A. KADİR, Meriçboyu

Poet and translator (b. 1917, İstanbul - d. 1 March 1985). His real name was Abdülkadir Meriçboyu. He also used the pen names Abdulkadir İbrahim and Ali Karasu. He graduated from Kuleli Military High School (1936). When he was a senior student at the Turkish Military Academy, he was charged with engaging in political activities together with Nazım Hikmet and was sentenced to ten years in prison and was dismissed from the school (1938). Later, he worked for the newspaper Tan as a proofreader and entered the Faculty of Law; however, when his first poetry book Tebliğ (Notification, 1943) was confiscated, he could not finish his studies as he was exiled from İstanbul. He was sent to exile in Muğla, Balıkesir, Konya, Kırşehir and Adana. After 1947, when he returned to İstanbul, he worked as a proofreader and translator in various publishing houses.

A. Kadir published his first poems in the reviews Ses and Edebiyat during the years of his military service. His poems were published in the following years in magazines such as Yeni Edebiyat (1940-41), Yeni Ses, Yürüyüş, Yığın (1946), Yeryüzü (1951-52), Beraber (1952), Yeditepe (1952), Gelecek (1971), Şairler Yaprağı, Militan, Pınar, Yeryüzü, Sanat Emeği and Varlık. He also translated western poetry. He simplified the poetry of Tevfik Fikret into modern Turkish. With his translation of İlyada (Iliad), he won the 1959 Habib Edip Törehan Science Award and the Turkish Language Association Translation Award together with Azra Erhat. For his translations, he was given the 1980 Hasan Ali Ediz Translation Award and the 1983 Azra Erhat Superior Service Award.

In the poems he wrote after 1950, we can say that he continued his socialist inclination as well as displaying a more meticulous style in his work. In that period, he tried to establish a relationship between the natural and the social, and between society and the individual. He tried to combine the spiritual in the lyrical. In his first poetry book he described the consequences of war in a realistic way. The main themes of his second poetry book were being exiled and yearning for home during exile.

WORKS:

POETRY: Tebliğ (Notification, 1943), Hoş Geldin Halil İbrahim (Welcome Halil İbrahim, 1959), Dört Pencere (Four Windows, 1962), Mutlu Olmak Varken (Instead of Being Happy, his new poems and all poems from his first three books, 1968).

OTHER WORKS: 1938 Harb Okulu Olayı ve Nazım Hikmet (The 1938 Military School Affair and Nazım Hikmet, 1966), Sovyet Rusya'da Onbeş Gün (Fifteen Days in Soviet Russia, travel notes, 1978).

Also the poems he translated and those in collaboration with Asım Bezirci, Afşar Timuçin, Eray Canberk and others were published.