193. Today in 1920s Turkey: 21 July 1924 (Writer’s Block)
Everyone attempting to complete a writing project this summer can relate to this cartoon. It depicts a condition as old as writing itself: writer’s block. Here, the cartoonist, Ramiz Bey, has offered us a poignant vignette of a severely blocked writer, Yahya Kemal Bey. Humorous details like the cobwebs that have sprung up around our motionless composer and the birds who have nested on his head underscore the monotony of writing. Indeed, physical stagnation is a symptom of writing, which is reinforced with the animal kingdom reclaiming both author and monograph. The consummate writer’s descent into inanimation is further expressed with the monolithic treatment of the black color-block that seamlessly unifies man and desk.
So who is this Yahya Kemal Bey? Born in 1884, Yahya Kemal (Beyatlı) was one of the most celebrated poets of the early Turkish Republic, and incidentally, one of Turkey’s most blocked writers! He published poems in various journals in the early 1900s and he established his own journal, Dergah in 1918 and continued to write for other publications/periodicals. He was also a politician and served as a national representative in parliament, on-again off-again, in the 1920s and 30s. He also took on a variety of international diplomatic assignments in the 1930s and 40s as well.
He famously died without having published a single book of his own. Many of his full-length publications were released post-mortem. He was a perfectionist and never quite believed that his poetry was complete enough for publication… Knowing this fate, the present cartoon is eerily foreboding of a book that will never be… The persistence of his writer’s block seems to be a well-known phenomenon in literati circles.
Here is the text that accompanies the cartoon:
Türkçe:
Ata sözlerinden: Geç olsun da güç olmasın
Yahya Kemal Bey’in yazmaya başladığı son eser!
English:
From (our) proverbs: Better late than cumbersome
Yahya Kemal Bey’s latest writing endeavor!
To this end, the quoted proverb offers both encouragement and caution. The common English version is “Better late than never,” but the Turkish iteration is a bit more involved as it acknowledges the difficulties encountered by writers during the process: that slow and steady is better than quick and cumbersome. Either way, we are reminded that good writing cannot be done in haste. Nevertheless, in the case of our Yahya Kemal Bey, his perfectionism and “block” may have cost him a glamorous publication record, but it never deterred from his reputation as a talented and accomplished poet.
