Melih Cevdet Anday Turkish

Turkish people

Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...

 poet and writer who has been one of the forefront poets of the Garip

Garip

Garip was a group of Turkish poets. The group was also known as the First New Movement. It was composed of Orhan Veli, Oktay Rifat and Melih Cevdet, who had been friends since high school. The name "Garip" signalled a break with the conventional, decadent style of Turkish poetry and literature at...

 movement together with Orhan Veli

Orhan Veli

Orhan Veli Kanık or Orhan Veli was a Turkish poet. Kanık who is the founder of Garip Movement together with Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet has moved to the poetic language, utterance of man-in-the street by purposing rootedly to change the old structure in Turkish poetry...

 and Oktay Rifat.

His unique poetry stands outside the traditional poetic movements searching for new ways in poetry. Their new poetry resolved to make itself simple, colloquial, matter of fact—an artless art designed to serve the common people.

Biography

Melih Cevdet Anday was born in Istanbul

Istanbul

Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...

 in 1915. He graduated from Ankara

Ankara

Ankara is the capital of Turkey and the country's second largest city after Istanbul. The city has a mean elevation of , and as of 2010 the metropolitan area in the entire Ankara Province had a population of 4.4 million....

 Gazi High School and started working as a consultant for the Ministry of Education. He also worked as a journalist and written several articles for Akşam and Cumhuriyet

Cumhuriyet

Cumhuriyet is a centre-left Turkish daily newspaper, founded on May 7, 1924 by journalist Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu. Based in Istanbul, it has been situated since October 17, 2005 in Mecidiyeköy. Cumhuriyet was the last newspaper to leave the old press district Cağaloğlu...

 newspapers. After 1954, he worked as a teacher for the Istanbul Council Conservatory.

Career

During a career that spanned six and a half decades, Melih Cevdet Anday published eleven collections of poems, eight plays, eight novels, fifteen collections of essays, a book of memoirs - and won all of Turkey's poetry prizes. He wrote several novels as well as translated several books into Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

.

In 1971, UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 honoured him—along with such giants like Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, Dante

Dante Alighieri

Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

, Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

, Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...

 etc. His works have been translated into Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Hungarian

Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

, Romanian

Romanian language

Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...

 and English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

.

External links

• Melih Cevdet Anday - On his life and poetry
• "Poem in the Manner of Karacaoglan" Center for the Art of Translation