Turgut uyar`ın huzursuzluğu

Turgut Uyar’s earlier understanding of poetry goes through a sudden change with Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı [The Most Beautiful Arabia of the World]. In his earlier style, the influence of “Garip Poetry” can be detected, but in Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı, Uyar approaches poetry with a new concep, similar to those of the other İkinci Yeni [The Second New] poets’, in which meaning is pushed to the background and figures of speech are brough to the fore. Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı is a modern work of art. The basic motivation that leads Uyar to write this book is the emotional pressures of modernity on the individual. Here, the poet focuses on two problems: First comes the pressure on the individual caused by religious morality, traditional ethics, and the social institutions which enforce these concepts. Second is the shock experience and discontents caused by modern civilization, urbanization, and the life style in urban the setting. Adverse affects of these experiences on the individual is not only the main theme of book, but it also determines the construction its whole design, the formal characteristics of the poems, and the dynamics of the imagery. In Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı, verses are not logically continuous, the narrative lacks the commonly expected form of linearity, and the construction that makes the book a whole is rather fragmented. Although these poems are meant to be read as independent pieces, they are connected to one another and constitute a coherent whole, because they are constructed within the framework of a common universe of symbols or fictional characters. The narrative events taking place in the poems do not display a chronological linearity. The poet/author hides himself behind the narrator of the individual poems and leaves the reader alone with the narrator. He employs various techniques of dramatic writing and story telling, which are not all that common in Turkish poetry. He backgrounds the meaning and expects the reader to bring together the pieces of the fragmented narrative by using various ambiguous relations between the imagery of the individual poems. The aesthetic choice of Turgut Uyar in this book is not Apollonian, but Dionysian, to refer to Nietzsche’s well-know dichotomy, one that the poet himself conceptualizes as “clumsiness”, something that makes the reader feel a sense of incompleteness before the whole work.