Ezra Pound Amid Turkey’s Culture Wars: The Reception of 'The Cantos' in Contemporary Turkish Poetry

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents

Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu
Assistant Professor/Ricercatore, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Associate, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

Abstract: This lecture examines the reception of Ezra Pound’s 'Cantos' in Turkish, with particular attention to language, word choice, and translation practices. Owing to early Republican reforms in language and education, most Arabic and Persian loanwords were purged from Turkish dictionaries and replaced with newly coined terms or words borrowed from other Turkic languages. By the late 1940s, two parallel vocabularies had emerged: one retaining Arabic–Persian elements, and another “pure Turkish” (Öztürkçe) that rejected such borrowings. In the second half of the twentieth century, Pound’s work resonated with Turkish readers across the political spectrum, from leftist intellectuals to right-wing conservatives. A comparison of translations of 'The Cantos' published since the 1960s suggests that poets on the Turkish left—such as Ülkü Tamer, Melih Cevdet Anday, and İlhan Berk—tended to employ the reformed lexicon of the early Republic, while poets associated with political Islam, particularly after the 1980s, favored an Arabized–Persianized vocabulary, as seen in the Neo-Epik movement. Through selected examples from translations of 'The Cantos', this lecture explores how these competing registers of Turkish continue to shape translation conventions today.

Contact: Liz Flanagan