Poetry
Otuz beş yaş
Not translated into English
Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı · 1946
Synopsis
The author's second collection, which takes its title from his best-known poem. In this poem, according to turkedebiyati.org, a thirty-five-year-old man says he is in the middle of his life: he sees his face changing, loses friends, feels loneliness growing and thinks of death. The work as a whole, according to the same site, mixes loneliness and death with a love of life, and seeks to say much in few words. The other poems in the collection are not described one by one.
Context
The collection appeared in 1946, thirteen years after the author's first book. The title poem won the same year the highest prize in a competition organised by the Republican People's Party, which made its author famous; the next two prizewinners were Attilâ İlhan and Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca. Turkedebiyati.org notes the influence of the Garip movement and of French poets, Baudelaire and Verlaine, and the use of the syllabic metre. Asım Bezirci took up this title for the edition of his complete poems, in 1983.
Who it is for
A collection of poems in Turkish, in a restrained language; no French translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
First prize in the 1946 poetry competition for the title poem, which made the author famous.