Galata ve Pera kendini anlatır İlhan Berk'e

Abstract

İstanbul, one of the major cities in the world, has been portrayed, especially in the 20th century, in the works of many Turkish writers like Yahya Kemal, Abdülhak Sinasi Hisar, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Ziya Osman Saba, Salah Birsel. İlhan Berk was the first writer to move away from the perspective of the more classical renditions of İstanbul and present the city as a multilayered and mutlivocal text. The poet in his works entitled Galata (1985) and Pera (1990) has moved beyond traditional narrative styles and through intertwined literary genres and discourses formed a hybrid and fragmented poetic text. The fact that the poet used different literary styles, miniatures and maps, visual collages and typographics added to the fact that the poems have many facets like their subjective abstration render them interesting to study. İlhan Berk does not view Galata and Pera as two historical sites to be portrayed as living concrete realities, but as ‘texts’, ‘subjects to be written about’ and ‘food for poetry’; in his own words ‘inspirations for poems’. Instead of composing poems of Galata and Pera he has tried to capture the poetry in these places and put it into words.