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Faruk Nafiz Çamlibel began to write poems during World War I, by writing poems in aruz meter. With his great success in

writing poems with syllabic meter, he was accepted as one of the five poets of poetry in syllabic meter. However, in his last years,

he began to write his poems in aruz meter again. His most famous poem is Han Duvarları ("Walls of the Inn") . . .

 

 

Legislator Poets

 

Translated from the Turkish by Mevlut Ceylan

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Faruk Nafiz Çamlibel -- Poet and writer (b. 18 May 1898, İstanbul – d. 8 November 1973). He used the pen names İsmail Vecih, Kalender and Tatlı Sert. He attended the Bakırköy Elementary School and Hadıka-ı Meşveret High School. Before completing his university education at the School of Medicine, he began to work as a teacher in Kayseri (1922). For many years, he worked as a teacher of literature in Ankara and İstanbul. After 1946, he embarked on politics and after being elected as a deputy for the Democrat Party, he served in the parliament. He was tried on Yassıada together with other politicians from Democrat Party after the military coup on 27 May 1960. He was imprisoned for about 15 months. After being acquitted, he left politics and focused on poetry. He died of an heart attack during a voyage on the Mediterranean Sea in 1973. His grave is in Zincirlikuyu Graveyard.

He began to write poems during World War I, by writing poems in aruz meter. With his great success in writing poems with syllabic meter, he was accepted as one of the five poets of poetry in syllabic meter. However, in his last years, he began to write his poems in aruz meter again. His most famous poem is Han Duvarları (Walls of the Inn), where he explains his impressions in Kayseri via the route of Ulukışla. Faruk Nafiz, who published a review with the title Anayurt (1933), published his satiric poems in humor reviews such as Akbaba and Karikatür, with the pen names Çamdeviren and Deli Ozan.

WORKS:

POETRY: Şarkın Sultanları (Sultans of the East, in aruz meter, 1919), Gönülden Gönüle (From Heart to Heart, in aruz meter, 1919), Çoban Çeşmesi (The Shepherd Fountain, 1919, the poem Han Duvarları - Walls of the Inn is in this work), Dinle Neyden (Listen from the Nay, 1919), Suda Halkalar (The Hoops on the Water, in aruz meter, 1928), Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti (A Life Passed Like This, selected poems, 1933), Elimle Seçtiklerim (Selected by My Hand, selected poems, 1934), Akarsu (The River, 1937), Akıncı Türküleri (Songs of the Raiders, 1938), Heyecan ve Sükûn (Excitement and Calmness, selected poems, 1959), Zindan Duvarları (Walls of the Dungeon, in aruz meter, 1967), Han Duvarları (Walls of the Inn, selected poems, 1969), Gurbet ve Saire (Living Far Away from Homeland and Et Cetera, a selection of poems published with Han Duvarları – The Walls of Inn and Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti – A Life Passed Like This, 2003).

PLAY: Canavar (The Monster, play in prose, 1925), Akın (The Raid, play in prose, 1932), Özyurt (Homeland, 1932), Kahraman (The Hero, 1933), Ateş (Fire, 1939), Dev Aynası (The Mirror of Titan, 1945), Yayla Kartalı (Eagle of High Plateau, 1945).

NOVEL: Yıldız Yağmuru (Rain of Stars, 1945).

Besides, he wrote plays for schools. The new editions of his plays have been published after 1965.

ANGEL

Yesterday Zainab’s mum said to her

“My angel child”

When she heard her mum she cried:

What does angel child mean? She asked.

I didn’t quiet understand

Angels have wings

Where’re my wings?

—I had three children

They flew away

From my heart

They all left me alone

Left this unfortunate lady alone

I plugged out your wings

 

So that you would not fly away

  Faruk Nafiz Çamlibel (1898-1973)

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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

By Charles C. Mann

I’m a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that it’s anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, I’m proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, “globalized” entity.

Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose “southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.

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The Persistence of the Color Line

Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

By Randall Kennedy

Among the best things about The Persistence of the Color Line is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the positions about Mr. Obama staked out by black commentators on the left and right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley. He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr. Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism regarding whether blacks should back Obama” . . .

The finest chapter in The Persistence of the Color Line is so resonant, and so personal, it could nearly be the basis for a book of its own. That chapter is titled “Reverend Wright and My Father: Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”  Recalling some of the criticisms of America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with feeling about his own father, who put each of his three of his children through Princeton but who “never forgave American society for its racist mistreatment of him and those whom he most loved.”  His father distrusted the police, who had frequently called him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr. Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places his father, and Mr. Wright, in sympathetic historical light.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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Negro Digest / Black World

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1950        1960        1965        1970        1975        1980        1985        1990        1995        2000 ____ 2005        

Enjoy!

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery / George Jackson  / Hurricane Carter

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804  / January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of Haiti 

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posted 9 March 2006

 

 

 

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Related files: Erdem Bayazit   Faruk Nafiz Çamlibel   Hasan Ali Yucel   Kemalettin Kamu   Mehmet Akif Ersoy   Mehmet Atilla Mara  Necdet Evliyagil   Yahya Kemal Beyatli  Yusuf Ziya Ortac    Ziya Gokalp