Dil devrimi’nin erken Cumhuriyet dönemi’nde şiir ve çeviri bağlamında Türk edebiyatı’na etkisi (1932-1950)

Abstract

This study analyses the influence of language policies implemented in the early Republican period on the Turkish literature in the context of poetry and translation. It first looks at language change policy that started with the Alphabet Reform and argues that its first impact was felt on displacement of semiotic associations of metaphorical words in the Ottoman poetry. When the debates covered in the First Turkish Language Congress Proceedings Records are analysed in the context of literature, it can be seen that a link between language, thought, mentality and civilization was established. Moreover, there was a determination to develop an easily understandable literature by replacing the Ottoman (Divan) poetry and Arabic and Persian originated words implying the old mentality and way of life with words taken from the public language/folk literature. The thesis examines the poems published in the leading newspapers of the era Cumhuriyet, Ulus and Akşam and the journals Servetifünun, Ülkü and Varlık as part of a campaign that has been launched after the 2nd Turkish Language Congress to write prose and poetry using “pure Turkish” words / neologisms. The deputies, bureaucrats, journalists and men of letters who wrote these poems were critically examined with Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” concept in the sense that they were the founders and re-producers of the language policy theory and had the ideal of making the people adopt “pure Turkish”. The language policies of the İnönü era are followed through the Tercüme journals published by the Translation Bureau (Tercüme Bürosu). The study presents its findings about the impact of the Language Reforms on the literature respectively in the 1940s and 1950s as follows: “New” and “old” words were used together in the translations and the sentence structure of the Western languages were tried to be adapted to this language. Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, Ahmet Muhip Dıranas and Oktay Rifat replaced the “old” words they used in their poems in the 1930s with “new” words in the 1950s and beyond.