Sami Baydar came to poetry from painting: he was a trained painter, and he wrote short stories as well as poems. He was born in Merzifon on 26 September 1962 and died there on 29 October 2012. His first poems appeared in the magazine Beyaz when he was eighteen, and his collected poems were published as Dünya İnancı just after his death. He spent more than the last twenty years of his life in his mother's house in Merzifon, far from the literary circles of Istanbul. Little known in his lifetime, he is now counted among the most individual voices of the generation that began writing in the 1980s, and his poems have been translated into English.

Life

He attended primary, middle and high school in Merzifon. In 1979 he entered the Department of Painting at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts; in 1981 he joined the studio of Neşet Günal and in 1983 that of Devrim Erbil. He finished his studies in the years when the academy had become Mimar Sinan University. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü places his graduation three years after the move to Erbil's studio, while Murat Nemet-Nejat, who translated his poems into English, gives 1987. He also completed a master's degree in the same department. As a student, in 1984, he received a merit award in the painting competition of the magazine Gösteri. He held his first solo exhibition at Garanti Bankası's Yonca Art Gallery; Nemet-Nejat records the year of this show as 1989.

The Istanbul years are also the years in which his poetry was most visible. His first book, Dünya Efendileri (The Gentlemen of the World), was printed at his own expense in 1987 and was followed by books of stories and poems. In 1992 the magazine Sombahar published a long interview with him under the title "Keşke dünyanın yüzeyinde başka bir tabaka daha olsa" (If only there were another layer on the surface of the world). In the early 1990s, however, he left Istanbul and went back to Merzifon. The only direct testimony from the first years after this return is his own letters: those he wrote between July 1992 and December 1996 to Ömer Aygün, then a young poet of seventeen, were later collected by Ömer Şişman and Mahmut Sefa İpek in the book Gece Çıkış Yolu Bulamadım (I Could Not Find a Way Out at Night). The book's description says that his life in Merzifon has remained a puzzle for most readers.

In Merzifon he went on painting and writing for magazines. He died on 29 October 2012, at the age of fifty. Nemet-Nejat writes that his death was caused by a heart attack. After his death the poet Necmi Zekâ devoted two poems to him: "Sb'nin Resmi" (Sb's Painting) and "sb'nin ölümü" (Sb's Death). The second opens with a portrait of someone who learned to hide from tree hollows and to keep still from motherless turtles, and it has also been published in English in Erik Mortenson's translation.

Connection with Amasya

Baydar was born in Merzifon, spent his school years there, and lived there for more than the last twenty years of his life until he died there. The second period of his poetry was written entirely in this small town. Nemet-Nejat links the seven-year gap in his publications between 1996 and 2003 directly to this return: the poet cut himself off from the poetry community in Istanbul and lived in the family house in Merzifon with almost no contact with the outside world. A passage from the letters gives his view of literature in this period in his own voice:

Bilge Karasu'yu ilk kez 1981'de okumuştum. Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi'ni. Şimdi katlanamıyorum, okuyamıyorum. Çok mükemmeli arıyor.

"I first read Bilge Karasu in 1981, Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi. Now I cannot bear him, I cannot read him. He is after something too perfect." Further on in the letter he says that fiction bothers him, that for the same reason he has not watched films by auteur directors for ten years, and that he is wearied by everything being "arranged and prepared". Read together with these words, his seclusion in the town may look like a choice as much as an escape; but this is only an impression drawn from the letters, since Baydar left no text explaining his return.

Merzifon still carries his name. One of the stops on the Culture Route map prepared by the Merzifon municipality is the Painter Sami Baydar Culture House; it is mentioned together with the town's other buildings in our article on Merzifon.

Poetry

Copyright note: Baydar died on 29 October 2012, and his poems stay in copyright until 2082 is out; until then no separate pages can be opened for them. What follows quotes none of his poems, only their titles and what has been written about them.

His poems and stories appeared in magazines such as Beyaz, Hürriyet Gösteri, Deter, Sombahar, Ludingirra, Kaşgar, eskiZ, Göçebe, Kitap-lık and Geceyazısı. He wrote in free verse. When his first book came out, Haydar Ergülen greeted it in Şiir Atı with an article titled "Kendi İçinden Geçenleri Anlatan" (One Who Tells What Passes Within Him); Cevdet Karal wrote on Çiçek Dünyalar (Flower Worlds) in Virgül in 1998. The Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü describes his poetry as offering the reader "a self-sufficient, self-completed world of images" and says that his gaze deepens in Çiçek Dünyalar.

The most detailed reading is Nemet-Nejat's. In his view there are two ways of approaching Baydar. The first concerns subject matter: his poetry is steeped in a Sufi sense centred on the effacement of the ego through tears and suffering, and the result is a melancholy, called hüzün in Turkish, that comes close to ecstasy. The main image is water, which suggests both flowing and weeping. The second concerns his way of writing. Baydar was a painter before he was a poet, and the translator thinks that he wrote his poems by assigning a space to each of his thoughts and building the poem on the visual arrangement of these spaces. Language stays behind this arrangement; at times the syntax comes to the edge of falling apart. Because Turkish pronouns carry no gender, it is easy for these shifts to leave unclear who is being addressed. Nemet-Nejat finds the finest moments of the poetry precisely in these blurred places.

The same translator divides the poems into two periods. The four books of 1987 to 1996 are complex, dense poems. The second period, beginning in 2003, uses at first sight a very plain, pared-down language, yet its gaps and sudden leaps keep it tied to the earlier work. Nemet-Nejat compares the poet's withdrawal from publishing and his reappearance to the loss and the enlightenment reached by talking to animals in the wilderness in the story of Layla and Majnun; this is the translator's own interpretation.

He was read outside Turkey as well. Several of his poems were included in the anthology New European Poets, published in 2008. Nemet-Nejat's translations appeared as a project file in 2013 and in the magazine The Antonym in 2022. The poems in this selection come from the first two books: "Kauçuk" (Rubber), "Sevgilim" (Beloved) and "Güvercin ve Çocuk" (Pigeon and Child) from Dünya Efendileri, and "Saplı Bıçak" (A Knife with a Shaft), "Cılız" (Skinny) and "Turunculuğu Yüzünden" (Orange) from Yeşil Alev (The Green Flame). For the Turkish texts of the poems, readers should turn to Dünya İnancı.

Works

  • Poetry: Dünya Efendileri (Istanbul 1987), Yeşil Alev (Istanbul 1991), Dünya Bana Aynısını Anlatacak (Istanbul: Korsan, 1995), Çiçek Dünyalar (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995; Nemet-Nejat gives 1996), Varla Yok Arasında (Istanbul: Everest, 2003), Nicholas'ın Portresi (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005).
  • Collected poems: Dünya İnancı (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2012); besides the earlier books it includes his new book Vücut Her Zaman Savaşır.
  • Stories: Dünyadan Çıkış Yolları (1990), Dünyada Anılara Bakıyorum (Istanbul 1991), Sese Gelen Sevgili: Toplu Öyküler (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2015).
  • Letters: Gece Çıkış Yolu Bulamadım (letters to Ömer Aygün, 1992-1996; edited by Ömer Şişman and Mahmut Sefa İpek).

Chronology

1962: Born in Merzifon on 26 September.

1979: Enters the Department of Painting at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts.

1980: His first poems are published in Beyaz.

1983: Moves to Devrim Erbil's studio.

1984: Receives a merit award in the Gösteri painting competition.

1987: His first book of poems, Dünya Efendileri, comes out.

1992: His interview appears in Sombahar; his correspondence with Ömer Aygün begins.

2003: After a gap of seven years, Varla Yok Arasında is published.

2008: His poems are included in the anthology New European Poets.

2012: Dies in Merzifon on 29 October; his collected poems Dünya İnancı are published.

Bibliography

Books

Online sources