Edip Cansever şiirinde tek seslilik : Tragedyalar ve Ben Ruhi Bey Nasılım

Abstract

One remarkable point about the poetry of Edip Cansever (1928–1986), who is among modern Turkish poetry’s most distinctive voices, can be seen in the relationship between his poems and the concepts of polyphony and novelization. First published in 1964, Cansever’s article “Tek Sesli Şiirden Çok Sesli Şiire” (“From Monophonic Poetry to Polyphonic Poetry”)—in which he makes a connection between the concept of polyphony and that of authority—pioneered later arguments concerning polyphony in Cansever’s poetry. Alongside this, the inclusion in Cansever’s poetry of more than one character and its usage of certain distinctive structural features led to a connection being made between his poetry and the genre of the novel. This study uses the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, who was the first to fit the concept of polyphony into a theoretical framework, in an attempt to reevaluate concepts such as novelization and polyphony—which is one of the novel’s distinctive features—and to reconsider earlier ideas on Cansever’s poetry in this regard. Focusing, in the light of Bakhtin’s theory, on the poems Tragedyalar (“Tragedies”) and Ben Ruhi Bey Nasılım (“I Am Ruhi How Am I”)—both of which were also the focus of previous studies in this regard—this study will attempt to show the monophonic nature of these poems. In accordance with this aim, firstly, previous claims concerning Cansever’s poetry will be opened up to argument, and secondly, the concepts of polyphony and novelization will be explained and examined. Subsequently, the study will look at the relationship between tragedy— defined by Bakhtin as monophonic—and Cansever’s poem Tragedyalar, and, using Cansever’s own ideas, examine the question of whether or not Tragedyalar reflects the class contradictions that the poet expressly claims it does. In this regard, it will be observed that, although the task attributed to tragedy by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels does appear in Cansever’s ideas, this relationship is not fully reflected in the text. As regards the examination of the poem Ben Ruhi Bey Nasılım, this will attempt to analyze the relationship between polyphony and Cansever’s poetry in a broader sense. Specifically, it will attempt to show through textual example that, although this poem does have more than one character, it does not, in fact, exhibit polyphony.