evaluate Turkish poetry in the line of world poetry today?
For such an evaluation, it is necessary to know a little about world poetry written today and in the past. I only have a limited knowledge of poems translated into Turkish. Of course, it is not a comparison, a value scale, but I can say this much; our traditional literature started with poetry, it was founded with poetry. We have a poem with a history as deep as music. For hundreds of years, this estranged, to borrow from Shakespeare, is one of the great poems of the world that still touches life in these "out of the way" times. If we keep a few names like Nâzım Hikmet apart, this poem has a problem that it cannot be translated into at least a few of the most common world languages. Apart from Yunus Emre and Nâzım Hikmet, I am of course talking about a very comprehensive translation and presentation made within a program that the world will read.
If you were to divide your writing life into several periods of change, how would you define these slices that created today's Şükrü Erbaş?
I never thought. More precisely, I was afraid of such a partition. I didn't even believe in such turns. No matter who it is, every poet writes a poem again and again throughout his life. Valery’s “a poem neither begins nor ends; Let's remember the phrase "it looks like that". I believed this. Still... in my early years, I wrote poems that I believed to be the most important attitude to speak up louder and more. Those were the years when the '68 Generation raised our country and the world, and life outside was imposing this on all of us. Then you start looking more “inside”, into detail. One comes to times when association, incomplete word, is more effective and valuable than expressing it openly. Even if your problem does not change, a way opens up in front of you as it gets thinner and the language re-creates it. I don't know how accurate it would be to say this: I think there were two major turns from writing to change the world to writing to understand the world.
Well, starting from your devotion to these old poets, how do you evaluate the relationship between Turkish literature and tradition? I think we have weaknesses in terms of protecting values.
Let alone our literature, no literature in the world can form a sentence without relying on what was written before it. Tradition has a paradox that it not only guides you, opens your way, but also locks you in its own prison, overshadowing everything you write. It depends on your relationship with the previous promise values. As in all areas of life, if you are content with tradition and the spoken word in literature, if you do not re-create it by transforming it and darkening it with the spirit of the time, that great accumulation will do you "evil". I strongly believe in the words of Ben Ehrenburg: “I found the key to contemporary art in the past.” There is also Dostoevsky who says "Tell me a lie you made up and I will kiss you on the forehead". Without knowing the past literature of the language that created you, no one can write anything by belittling. The author, of course, talks about a lot of rubbish that falls far back from that tradition. The poet does two things: he takes the life he lived out of the time he lived; carries all the times he did not live into the time he lived. This takes the poet and the reader to a whole new synthesis. This endows our very short life with the possibilities of eternity.
How do you view the definition of modern poetry? Since every poem written in the period already bears the characteristics of that day, isn't it a modern poem, such a discourse is being developed.
The concept, which is used to express the formation of a structure suitable for the life of new times, the changes of thought and attitude in the form and content of traditional poetry, and accordingly the change of the rhythm in which the poem flows, has gradually undergone a semantic shift that expresses all the poems written in modern times. Of course, like all artistic creations, poetry will rely on the facts-objects-events-thoughts of the time in which it moves. What kind of a poetic structure they will exist in is directly related to the poet's personality and poetics, his knowledge and experience of poetry, and the cultural and social reality of the society he lives in. Form is of course important, but the main constituent is the content, which also creates that form; it is the values and perspectives that the content transforms into language. What shall we say if a poem written a thousand years ago meets today's human values and continues to add different depths to the spirit of the time?
You are taking a picture of my country, which cannot be liberated socially, economically and culturally. As Turkish intellectuals and men of letters, what would you say about those who are "exiled from life" in every sense, how they will keep hope alive or how we can cultivate hope?
Do you need long words? We are alive and living is a miracle despite all its hell. Love is a miracle, nature is a miracle, man is a miracle, even pain is a miracle. Anyone who makes a little bit of awareness that this is so has opened all the doors of hope. Even the gods of evil cannot live with that evil forever. One cannot live without touching another human being. It is art with all its branches that will bring us this awareness and value. Art is the greatest knowledge of life to understand, love, freedom and peace.
In recent years, literature workshops have met the needs of many people. Novel, short story workshops… Can poetry be learned with a workshop? How would you set a bar to tell poetry in a workshop?
Frankly, I'm still trying to understand why people have such a need, some friends enthusiastically teach these people to "write" and organize "workshops" and "courses" for this. There are reading groups that readers create among themselves. They choose a book, read it, then gather and share their evaluations, comments, criticisms. It's a productive effort. They open together layers of text that they couldn't open alone. In fact, I think that's what was done in these "workshops" after all. Otherwise, just as great compositions and paintings cannot be made when you acquire the technical knowledge of music and painting, great poems, novels and stories cannot be written once you acquire the technical knowledge of the language of literature. What did Zweig say, “an error in thought can be criticised, but no eye can be given a creative gaze.” I think it is necessary to watch it with love, without disregarding that writing is a process that can only be learned by writing, and that it is a beautiful work that so many people put into literature.
What are the parameters of a good work that reaches universality in literature as an award-winning poet? How should we read the 'spirit of your text' in your works?
Writers, poets, musicians, painters cannot have a primary concern like being universal... they simply re-create the human soul in the spirit of the time. It does this by both destroying and establishing all the values of geography and history that make up the existence of both itself and the society in which it lives. First, it recreates its own existence with the spirit of the world, and then it blows the existence of this new spirit into the heart and body of the world. In my opinion, this is the dialectic of living and creating.
Every poet has poets who shape and leave their mark in world literature. Erbaş, can we learn about the poets you identify with?
So much that I will forget... it will be very unfair to the grown-ups. Yunus, Karacaoğlan, Nâzım, Ritsos, Neruda, Hafiz, Sadi, Baudelaire, Withman, Yesenin, Yeats, Seven Suspense Poets, Eluard, Aragon, Kavafis, Seferis... by apologizing to all the elders I forgot...
Şükrü Erbaş's works are among those rare treasures that a reader can come across in life. Few poets leave as much traces in the world of their readers as they do, and shape them as much as they do. Mr. Şükrü, a naive poet who left a mark and shaped Turkish literature, what would you like to say to literature lovers after 100 years?
Thank you very much for your valuable words. Praise embarrasses me. I'm just trying to understand myself by writing. I try to do this by holding myself to people's mirrors. I guess it takes crazy courage to say something a hundred years later. However, I want them to know that without poetry, without painting, without music, those machines would not work, even though they are living in times that have been mechanized down to their capillaries.
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