Asaf Halet Çelebi facts for kids

Asaf Halet Çelebi (born December 27, 1907 – died October 15, 1958) was a Turkish poet who wrote about mystical ideas. He wasn't super famous, partly because his style was very smart and sometimes used ideas from other cultures. But many people see him as Turkey's first surrealist poet. Surrealism is an art style that explores dreams and imagination.

About Asaf Halet Çelebi

Asaf Halet Çelebi was born in Istanbul, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1907. His father, Mehmet Sait Halet Bey, worked for the government. Asaf Halet wasn't born with the last name Çelebi. He chose it because he really admired a famous 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic named Rumi.

Rumi's family started a Sufi group called the Mevlevi Order. For 800 years, Rumi's descendants led this group using the title Çelebi. This word means 'gentleman' or 'well-mannered'. Even though Asaf Halet Çelebi used this name, he was not related to Rumi.

His School Days

Çelebi went to Galatasaray High School in Istanbul. He started studying art at the School of Fine Arts. But he left there pretty quickly. Then, he went to the Vocational School of Law.

His Work Life

After finishing school, Çelebi worked at the Ottoman Bank and the State Maritime Administration. But for most of his life, he worked as a librarian. When he passed away in 1958, he was working as a librarian at Istanbul University's Philosophy Department.

Asaf Halet Çelebi died on October 15, 1958, when he was 51 years old. He is buried in the Beylerbeyi Küplüce Cemetery in Üsküdar, Istanbul.

His Poems and Writings

When Çelebi was young, his poems were like the old Ottoman court literature. But after 1937, he started using Western poetry styles. He began writing in free-form verse, which means poems without a regular rhythm or rhyme. His poems often included ideas and themes from the cultures of Persia and India.

How He Wrote His Poems

Because he was a librarian, Çelebi had lots of time to read. What he read became the foundation for his poetry. A common theme in his poems was philosophical ideas. For example, he explored ideas from Buddhism. He used names like Siddhartha and Mara from Buddhist stories. These names and ideas could sometimes make his poems hard for people to understand. But he often wrote explanations in other texts to help his readers.

When he was younger, Çelebi wrote poems in old Eastern styles like the ghazal and Rubaʿi quatrain. But he didn't publish them. He only started publishing his work in magazines and newspapers in 1938. People knew him for mixing "exotic, mystical, and warm" Eastern qualities with Western culture.

He became the only Turkish poet of his time who wrote in an abstract way. Many of his poems were based on fairy tales, religions, or dream symbols. He believed that things like metre (the rhythm of a poem) and rhyme were not always needed. Instead, he looked for a new form for poetry. This way of thinking was very modern for his time.

Çelebi understood both Eastern and Western cultures very well. He wrote articles about Eastern civilizations and Persian literature. He also studied Divan literature, which is a type of classical Ottoman poetry. His own poems were a mix of his knowledge of philosophy, music, Ottoman culture, Persian culture, and French poetry. Because of this, readers often needed some knowledge themselves to fully understand his work.

Çelebi also translated Rumi's quatrains (four-line poems) into Turkish in 1939 and into French in 1950.

See also

• List of contemporary Turkish poets