A product of the Village Institutes, the poet and essayist Osman Bolulu gave his life to teaching, to the Turkish language and to writing; over a writing career of more than sixty years he published six books of poetry, a good many volumes of essays and memoirs, and works on grammar and spelling. He had been born in the village of Tekke (Akınoğlu) near Taşova. Most of the first seventeen years of his working life were spent in the villages of Taşova, in Taşova and Suluova, and in Amasya, where he also brought out a review called İlke. Ankara was where he died, on 2 August 2017.

His Life

He was born in August 1929. By his own account his father, İsmail Bey, had studied for sixteen years in a madrasa, yet because he would not write amulets and did not oppose the Republic he became known in the village as the "infidel imam". His son remembers his mother, Hatice Hanım, by her saying "lower than work, lower than a dog". Osman was the fourth son of the family. He learned to read and write before starting school, and while still at primary school he read the novel Gong Vurdu, which stood in the family's bookcase. In one interview he describes himself as someone who "fell to the earth in the tobacco field of a village at the foot of a mountain" and says he had worked in the fields since the age of six.

He finished the village primary school in 1942 and graduated in 1947 from the Akpınar Village Institute in Lâdik, in the province of Samsun. During his years at the institute he is said to have produced a wall newspaper single-handed and, according to his own notebook, to have read 375 books in 1945 alone. Bolulu traced the whole of his later writing life to the door this school opened: he says that he was educated in the dynamic early years of the Republic and that from the Village Institute founded by Atatürk he "set out for the gates of culture".

He began teaching in Taşova. According to the record of his postings published on his personal website, from 1947 to 1951 he was head teacher at the village schools of Yerkozlu, Zuday (Alpaslan) and Sonusa (Uluköy); the record lists these years under the heading of Tokat province. He then entered the Literature Department of the Gazi Institute of Education in Ankara and graduated in 1954. After teaching at the Atatürk Primary School in Turhal in the 1953-54 school year and a brief appointment to the middle school in the village of Doğanhisar near Akşehir, he taught at the Reşadiye Middle School in 1954-1956, where he published the review Duruluk. At the end of 1956 he was appointed headmaster of the Taşova Middle School, returning to his home district, and he held the post until he left for military service in 1959.

After military service, in 1961, he became a teacher at the Amasya Girls' Institute, and in these years he also published the review İlke in Amasya. From late 1962 to 1964 he was a school headmaster in Suluova, and in 1964 he completed the Public Administration Institute for Turkey and the Middle East. He was removed from his post in Suluova by a decision of the disciplinary board; after working for a while as a civil servant at the Ministry of Industry he resigned in 1966 and worked within the teachers' organisations. He sat on the general executive board of the National Federation of Turkish Teachers and was among the founding members of the Teachers' Union of Turkey. He was a senior inspector at the Ministry of National Education when, after the coup of 12 September 1980, he was retired in May 1981. From then on he worked in Ankara as a freelance writer, and for a time, while employed at private tutoring schools, he wrote the Turkish and literature sections of preparation books for the science high school and university entrance examinations.

His memberships included the Turkish Language Association, the Turkish Art Society, the Writers' Association, the Association for Contemporary Language and the Human Rights Association. In Ankara he was the editor in charge of the reviews Öğretmen Dünyası and Abece. He died in Ankara at the age of 88 on Wednesday, 2 August 2017; after the funeral prayers held the next day he was buried in the Karşıyaka Cemetery.

His Poetry and Prose

His first published poem, "Ümit Dünyası" (World of Hope), appeared in the 72nd issue of the review Nilüfer in December 1951. He himself says that he was taken with poetry "by imitation" at fourteen or fifteen, and that he was twenty when his first poem was printed in a review of national circulation. Between 1951 and 1991 his poems and articles appeared in nearly fifty reviews, among them Varlık, Ataç, Yelken, Kaynak, Türk Dili, Ilgaz, İmbat and Yelpaze; after 1991 his chief outlets were Türk Dili, Kıyı, İnsancıl, Damar, Gerçek Sanat and the newspaper Cumhuriyet.

Dalların Ucundaki (What Is at the Tips of the Branches), his first collection, was published by Türk Sanatı Yayınları in 1955, and the second, Bileşim Çizgisi (Line of Composition), by Mim Yayınları in 1963. A poetic silence of nearly thirty years followed. It was for this reason that Cemal Süreya called him a "secret poet". Explaining the name in an interview, Bolulu says that he spent those years wrestling with the country's problems and taking part in social action, but that he did not want to "harness words to slogans" or hand literature over to politics; he adds that he regarded the pause in his writing as a "loom of testing and evolving". In 1992 he returned to poetry with Yurtboyu Sevişmek (Making Love the Length of the Country) and Taşın İyisi (The Best of the Stone), in which he collected his satirical poems; these were followed by Uzun Koşu (The Long Run, 1994) and Güle Yolculuk (Journey to the Rose), which brought together selected earlier poems with new ones, his life story and extracts from writings about him.

He states plainly how he saw his poetry in his reply to Okay Kılıçaslan: he does not want what he writes merely to please himself, yet he fears that his thesis may show through in a poem; he knows "that poetry is poetry pure and simple". What he wants is for the water of his worldview to circulate in the veins that run beneath the lines and, without ignoring evil, for the shoots of hope to grow green. He describes the common ground of his poems as "the I that does not like to say 'I', my people, my nation, all humanity". Tacim Çiçek, too, ascribes his originality to his writing poetry as though he were talking, and notes that he gives new meanings to familiar words.

After becoming a member of the Turkish Language Association he paid particular attention to language and wrote in a plain Turkish. In his interviews he says again and again that language and thought are intertwined, each feeding and shaping the other; he holds that "if you lose the land you call your homeland you can settle on another land, but if you lose your language you are left without a homeland." This conviction turned into books on spelling and punctuation such as Sözün Işığı (The Light of the Word, 2004), Dilden Düşünüşe Atatürk Yolu (Atatürk's Way from Language to Thought, 2008) and Dil, Düşünüş Evirtimi (Language and the Evolution of Thought). Over time he turned more and more to the essay. He says himself that his prose sets out from a fact or an impression, that he tries to give ideas in concrete form, and that at times he falls into a "know-all" manner that comes from his teaching. Tansu Bele stresses how closely these essays fit the classical definition of the genre and how they carry the reader from familiar facts to new ideas.

His awards, too, are divided between poetry and prose. With the poem "Yurtboyu Sevişmek" he won first prize in the Vedat Güler and Nabi Üçüncüoğlu poetry competitions in 1992 and an honourable mention in the Petrol-İş competition. İnsan İnsana Eklene Eklene (People Added One to Another) received the grand prize in the essay category in 1998 in the competition held by the Ministry of Culture for the 75th anniversary of the Republic. Sözün Işığı earned him the Language Association's Beşir Göğüş Prize. Some of his poems were translated into Danish, and one appeared in the Turkish-French book Ankara'dan 20 Şair (Twenty Poets from Ankara).

Works

  • Poetry: Dalların Ucundaki (1955), Bileşim Çizgisi (1963), Yurtboyu Sevişmek (1992), Taşın İyisi (1992), Uzun Koşu (1994), Güle Yolculuk (1996).
  • Essays: Antilaikliğin Önlenemeyen Yükselişi (1994), Belleksiz Toplum (1995), Korkacaksan Kitapsızlardan Kork (1998), İnsan İnsana Eklene Eklene (1998), Haritasız Yüzler (2007), Dil, Düşünüş Evirtimi (2012).
  • Stories, folk tales and memoirs: Devlet Kuşu (folk tales, 1978), Yağmur Sonrası (stories, 1998), İnsanlığın Solmaz Gülleri (2000), Bir Gülün Aydınlığında (2010), Köy Enstitülülerden Biri (2012).
  • Biography and research: Türkiye'de Mahalli İdarelerin Eğitim Öğretim Kurumlarıyla İlgisi (1965), Ahmet Miskioğlu Kitabı (2004).
  • Language: Türkçe Bilgileri (many editions from 1955 onwards), Cümle Çözümleme Anahtarı ve Dilbilgisi Özeti (1970), Şemalarla Dilbilgisi (1983), Sözün Işığı (2004), Dilden Düşünüşe Atatürk Yolu (2008); also the compilations Atatürk ve 10 Kasım and İlk Dersimiz Atatürk.

Some of the dates differ between sources. Devlet Kuşu is dated 1970 in some lists and 1978 in the poet's own; Korkacaksan Kitapsızlardan Kork appears under 1995 in one biographical compilation and under 1998 in the other two sources. Güle Yolculuk is given as 1996-97 in the poet's list, and an interview quotes from the 1997 edition. The date 2002 for İnsanlığın Solmaz Gülleri belongs to the second edition issued by the Ministry of Culture. The list above follows the dates on the poet's own website and in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü.

From His Poetry

Copyright note: Because of the seventy-year term of protection running from his death in 2017, Bolulu's poems stay protected through 2087. Separate poem pages have therefore not been opened, and only two short passages are quoted below.

In the interview "Kendi Türkümü Söyledim" (I Sang My Own Song) on his website, saying that poetry cannot be written without love, he quotes three lines from his first book. The lines are dated 27 September 1954, so the poem belongs to the autumn of the year he graduated from the Gazi Institute:

Dikenlere takılan koyun tüyleri gibi
Güzellerin üstüne tel tel kalbim
Ben değilim bu tenin sahibi

"Like sheep's wool caught on thorns, / my heart, strand by strand, on the beautiful ones; / I am not the owner of this flesh." An observation from a village childhood, wool left hanging on a thorn, becomes here a simile built for love: the heart hangs strand by strand on the beloved, and the last line separates the body from its owner. In the same interview, speaking about Atatürk and the homeland, he also reads a passage from Uzun Koşu. The lines, read at the point where he relates that socialist circles branded him an "opportunist" while he could not lift his feet from his own soil, give voice to that stance:

Ülkesi yok, ulusu yok
Bütüne yorgan
Öncesini sonrasını özümsemek işi
Kurtulamaz ayakları toprağından
Evrenselde dokunmuş yerli işi

"No country, no nation, / a quilt for the whole; / the work of absorbing what came before and after; / its feet cannot get free of its soil; / homespun, woven on the universal loom." The meaning that emerges from the context of the interview may be this: a universality without country or nation is a quilt that covers everyone but belongs to no one, and the real work is to absorb past and future and weave something universal without cutting one's feet off from the soil. The phrase "yerli işi" (homespun) calls to mind village cloth woven on a hand loom. Apart from these two passages no full text of his poems is quoted here; the poems as a whole are in his books.

Chronology

1929: Born in August in the village of Tekke (Akınoğlu) near Taşova.

1947: Graduates from the Akpınar Village Institute; becomes head teacher in the village of Yerkozlu near Taşova.

1951: His first poem, "Ümit Dünyası", appears in December in the review Nilüfer.

1954: Graduates from the Literature Department of the Gazi Institute of Education.

1955: His first book of poems, Dalların Ucundaki, is published.

1956: Appointed headmaster of the Taşova Middle School.

1961: Becomes a teacher at the Amasya Girls' Institute; publishes the review İlke in Amasya.

1963: Bileşim Çizgisi is published.

1981: Retires in May from his post as senior inspector.

1992: Returns to poetry with Yurtboyu Sevişmek and Taşın İyisi; the poem "Yurtboyu Sevişmek" wins first prize in two competitions.

1998: İnsan İnsana Eklene Eklene wins the Ministry of Culture's grand prize for the essay.

2017: Dies in Ankara on 2 August.

Bibliography

Books

  • Metin İpek, "Osman Bolulu", Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, 09.05.2019 (updated 19.12.2020). https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/bolulu-osman
  • Osman Bolulu, "Yaşam Öyküm", Türk Dili, no. 89-90, 1995, pp. 38-40 (as quoted by İpek).
  • Okay Kılıçaslan, "Osman Bolulu", Eşik, no. 18, March-April 1995 (as quoted by İpek).

Other sources

Online sources