The image of Nazım Hikmet and his poetry in Anglo-American literary systems in 2002

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to look into the image of Nâzım Hikmet and his poetry in Anglo-American literary systems in 2002 through a paratextual analysis. Nâzım Hikmet is crucial for the realm of translation studies since he is the Turkish poet who has been translated into English more than any other Turkish poet and who has been translated into as many as more than fifty languages. Besides, the year 2002 is the year when four books of Hikmet's translated poetry were published abroad. Two of these books were published in the U.S.A, one in Paris, and one in London.Since this study aims to carry out a research on the image of Hikmet and his poetry from a historical perspective; the image before 2002 is also examined within its socio-political background. In the first chapter of the thesis, the anthologies, reviews, criticisms and selected poetry books published in Anglo-American literary systems are examined through paratextual analysis and discourse analysis and the image of Hikmet and his poetry before 20022 is discussed. A similar methodology is employed in the second chapter of the thesis to carry out an analytic research on the four target texts of Hikmet's selected poetry published in 2002. In the last chapter of this thesis, the reception of these four books as well as the image created through their reviews and criticisms are discussed through discourse analysis of these metatexts. This study is a research-oriented, historical, descriptive study wherein the gradual change of the image of Hikmet and his poetry is revealed through the description and evaluation of the visual paratextual elements as well as discursive analyses of the textual ones. In conclusion, the evaluation of the research data reveals that the change of the image of Hikmet and his poetry in Anglo-American literary systems is reflective of the 2oth century socio-political background and that there is a discrepancy between the images formed before and after the dissolution of the Communist bloc.