Biography
Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı was one of the most important lyric poets of the early Turkish Republic. He was born in Diyarbakır in 1910 as Hüseyin Cahit, into an established local family. After completing his early education in Diyarbakır, he was sent to Istanbul, where he attended Saint-Joseph High School and later Galatasaray High School. There he met the poet Ziya Osman Saba, who became one of his closest lifelong friends. Tarancı studied for a time at the School of Political Sciences and later at the Higher School of Commerce, but did not complete a degree. In 1938 he went to Paris, where he continued his studies and worked for a period at the Turkish-language service of Paris Radio. The German advance into France in 1940 forced him to leave Paris and return to Turkey. He later worked mainly as a translator for public institutions and the Ministry of Labour. From an early age he was deeply influenced by French poetry, especially Charles Baudelaire. His poems repeatedly explore youth, love, solitude, the joy of living, the passage of time and the awareness of death. His poem “Age Thirty-Five” (Otuz Beş Yaş) brought him wide recognition and became one of the best-known poems of modern Turkish literature. In 1954 he suffered a severe illness that left him partly paralysed and impaired his speech. He was later taken to Vienna for treatment, where he died on 12 October 1956.
