EKPHRASIS IN NAZIM HIKMET POETRY

Abstract

Ekfrasis, which can be briefly defined as enabling the silent work of art and objects to speak, is a concept that can be translated into Turkish as sozedokme. The concept directly related to the emergence of eye-centeredness in the Western civilization. In this respect, ekphrasis establishes intersemiotic communication between works of art, objects, and things and language. Ekphrasis in Western civilization has formed a rooted ground for itself, which is usually expressed as ut pictura poesis. In addition to being an art and writing technique, the ground of ekphrasis has become so widespread through various examples that bring it into a functional form. In the essay, the emergence process of ekphrasis, important turning points, and important works related to this experience are briefly mentioned and how ekphrasis is used in literature is illustrated. Ekfrasis has served to enrich the literature with very different applications in recent years, as it provides the intersemiotic communication of visual art works and literature. In this paper, how ekphrasis appears in Nazim Hikmet's poems and how visuality in his poetry is expressed, and how it affected both Nazim's poetry and Trukish literature have been analyzed. Among all of Nazim Hikmet's poems, ekphrastic poems originating from visual art works give different clues to the readers about the visuality in his poetry. Ekfrasis is important in terms of making it easier to understand the strengths of Nazim Hikmet's poetry. In his poems, there are a total of ten poems of ekphrastic nature that originate directly from works of visual art. According to the information we have, Nazim Hikmet is the first poet to write an ekphrastic poem on the cover of a book in the history of Turkish literature. His work titled Cover Picture of a Poetry Book is valuable in that it is the first ekphrastic poem of this type in our literary history. In addition, his book Jokond and Si-Ya-U is the first poetry book with a fully ekphrastic feature for the first time in the history of Turkish literature.