A Note on the Amasya Connection

For a long time this site presented the article as the profile of an "Amasyalı," a poet and translator from Amasya. None of the sources that could be consulted confirms this. The Turkish Wikipedia entry, Biyografya and the Turkish Literature Dictionary of Names (TEİS) all state that İsmail Hakkı was born in Istanbul in February 1871, and he died in Istanbul as well. The life outline based on the entry "Eldem, İsmail Hakkı" by M. Orhan Okay (1995) in the Turkish Religious Foundation's Encyclopaedia of Islam (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi) likewise begins and ends in Istanbul without a single line mentioning Amasya. The recent academic studies of his works show no trace leading to Amasya either. His father was Cavid Bey, a clerk at the Tophane-i Âmire, and his mother was Fatma Hanım; the information recorded about the family contains no such link.

For this reason the qualifier "Amasyalı" has been dropped from the title. The sources record no birth, posting or family tie connected with Amasya, and the occasional description of him as "of Amasya origin" rests on no document. Whether such a link exists or not could only be settled by a reliable source, and none has been found for this study. The rest of the article relies on what the sources report and places İsmail Hakkı, with his actual life, within the transitional generation of Turkish literature after the Tanzimat. "Alişanzâde" is his literary signature; Biyografya gives his full name as İsmail Hakkı Alişan Eldem. He took the surname Eldem only after the Surname Law.

Family and Education

İsmail Hakkı was born in Istanbul in February 1871. The exact day differs between sources: Bedri Aydoğan's 2019 study gives 5 February 1871, Biyografya in one record gives 31 January 1871, and the encyclopaedia entries content themselves with the month of February. His father, Cavid Bey, worked at the Tophane-i Âmire, which handled the army's artillery and munitions; the TDV entry describes him as a mümeyyiz in that institution's Jurnal Kalemi. İsmail Hakkı received his first schooling at the Fevziye Rüşdiye, then moved on to the Mülkiye Mektebi (the School of Civil Service) and completed both its secondary and higher divisions in 1889. Mülkiye was one of the Ottoman state's important schools for training officials, with a strong emphasis on French and modern learning. Okay describes him as one of the school's most diligent students and notes that his contemporaries remarked on the strength of his French. This linguistic equipment proved decisive in both his literary and his professional life.

His marriage tied him to a well-known Ottoman family. His wife, Azize Hanım, was a granddaughter of the grand vizier İbrahim Edhem Pasha, known by the nickname "Deli Corci," and the daughter of Galip Edhem Bey, brother of Osman Hamdi Bey; the painter and museum founder Osman Hamdi Bey was thus Azize Hanım's paternal uncle. The couple had four children: Sadi, Sedad, Vedad and Galibe. Galibe Hanım married Fethi Okyar. The youngest of the family, Osman Sadi Eldem, was born in Marseille on 10 April 1910, while his father was serving there as Ottoman consul general. He graduated from Galatasaray High School and the Istanbul law faculty, completed a doctorate in law at the University of Paris in 1940 and entered the foreign ministry the same year; carrying on his father's profession, he served as ambassador to Syria (1965), Spain (1969-1972) and Iran (1972-1975), and in between as undersecretary of the ministry. Edhem Eldem, who works in Ottoman-Turkish history, is Sadi Eldem's son and therefore İsmail Hakkı's grandson.

The best-known member of the family is Sedad Hakkı Eldem (1908-1988), one of the leading architects of the Republican period. Known also for his research on the traditional Turkish house, Sedad Hakkı spent his childhood in European cities such as Geneva, Munich and Zurich because of his father's foreign-ministry postings. Semavi Eyice's TDV entry on him introduces his father as "consul general in Marseille, Zurich and Munich"; a consul generalship in Zurich does not appear in the entries devoted to İsmail Hakkı, so the capacity in which the father was there while the family lived in the city could not be established. Sedad Hakkı received his secondary education in Munich, having studied in French at primary level and in German at secondary level, and mastered both languages; he returned to Istanbul in 1924, graduated from the Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi in 1928 and won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1986. The father's linguistic and cultural circle is clearly visible in the upbringing of the sons.

Entering Literature at a Young Age

İsmail Hakkı's first literary attempts appeared in March 1886, while he was still a student at Mülkiye, in the journal Nahl-i Emel (The Sapling of Ideals). These first steps soon made him known as a young man who wrote poetry, studies and translations. He adopted Recâizâde Mahmud Ekrem's understanding of poetry and defended his ideas; literary historians describe this position, between the second generation of the Tanzimat and the first generation of Servet-i Fünûn, with the phrase "intermediate generation." His own poetic output remained limited. The title of his only book of verse, printed in Istanbul with the date 1308 (1891 or 1892), appears as Sevdâ-yı Hazân yahud Teessür in the TDV entry and in Aydoğan's study, and as Tahassür in TEİS. According to Okay, the book consists of poems written in 1889-1890, some of them previously published in Mekteb, some of them translations, and most of them sentimental verse in Ekrem's manner; after this book the author appears to have given up poetry altogether.

İsmail Hakkı himself explained why he turned away from poetry. In a letter quoted in Abdullah Uçman's article on the unpublished seventh volume of E. J. W. Gibb's A History of Ottoman Poetry, he wrote to Rıza Tevfik, who had asked him for his biography and a few of his poems, that he regarded poetry as a youthful enthusiasm and had abandoned it; the work he valued most, he said, was his monograph on Muallim Naci. These words show that he saw himself more as a critic and biographer than as a poet. In his youth he had not confined himself to verse: among his writings in Mekteb were an unfinished novel titled Çiftlikte (On the Farm) and a long study of Ali Şîr Nevâî that ran over several issues. The TDV entry counts these two works among the noteworthy items he published in the journal. After 1895 he devoted himself entirely to translation.

For İsmail Hakkı, literature was a pursuit carried on outside working hours. Two years after graduating from Mülkiye he had entered the foreign ministry, and within a few years he held responsibility both in the office and at the journal. The young official who ran the business of a government department by day and wrote translations and studies in the evening had been a familiar figure in Ottoman literature since the Tanzimat; İsmail Hakkı may be considered one of the last-generation examples of this type.

The Journal Mekteb and His Chief Editorship

The publication that defined İsmail Hakkı's place in literary circles was the journal Mekteb. Owned by Karabet Efendi, the journal began appearing weekly on 7 August 1891 and, apart from a five-month interruption and a one-week closure in February 1896, published 211 issues over five years and five months until 11 February 1898. In its first period of one hundred issues it was a school magazine aimed at pupils of the rüşdiye and idadî schools; its chief editor was Reşad, Mehmed Hâlid contributed translations from French, Ahmed Râsim, Mehmed Celâl and Hüseyin Cahid wrote instructive stories, Şerefeddin Mağmûmî wrote on health and Sâlih Zeki provided scientific amusements. Because of the censorship of the time, the journal kept away from politics throughout its life.

The dates of İsmail Hakkı's chief editorship appear differently in two TDV entries. Okay's entry "Eldem, İsmail Hakkı" and the sources that follow it place the editorship between 1891 and 1894. Abdullah Uçman's entry "Mekteb," by contrast, states that the journal's second period, published in a larger format and with richer content, began in January 1894 under İsmail Hakkı's chief editorship. This contradiction could not be resolved with the sources at hand. In the second period described by Uçman, the journal gave more room to literature without entirely abandoning its identity as a school magazine: it published translations from Western literary histories, translations of stories and novels, writings on Western music and articles comparing Eastern and Western music. Its literary columns carried poems by poets such as Andelib (Faik Esad), Muallim Feyzi, Hüseyin Dâniş, Müstecâbîzâde İsmet, Halil Edib and İsmâil Safâ; Faik Esad's essays on Persian literature; İsmail Hakkı's translations from Western authors; literary pieces by Halit Ziya and Ahmed Râsim; and philosophical writings by Rıza Tevfik.

The sources do not agree on the journal's literary orientation in this period either. According to Okay, Mekteb under İsmail Hakkı became one of the literary hearths where the intermediate generation and the Servet-i Fünûn writers gathered; Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, in his memoirs Kırk Yıl (Forty Years), stresses that İsmail Hakkı's personality played an important part in the journal taking on this role. Some sources list Halid Ziya, Mehmet Rauf, Necip Asım, Cenap Şahabettin, Hüseyin Siret and Velet Çelebi among those who supported the journal. Uçman, however, notes that in this period the journal took on rather the appearance of an organ gathering the partisans of the old literature, and even printed works by some divan poets. In his view the real turning point came after the second half of the fourth volume, when the journal passed into the hands of Mazhar and Müstecâbîzâde İsmet, and in February 1896 a poem by Cenab Şahabeddin began to appear every week. Tevfik Fikret, Menemenlizâde Mehmed Tâhir, Hüseyin Suad and Hüseyin Sîret followed, and from the 47th issue onward, with Mehmed Rauf and Halit Ziya joining, Mekteb turned entirely into a literary journal. The point on which both readings meet is that the journal was one of the grounds that brought the new generation together before Servet-i Fünûn. The 72nd issue of 11 February 1898 was its last; a large part of its poets and writers had moved to Servet-i Fünûn.

His Career as an Official

His real profession was diplomacy. On 25 July 1891 he began as third clerk in the Consular Affairs Office (Şehbenderlik Kalemi) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Drawing attention with his diligence, he rose steadily: in 1895 he became second mümeyyiz, in 1897 serhalife, in 1899 deputy director, and in 1908 director. A mümeyyiz is the official who corrects and completes written documents, and a serhalife is the most senior of the clerks of a bureau; these titles show that he was a bureaucrat who knew the language and workings of the office closely.

After the Second Constitutional Era he took postings abroad. The consul generalship in Marseille is dated 1908 in Wikipedia and in Aydoğan, and 1909 in TDV and TEİS; the difference may arise from the appointment and the start of duty falling in different years, but no certain information has been found on this point. The birth of his son Sadi in Marseille in April 1910 shows that the family was living in the city at that time. In 1918 he was appointed consul general in Munich. In 1919, during the second government of Damat Ferid Pasha, he was removed from this post and returned home. In the following years he continued to draw a salary while out of office, and in 1925 he retired from the foreign ministry at his own request. In retirement he worked as the authorized representative of the Üsküdar and Kadıköy Water Company. In the contract concerning the transfer of the company to the Istanbul Municipality in 1938, his signature appears on behalf of the company; the contract was published in the Official Gazette as an annex to Law No. 3359, adopted in April 1938.

Müntehabât-ı Terâcim-i Meşâhir and Translation Criticism

What secures İsmail Hakkı a place in literary history are the books of criticism and biography he published in the early 1890s. The first of these is Müntehabât-ı Terâcim-i Meşâhir (Selections from Famous Translations), prepared together with İbrahim Fehim. The book bears the date 1307, whose Gregorian equivalent is given as 1889-1890 or 1890-1891. It presents selected translations from French into Ottoman Turkish and from Ottoman Turkish into French together with their originals, and offers brief assessments of the success of each. The translation scholar Cemal Demircioğlu stresses that the book is a translation anthology rather than a literary history, and that it offered readers literary as well as political translations. TEİS and Demircioğlu regard it as the second collection of its kind, appearing some thirty years after Şinasi's Tercüme-i Manzume of 1859, in which Şinasi had gathered his translations of Western poetry. Measuring the success of a translation by reading it side by side with the original was an innovative approach for the period.

The book opens with a preface titled "Mütalâaname" (Evaluation) by Kemalpaşazâde Said (known as Lastik Said), a well-known translator of the day and a teacher of translation, law and rhetoric at the Mekteb-i Sultânî and at Mülkiye. In the preface Said argues that the anthologies and translation miscellanies then beginning to appear would help distinguish the "beautiful translations" of capable translators from the work of unqualified ones. The most frequently quoted part of the preface is the passage in which he defines translation as the instrument of Ottoman progress: it is translation that brings us the advances of the West, gives the soldier new military knowledge, advances education and conveys to the public the news arriving by telegraph; ninety per cent of the news and articles in the newspapers are the product of translators' labour. Said adds that a foreign language brings French to mind, and translation, translation from French into Turkish. Hakkı Tarık Us mentions this book as the work that helped spread the saying attributed to Said: "writing requires one idea, translating two, and choosing well three."

One of the anthology's notable pages sets different Turkish versions of the same French poem side by side. Alfred de Musset's "Rappelle-toi," Nigâr Hanım's prose-poem translation "Tahattur Et" and Recâizâde Mahmud Ekrem's tanzir (emulation, nazire) of the same poem, "Yâd Et," are printed together. In the note they attach to this section, the compilers introduce Musset as a poet famed for his fine and simple style, write that the poem's worth is also proven by Ekrem Bey's choosing to emulate it, and say that Nigâr Hanım has translated it in a style "that would fill even the most skilled translators with envy." Demircioğlu, noting that the original's three sections are kept as three in Nigâr Hanım's version but become six in Ekrem's emulation, reads these pages as an example showing that French poetry, like Arabic and Persian poetry, was both translated and answered with nazire. That the young İsmail Hakkı thought it worthwhile to compare translation and emulation on the same page is an early sign of the comparative approach of his later critical books.

On Dördüncü Asrın Türk Muharrirleri

On Dördüncü Asrın Türk Muharrirleri (Turkish Writers of the Fourteenth Century), so named because it refers to the fourteenth century of the Hijri calendar, that is, the late nineteenth century, is a series of four volumes written and printed between 1892 and 1895. The subjects of the volumes are, in order, Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Recâizâde Mahmud Ekrem, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha and Şemseddin Sâmi; each is a small book of about eighty pages, some printed separately and some together. At the beginning of the first volume there is a study of the novel, and at the beginning of the fourth one on the theatre. In the copy transliterated by Aydoğan, the Ahmed Midhat and Ekrem Bey volumes follow one another. This edition was printed in 1308 (1892) at the Artin Asadoryan Şirket-i Mürettebiye Press on Bâbıâli Avenue and published by Ohannes Ferid, owner of the Vatan Kütüphanesi. It is a small, hard-bound book measuring 10 by 14 cm, with 83 pages including the preface and 11 lines on each page. As İsmail Hakkı had promised, each author is represented by a photograph faced by a three-line sample of his handwriting and his signature.

In the "Müellifin İfadesi" (Author's Statement), which serves as a preface, the author says he planned to continue the series with living writers such as Münif Pasha, Ekrem Bey, Said Bey, Abdülhak Hâmid, Şemseddin Sâmi, Ebüzziya Tevfik and Sezâî Bey; the series, however, stopped at four names. He defines his aim as serving state and nation by impartially assessing the works of the writers who had brought about the progress seen in education and literature under Abdülhamid II, and asks that his errors be put down to inexperience. The TDV entry states that the books contain fairly objective assessments of the authors and their works. According to Hakkı Tarık Us, as Şemseddin Sâmi described it, İsmail Hakkı gave a new direction to a conception of criticism that was thought in the country to consist of fault-finding, and he is the one who began biography in Turkish literature according to the Western method. His reading of Muallim Naci as a pupil of the school of Bâkî has, according to Us, kept its originality despite the passing years.

The Ahmed Midhat volume is the text that shows İsmail Hakkı's view of the novel most clearly. The study opens with the view that literature serves to refine morals and enlighten minds. The author distinguishes three main elements in the novel: the beginning (ibtida), the ending (intiha), and description and arrangement. The ending matters most; if a work with a flawed beginning or structure ends well, its shortcomings may go unnoticed. He lists, with examples, five main ways in which novels begin: with a detailed description of a character or a place (Victor Hugo, Octave Feuillet), from the middle or the end of the events (Ahmed Midhat's Arnavudlar ve Solyotlar, Hayret and Rikaldo), with a poetic description of nature, directly with a dialogue (Albert Delpit, Paul de Kock, Jules Verne), or with the hero's confession. On endings he compares realist and idealist writers, and taking the local novels Sergüzeşt and Muhsin Bey as examples, says that a realist writer would not have made Dilber commit suicide or had Muhsin die.

In this volume İsmail Hakkı both praises and criticizes Ahmed Midhat. He accepts exaggeration, strangeness and an excess of coincidence as faults, but shows with examples ranging from Joan of Arc to Kara Fatma of the Crimean War that their like is found in Western novels as well; if Jules Verne could describe places he had never seen, he says, Ahmed Midhat's depiction of America should not be thought odd. In his view Ahmed Midhat is a "half-realist" writer, and his popular style is the right choice, since a poetic language would have limited his readership to a narrow circle. While he finds Sezâî's Sergüzeşt valuable from a literary point of view, he regards it as a "salon book" favoured by women and considers Ahmed Midhat's works more useful for the public. His own stance remains romantic: he does not accept the view that the novel is a mirror reflecting reality, and argues that a novel must serve a purpose. The study continues with a short history of the French novel from Alfred de Vigny to Balzac and an eighteen-page discussion of philosophy. According to Aydoğan this interest is no accident: two years before the book, in 1890, İsmail Hakkı had joined the debate on the novel between Ahmed Midhat and Nâbizâde Nâzım and had said he wished to write a history of the novel; with this volume he fulfils that wish to some degree.

Muasır Şairlerimiz (Our Contemporary Poets, 1311, that is, 1893 or 1894) is a book introducing poets of his own time. It includes Nâbizâde Nâzım, Ali Rûhî, Emin Hümâyî and Muallim Cûdî, with short notes, sample poems and assessments placed under the poets' photographs. Osmanlı Meşâhîr-i Üdebâsı (Famous Ottoman Men of Letters) was launched in 1895 as a series on deceased writers, but only its first book, the monograph on Muallim Naci, was published, and the series was not continued. That this monograph was the work he valued most in his letter to Rıza Tevfik makes the series' unfinished state all the more striking. Some of these books have become readable again in recent years: a study published by Kitabevi Yayınları has transliterated Müntehabât-ı Terâcim-i Meşâhir, On Dördüncü Asrın Türk Muharrirleri and Muasır Şairlerimiz into modern letters, a master's thesis written by Cennet Esen at Aksaray University in 2017 has examined Alişanzâde's writings on art and literature, and in 2019 Bedri Aydoğan transliterated and assessed the Ahmed Midhat volume.

Elem Çiçekleri: The First Turkish Baudelaire

The work for which İsmail Hakkı's name is cited most often today is his translation into Turkish, under the title Elem Çiçekleri, of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, published in 1857. TEİS records him as the first person to translate this book into Turkish; Abdullah Uçman, too, considers the translation important as the first rendering made from Baudelaire. The publication year of the translation diverges between 1926 and 1927 in the sources: Wikipedia and the works table of TEİS show the 1927 edition from the Orhaniye Press in Istanbul, while Biyografya writes 1926. The difference has not been resolved with a single date. The word "elem" in the title brings out the side of pain and grief in the French "mal," and the title became established in this form.

When Les Fleurs du Mal first appeared in France in 1857, it was taken to court, the author was fined, and the removal of some poems from the book was ordered. In the following decades the book came to be counted among the masterpieces of modern French poetry. İsmail Hakkı's translation holds a distinct place as the first complete rendering of this poetry into Turkish. A tradition of translating Western poetry had existed in Turkish since Şinasi; that İsmail Hakkı, who in his youth had compiled examples of this tradition in Müntehabât-ı Terâcim-i Meşâhir, presented Baudelaire's book in full to the Turkish reader after a gap of more than thirty-five years can be read as the mature fruit of the same interest. He was fifty-five when he published the translation and had lived with French throughout his long foreign-ministry career.

The language of the translation is a heavy Ottoman Turkish, even in the early years of the Republic. As an example of this language, the last stanza of "L'Albatros" is rendered as follows: "Şair, fırtına ile uğraşan, yay ile eğlenen,
Tahkirler arasında toprağa matrûd,
Ve muazzam kanatları yürümesine mani
Bulutlar hükümdarına benzer." This language gradually made the work hard for new generations to read. The translation has been republished in Latin letters by the poet Hilmi Yavuz. In this edition, issued as the hundredth book in the Modern Klasikler series of Everest Yayınları, Yavuz carried out the transliteration in comparison with the French original and added an extensive glossary for the reader. Yavuz's interest in this translation goes back a long way; his essays "Baudelaire ve Şiir" and "Âlişanzâde ve Eldem," published in the early 1990s, are among the sources of the TDV entry. According to Uçman, the translations Elem Çiçekleri and Salambo are still printed and read today.

His Other Translations

His work as a translator was not confined to Baudelaire. The TDV entry lists, among his many translated books, novels and poetry from Western authors such as Lamartine, Baudelaire, Maurois, Bourget, Shakespeare, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Biyografya's list includes Lamartine's Raphaël and Graziella and, from the Republican period, Aile Çemberi (1934) and Disraeli'nin Hayatı (1935) from André Maurois, Samimi Saadet (1934) from Tolstoy and Salambo (1935) from Flaubert. According to the table in TEİS, some of these appeared in the series Dün ve Yarın Tercüme Külliyatı of the newspaper Vakit; translations such as Talihsiz in 1895, Isfahana Doğru: Seyahat Hatıraları in 1934 and Kara Melekler from Remzi Kitabevi in 1942 are also listed. The titles and publication details of the Bourget and Shakespeare translations could not be found in the sources consulted. İki Hakikat (1311), according to TDV, is an adapted book consisting of two long stories.

The Rafael translation also contains İsmail Hakkı's own words on his idea of translation. Its publication year is given as 1893, 1894 or 1896 depending on the source; Demircioğlu, relying on İsmail Habib Sevük's quotation, refers to the introduction of the edition dated 1314 (1896-1897). There İsmail Hakkı apologizes to the reader: because care was taken to render words and sentences "exactly and literally" (aynen ve harfiyyen), some passages became rather convoluted and long, and so they should not be judged meaningless without being read attentively. Demircioğlu places this stance on the same line as that of Şemseddin Sâmi, who said he took care to write plainly and not to depart from the original. It may be considered that the heavy, original-bound language of Elem Çiçekleri shows this early principle still at work thirty years later; this is an inference drawn from comparing the texts, not a statement found in the sources.

From the wording of the TDV entry it can be understood that İsmail Hakkı left a large number of translations. The list published in the first issue of the journal Kitap ve Kitapçılık in 1936 under the title "İsmail Hakkı Alişan'ın Dilimize Kazandırdığı Eserler" (Works İsmail Hakkı Alişan Brought into Our Language) is one of the earliest inventories of this work; its details could not be examined here.

His Last Years and Remembrance

İsmail Hakkı Eldem died in Istanbul on 13 March 1944 and was buried in the Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. His son, the architect Sedad Hakkı, was later buried in the same cemetery. The fact that Sedad Hakkı Eldem's first article, "İstanbul ve Şehircilik" (Istanbul and Urbanism), published in the journal Mimar in 1931, carried the signature "Alişanzâde Sedat Hakkı" shows that this name lived on in the family for a while longer. The TDV entry records that İsmail Hakkı also painted in oils as an amateur.

According to Okay, İsmail Hakkı addressed certain questions of literature with real competence in his writings in Mekteb and his early biographical works, and took important steps for his time in the assessment and analysis of poetry; but abandoning such publications at a very young age and turning entirely to translation caused his name to be forgotten in literary circles. This neglect has been partly remedied in recent years: Abdullah Uçman's book Kendi Kalemiyle Âlişanzâde İsmail Hakkı, which brings his writings together, was published by Dergâh Yayınları in 2017. Hilmi Yavuz discusses him in the essay "Âlişanzâde ve Eldem" in Okuma Notları, and Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil speaks of him in Kırk Yıl. İsmail Hakkı's place in literary history lies beside the workers who systematically began translation criticism, biography and the transfer of Western poetry into Turkish. From the standpoint of Amasya there is no verifiable local link; this entry therefore records the source-based life outline of a writer who cannot be tied to Amasya but whose name is sometimes cited in that direction.

Chronology

1871: Born in Istanbul in February (according to one source, on 5 February).

1886: His first article appeared in the journal Nahl-i Emel in March.

1889: Graduated from the Mülkiye Mektebi.

1889-1891: Published Müntehabât-ı Terâcim-i Meşâhir with İbrahim Fehim (1307).

1891: Took up his post in the Consular Affairs Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 25 July; the journal Mekteb began publication on 7 August.

1891-1894: Served as chief editor of the journal Mekteb (according to one source, his editorship began in January 1894).

1891-1892: His only book of verse, Sevdâ-yı Hazân, was published (1308).

1892-1895: The series On Dördüncü Asrın Türk Muharrirleri appeared.

1895: The monograph on Muallim Naci, the only book of the series Osmanlı Meşâhîr-i Üdebâsı, was published; became second mümeyyiz.

1896-1897: The edition of his translation of Lamartine's Rafael explaining the principle of "exact and literal" translation appeared (1314).

1897-1899: Became serhalife and deputy director.

1898: The journal Mekteb closed with its 72nd issue on 11 February.

1908-1909: Became director at the foreign ministry; appointed consul general in Marseille (the date varies by source).

1910: His son Sadi was born in Marseille on 10 April.

1918: Became consul general in Munich.

1919: Dismissed during the government of Damat Ferid Pasha.

1925: Retired from the foreign ministry at his own request.

1926-1927: Elem Çiçekleri was published.

1938: Represented the company in the contract transferring the Üsküdar and Kadıköy Water Company to the Istanbul Municipality.

1944: Died in Istanbul on 13 March; buried in the Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Uçman, Abdullah. "Mekteb." TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Aydoğan, Bedri. "Alişanzade İsmail Hakkı'nın 14. Asır Türk Muharrirleri'nin Birinci Defteri - Ahmed Midhat Efendi." Çukurova Üniversitesi Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi 4/2 (December 2019): 247-256.
  • Demircioğlu, Cemal. "Müntehabat-ı Teracim-i Meşahir: An Exploration of Its Paratext from the Perspective of Cultural Memory." İÜ Çeviribilim Dergisi 6 (2012): 15-43.
  • Esen, Cennet. Alişanzade İsmail Hakkı'nın Sanat ve Edebiyat Yazıları. Master's thesis, Aksaray University, 2017.

Books

  • Baudelaire, Charles. Elem Çiçekleri. Translated by Alişanzâde İsmail Hakkı, transliterated by Hilmi Yavuz. Istanbul: Everest Yayınları (kitapyurdu.com product page).
  • Uşaklıgil, Halit Ziya. Kırk Yıl, İstanbul: Özgür Yayınları, 2008.

Other sources

  • Okay, M. Orhan. "Eldem, İsmail Hakkı." TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 11, 1995. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Eyice, Semavi. "Eldem, Sedat Hakkı." TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 11, 1995.
  • Demircioğlu, Cemal. From Discourse to Practice: Rethinking "Translation" (Terceme) and Related Practices of Text Production in the Late Ottoman Literary Tradition. PhD dissertation, Boğaziçi University, 2005.
  • Ergün Atbaşı, Nurtaç. "İsmail Hakkı (Alişanzade)." Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (teis.yesevi.edu.tr). teis.yesevi.edu.tr
  • "İsmail Hakkı Eldem." Vikipedi (tr.wikipedia.org). en.wikipedia.org
  • "İsmail Hakkı Eldem." Biyografya (biyografya.com).
  • "Sedad Hakkı Eldem." Vikipedi (tr.wikipedia.org).
  • "Sadi Eldem." Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org).
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