From Alfred de Vigny to Yahya Kemal Beyatlı: An analysis of the poem “The Death of the Wolf”
Nedret Öztokat KılıçeriAlfred de Vigny's "La Mort du loup" (1938) is a leading representative of French romantic poetry. "The Death of the Wolf" is one of the first poems that comes to mind when considering both the romantic period and Vigny's poetic work. This study presents Alfred de Vigny's poem in terms of the romantic trends of the time and attempts to analyze it. After giving basic information on Romanticism and Vigny’s poetry, we describe the historical and literary context in which he worked. As the poem deals with a hunting story, observations were made both in terms of romantic aesthetics and narrative logic. For the purposes of writing this article we tried to translate this poem – without being too ambitious - , as it had not yet been translated into Turkish. In so doing, we were able to focus on the transfer of meaning The main objective is based on an analysis that addresses the basic semantic and thematic structure of poetry. In addition, the study gives an evaluation of the writing bond between Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Alfred de Vigny. As Yahya Kemal used the wolf metaphor in reference to Vigny's poem in his article on "The Female Wolf and The Cubs", the relationship with this image in the text as well as the intertext horizon between the two poets will be treated.
Alfred de Vigny’den Yahya Kemal Beyatlı’ya: “Kurdun Ölümü” Şiiri Üzerine Bir İnceleme
Nedret Öztokat KılıçeriFransız romantik şiirinin önde gelen temsilcisi Alfred de Vigny’nin “La Mort du loup” “Kurdun Ölümü” hem romantik dönemin hem de Vigny’nin şiirsel yapıtının ilk akla gelen örneklerindendir. Şiir dilinin düzyazıyı andıran esnekliği, kullanılan imgelerin çarpıcılığı, şiirin taşıdığı hayat dersi ve felsefi derinlik bu romantik şiirin sınırlarını genişletmiştir. Hem romantizmin parlak bir örneğidir, hem de felsefi şiiri örnekler. Bu çalışmanın amacı Alfred de Vigny’nin şiirini romantizm akımı açısından değerlendirdikten sonra, şiirin çözümlenmesini sunmaktır. Türkçeye daha önce çevrilmemiş bu şiirin bir çevirisini de –fazla iddialı olmadan- anlamın aktarılmasına odaklanarak bu makale vesilesiyle yapmaya çalıştık. Bu çerçevede, öncelikle Romantik akım ve Alfred de Vigny şiirine ait temel bilgiler verildikten sonra, şiirin tarihsel ve yazınsal bağlamından söz edilmiştir. Şiirin bir av hikâyesi içermesiyle birlikte, hem romantik estetik, hem de anlatının mantığı açısından gözlemlere gidilmiştir. Temel amaç şiirin temel anlamsal ve izleksel yapısını ele alan bir çözümlemeye dayanmaktadır. Çözümlemenin ardından Yahya Kemal Beyatlı ile Alfred de Vigny arasında kurulan yazınsal bağ değerlendirilmeye çalışılmıştır. Kurt metaforunu “Dişi Kurt ve Yavruları” konulu yazısında Vigny’nin şiirini referans alarak kullanan Yahya Kemal Beyatlı’nın metin düzleminde bu imge ile kurduğu ilişkiyi değerlendirebilmek ve bu metafor aracılığıyla iki şair arasında düşünce ve edebiyat alanında kurulan metinlerarası ufkun betimlenmesi de amaçlanmaktadır.
In this article, we aimed to reach the textual and semantic horizon of "The female wolf and her children", written by Yahya Kemal in which he referred to one of Alfred de Vigny's best-known poems, "The Death of the Wolf". Alfred de Vigny was not only a leading poet of French romanticism, but he also contributed to the most brilliant works of the romantic school with his dramas and novels. In this study we worked on Vigny’s poem to assimilate the metaphor for "The Wolf" that connects the two writers. Both poets, interpreted the world in which they lived in the light of a metaphor - human mortality and the fateful weight of the Battle of Independence.
Yahya Kemal's article refers to Vigny in a poetic and intellectual way. Using great poetic depth, he transposed and interpreted Vigny's famous poem into prose on the basis of the metaphor of "wolf". Here we should consider the intellectual and spiritual conversation between the two poets with lines and verses, as well as the interaction between the two texts (dialogues) in Bakhtin's terms. Poets compose literature by recreating each other using the intellectual thoughts and images that date back to previous ages. In so doing they include thoughts on the connection between life and death and the fates of societies, resaying everything that belongs to humanity.
Our analysis aims to reveal the deep structure of poetry, the semantic and traceable layer, and will follow a sequence based on semantic and logical progress with a methodical preference in order not to overlook the importance of detail. The sections, which we call "cross-sections" in narrative analysis and which have semantic integrity in themselves, appear as a “scène” in terms of the editing of the story conveyed by the poem we discussed. Our review aims to reveal the linguistic characteristics, use of images and the semantic and thematic figures of each scene.
The hunting scene tells the story of the male wolf being captured and killed by hunters while walking with his family at night. The greatness of the death of the male wolf impresses the poet. That is where the morality of poetry lies . The wolf teaches the poet how to die without crying and complaining. After fulfilling the so-called "long and heavy duty" of life, waiting for death shows the philosophical stance which the poet describes as stoical. "Stoïque fierté" is to be strong in the face of pain, to accept what is happening instead of standing behind or complaining with fear; it is also used as an effective adjective in everyday French for terms which can be translated as "endurance". With the idea of dying quietly in pain, the wolf's death scene is presented as a moral example that defines individual people.
The poem has a polysemic structure. The female wolf identifies with the mother who breastfed Remus and Romulus, the founders of Rome. Thus, by expanding the time of content, the poet achieves the mortality of the person he intended to be and the infinity of nature by analogy to the problem.
Vigny's philosophical view is an attitude that the researchers, to whom we referred in the introduction call "attitudes" and which they find valuable, the vortexes in which one is caught in experiencing one’s own destiny in the face of the incomprehensibleness of death, one’s inevitable response to what happened, which is a proud and human honor. Here you can clearly consider both greatness and humility hand in hand. Perhaps the most valuable message of the poem is that we have to take these two values together. Vigny wanted to explain that the way to put a person in an idealistic place needs a moral point of view and volunteerism. This is how we can explain what he called the high "rank" he expressed in the final verses of the poem. He always believed in human honor and used the metaphor of the wolf as a great animal who knows how to die in silence and with dignity.
In his article, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı offers a prosaic description of the poem and adds his own thoughts. Here, "The Death of the Wolf" is a writing tool for Yahya Kemal's writing, and an aesthetic element at the same time; it opens a poetic space to express Turkey's state in the War of Independence. Thus, in addition to the intellectual and cognitive background, Yahya Kemal's writing creates poetic elongation.
The author's analogy between the Turkish army and Anatolia is to be understood on the basis of this figure (metaphor). Like the terms of “male wolf” and “Turkish army” signifying death, Anatolia and the female wolf are presented in terms of survival and courage. For Vigny and for Yahya Kemal, the metaphor for the male and female wolf points to morality (life and death). They placed the metaphor at the center of their work: Vigny places it philosophically in a romantic context, while Yahya Kemal places it in the context of the war of independence, in a philosophical sense.
