Abstract
İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu (d. 1955) is one of the important cultural figures raised in Niğde. After teaching various courses in different schools for thirty-three years, in 1933, he ended his teaching career, which he started in 1900. The contributions of Eroğlu to our education and cultural life were not limited to his profession. Transferring the important examples of nasihatname genre in Persian literature into Turkish, Eroğlu also continued to enlighten the society with his publications after his retirement. His translations of Sa‘dî-i Şîrâzî's (d. 691/1292) Bostān and Gülistān and Ferîdüddin Attâr's (d. 618/1221) Pendnāme were published in Niğde before Eroğlu passed away. Upon the request of the historian and translator Feridun Nafiz Uzluk (d. 1974), who is relative to Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî (d. 672/1273) from his maternal side, Eroğlu translated two nasihatname genre literary works of Sultan Veled (d. 712/1312) into Turkish from Persian. These two nasihatnames, Rebābnāme and İntihānāme, are important examples of their genre in our literature. These translations, written in the Ottoman alphabet, were published in the Latin alphabet after the death of the translator.
Besides his identity as a translator, Eroğlu is a poet who closely followed the era in which modern poetry was built. His poems in his majmua of poetry, he named Nāle, are important examples of the changing of form and content observed in classical poetry as a result of the change in social and political life and interaction with the West. However, Eroğlu's poems -except for a few examples published in some local publications- have not been published yet and his poet identity has not been the subject of an academic study. The poetry majmua named Nāle, which contains three hundred and fifty-two poems written by İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu in different verse forms, is found in succession with his treatise named Tünel Eğlencesi in the manuscript book that we reached through his grandchildren. We are preparing these two works, written in the Ottoman alphabet, for publication.
In this article, based on Nāle, which is his unpublished majmua of poetry, his identity as an educator and poet is explored; and the social, political and cultural picture of the 20th century is presented to the attention of the reader with examples from the poems of an educator poet. This article is organized in two chapter. In the first chapter, information about Eroğlu's life is provided and his works are introduced under sub-titles. While composing this chapter, existing studies on İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu have been used. New information, obtained from interviews with his grandchildren, has also been added to the literature. In the second chapter, Eroğlu's educator and poet identity was discussed with examples from the poetry majmua named Nāle, and his poems were examined in terms of form and content. While evaluating his educator identity, besides the letters and notes in Eroğlu’s handwritten notebook, İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu Special Issue (1940) of the magazine named Akpınar (published by Niğde Community Center), was also used. To examine the reflection of Eroğlu's educator identity on his poems' language, his didactic poems are also evaluated under this topic. In the section titled " İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu by his Poet Identity", the relationship of Eroğlu, who is known as Second Mehmed Âkif around Niğde, with Mehmed Akif (d. 1936) is also emphasized, while his literary aspect is being examined. The similarity of Eroğlu's poems to Akif's in terms of content has been demonstrated with examples selected from his poems, and it has been proven that this appellation given by the people of Niğde is not an unfair. In order to reveal his dominance in the literary landscape of the period, Eroğlu's praise of Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan (d. 1937), one of the important representatives of the new poetry, the compensation from Ziya Paşa's (d. 1880) Terkib-i Bend, and the criticism of Tevfik Fikret's (d. 1915) poem are among the poems cited in our study.