Barbaros İrdelmen – The Poet of Emotions

Human values, justice, love, losses, nature and sections from life have an important place in his works

Interviewed by Irma Kurti | Albania

BARBAROS İRDELMEN is a writer, poet, translator, and retired medical doctor. He resides in Istanbul, Turkey. His poems have been included in anthologies, poetry festivals and selected books both in Turkey and abroad. He serves as a poetry columnist for Edebiyat Magazin Newspaper, a writer for Kybele Kültür ve Sanat magazine and Pazartesi14 Neyya literary Magazine, a board member of Hedgehog Literature and Thought Magazine, a member of the editorial board for Papirüs Magazine, former writer for Akatalpa Monthly Poetry and Criticism Magazine, former writer of the Literature House and former ORPARS TV Broadcasting and Board Member on YouTube. He is also a member of the Turkish Writers’ Union. Through his initiatives, Poetry Without Borders, published in nearly 40 different languages since 1984, began to be published in Turkish starting from July 2024. He is a member of the translator family of the ITHACA Foundation in Spain.

Poet Barbaros İrdelmen’s poems mainly focus on people, life, social realities and emotions. Human values, justice, love, losses, nature and sections from life have an important place in his works. He also has poems in which he writes deep lines about social events and human relations with a critical perspective. Philosophical and existential themes, especially death, the transience of life and man’s search for himself are also clearly felt in his poems. In addition, he also has poems written on childhood, nostalgia, love, hope and human ties. He delicately handles the small but meaningful details of daily life in his poems, allowing the reader to establish an emotional connection.

When and how did you start writing?

I started writing regularly late. It was 7-8 years before I retired, when two poet friends known in our country’s literary circles, Osman Serhad Erkekli and Serdar Koçak, came to my office to make an appointment and get examined, because they had health problems. After the examination, I told them that I had written some poems, and they wanted to listen to a few of my poems. Then, they said that there is poet inflation in our age, they liked what I wrote, and they wanted me to compile it. I compiled my poems I wrote and sent them to the publishing house, they liked them also and my first poetry book was published in 2016. The incident I experienced motivated me and encouraged me to write and in the last 9 years, many anthologies in Turkey and abroad included my poems and nine of my 19 poetry books were published as printed and the ten as e-books online at Google books, I still continue to write.

You are now a retired medical doctor. Did your profession influence your writing?

Yes, I am a retired medical doctor, I come from a highly specialized, hard science background. Due to my profession, night shifts, weekend and holiday shifts, I have had very little free time throughout my working life, but I have always loved reading poetry for as long as I can remember. Before I started writing regularly, I had dozens of poetry books by local and foreign poets in my library, and sometimes my friends and family would get together at home and organize poetry reading nights. Poetry was a happy, relaxing distraction for me at that time. In my working life, until I was almost retired, I would scribble one or two poems a year and put them between the pages of my books.

Why do you find literature and especially poetry interesting? Could you please give us information about your own understanding of literature or poetry in general?

Poetry is beauty for me, when we describe any beauty, we say, “Like a poem” or let a poet tell us this. Yes, that’s why poetry is the ultimate point of beauty, the ultimate point of creativity. The sudden overflow of our emotions is the wonder of poetry. Poetry is a means of expressing feelings and thoughts in a literary form and expresses the inner thoughts of the poet, the reflections of his mind. Just as love is the ultimate point of all emotions, poetry is the ultimate point of literature. The most attractive aspect of poetry that attracts me is that it reaches beyond time and borders. With words, we can cross continents, oceans, different ages and I think that it should meet with neighboring languages while promoting national poetry. I miss the way people share their thoughts and bring them together with love and peace through multilingual poems.

Can you describe the experience of being a translator?

Throughout my education, the foreign language I studied in the schools and medical school was predominantly English. After finishing university, I started working in West Germany, at that time there were East and West Germany, I completed my eight-year specialization there, my German was ahead of English. During my professional life, I wrote, translated and compiled various professional articles in local and foreign languages. But my first serious translation was in 1996, when I translated a 644-page German medical textbook into our language, the book remained in the apron pockets or on the desks of medical students and young assistant doctors for years.

Translating poetry is very different from translating prose, and for years I hesitated to translate poetry for fear of not being able to fully reflect the poet’s feelings or message. When I decided to publish two of my books, Turkish and English, bilingually, I asked my dear poet friend Mesut Şenol to translate them. Afterwards, I started to try translations and share my own poems on digital platforms related to literature. Some of my readers said that my translations were very successful and even better than the poem itself. My courage had increased and I was on a quest. In recent years, I started to send my poems bilingually to digital OPA Monthly Magazine, Our Poetry Archive, they were appreciated and started to be published, and my poems were selected and included in their various anthologies published annually. Last year, my meeting with Flemish poet Germain Droogenbroodt renewed my motivation. I was invited to the “Poems Without Borders” translator family, an activity of the Ithaca Literature Foundation, which he founded in Spain in 1984, so I translate the two most beautiful poems from all over the world, selected by the Ithaca Foundation every month, into our language and publish them in Turkish. I translated the book “The Road of Being” by world poet Germain Droogenbroodt, which has been published in different languages in thirty countries, and it became the 31st country where his book was published. I presented it to him on behalf of Turkish poetry lovers.

You are a poetry columnist and a member of the editorial board of various journals and magazines. What do most poets have in common?

Today, poets write in many directions and about many different genres. I divide poets into four groups, like the well-known Turkish poet Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. In my opinion, every poem has a main idea and an ornament.

Poems with a beautiful main idea and complete ornamentation are poems that have gone down in the history of literature, written and will be written by first-class master poets.

Poets who strive to be good poets are poets who write poems with a main idea and little ornamentation, and we can say that they are 2nd-class poets.

Today, more and more ornamented poems are written without a main idea, and they are the ones who have the most, I think it includes 3rd-class poets, I think it may be the answer to your question, and there are 4th-class poets who write poems without a main idea and ornamentation.

What is the effect of a beautiful poem on you?

Poetry affects me differently, sometimes it leaves an ache inside me, sometimes it ignites a ray of hope, sometimes a line resonates deeply inside me, and sometimes a metaphor opens new doors in my mind. I get lost in a line and dive into my own memories, the purest expression of emotions, the flow of words sometimes like music, sometimes hitting like a hard stone… These are the things that affect me. Most of all, I am amazed by the poet’s ability to create a huge world with few words.

What are you trying to convey to your readers with your poems?

I saw that people in this geography have become estranged from poetry, there are almost no lovers, and unfortunately few people read stories and novels. In these lands, there were wars for tens of centuries in the Roman period and later in the Ottoman period, the Palace’s Divan Literature did not leave the palace and did not embrace the people. However, our talented folk poets and folklore are very developed in Anatolia. The strict and unchanging rules and regulations of Divan Literature in our education system in the Republican Period alienated and distanced people from poetry and literature. The Garipler Movement that started with poet Orhan Veli Kınık and his friends sought simplicity as a reaction to Divan Literature, and then the Second News Movement which was influenced by the West, started a new trend in Turkish Poetry.

Today, Turkish Poetry is in a search. Time is becoming increasingly valuable, no one has the luxury of spending time reading long texts anymore. For me, poetry should be easy to understand. In my opinion, poetry should be easy to understand when read by an ordinary citizen who has no interest in literature. If he understands the poem when he reads it, I think that I can attract his attention and make him love it again. I prefer to write short poems with a main idea and story, using simple language with no rhyme but an acoustic flow.

May you share an advice for those poets who want to dedicate themselves to writing?

I believe that if the new generations love literature and poetry with the education they receive and their quick wit, they will produce much more creative poems.

Read: When We Argue, We Become A Little – Poetry From Albania

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IRMA KURTI is an Albanian poet, writer, lyricist, journalist, and translator and has been writing since she was a child. She is a naturalized Italian and lives in Bergamo, Italy. All her books are dedicated to the memory of her beloved parents, Hasan Kurti and Sherife Mezini, who have supported and encouraged every step of her literary path. Kurti has won numerous literary prizes and awards in Albania, Italy, Switzerland, USA, Philippines, Lebanon and China. She was awarded the Universum Donna International Prize IX Edition 2013 for Literature and received a lifetime nomination as an Ambassador of Peace by the University of Peace, Italian Switzerland. In 2020, she became the honorary president of WikiPoesia, the encyclopedia of poetry. In 2023 she was awarded a Career Award from the Universum Academy Switzerland. She also won the prestigious 2023 Naji Naaman’s literary prize for complete work. Irma Kurti is a member of the jury for several literary competitions in Italy. She is also a translator for the Ithaca Foundation in Spain. Irma Kurti has published more than 100 works, including books of poetry, fiction and translations. She is one of the most translated and published Albanian poets. Her books have been translated and published in 20 countries.

Courtesy: Enheduana Magazine