Can Yücel

Of course, it would not be enough to describe Can Yücel, who is identified with Datça, in one article. Let’s talk a little about the life of Can Yücel, with whom we remember Datça;

Can Yücel was born in Istanbul on August 21, 1926, along with his twin sister Canan (Canan Yücel Eronat- Writer – 1926-2013).

Yücel, who grew up missing his father, often pretended to be sick in order to see his father.

“He expresses this with the lines, “I loved my father the most in my life.

His father was Hasan Ali Yücel, the grandson of Ali Pasha, the captain of the Ertuğrul Frigate that sank off the coast of Japan, and who served as Minister of National Education in the Celal Bayar cabinet between 1938 and 1945. Isn’t it quite understandable to miss a father who was an intellectual, hard-working, revolutionary and idealist; who worked for universities and village institutes and gave great importance to literature and translation?

Perhaps due to the influence of his father’s passionate translation project, he enrolled in the philology department at the Ankara Faculty of Language, History and Geography and studied Latin and Greek. He then continued his education at Cambridge.

The poems he started writing at the age of 13 were published in a poetry book with the cover design by Bedri Rahmi while he was in England. However, his father did not allow the book to be sold so that it would not be thought that he had benefited from the Ministry’s opportunities; this caused Can Yücel to reconsider his poems in 1950 and re-create them under the name Yazma.

He also continued to write in magazines and newspapers for a while.

Yücel, who worked as a translator in various embassies and as a news anchor in the Turkish section of the BBC in London, completed his military service in Korea and returned to the country in 1958.

He married Güler Yücel in 1956 and had two daughters (Güzel and Su) and a son (Hasan).

After returning home, Yücel worked as a tourist guide in the beautiful Aegean regions of Bodrum and Marmaris, which have developed with tourism, and continued his life in Istanbul as an independent translator and poet.

While in England in 1962, he found a Turkish grammar book written in Latin letters, lithographically printed in 1709, which caused a great stir at the time. When he returned home, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison during the 1971 coup due to his translations of Che Guevara and Mao. While he was freed again with the amnesty in 1974, he continued to be criticized and prosecuted for his political views and comments.

In 1996, Can Yücel, one of the founders of the Labor Party, became the Freedom and Solidarity Party Izmir Deputy candidate in the 1999 elections, but he died in Izmir on August 12, 1999, the same year and was buried in Datça according to his will.

After Can Yücel’s death, the emergence of nearly 50 fake poetry texts that do not reflect Yücel’s style, views, or language, and that do not reflect him in his true form, greatly upset his wife Güler Yücel and his family.