Oktay Rifat

(pen name of Oktay Rifat Horozçu). Born 1914 in Trabzon. Turkish poet.

Rifat graduated from a lycée in Ankara in 1936. In 1941, together with the poets Orhan Veli Kanik and Melih Cevdet Anday, he founded the literary group known as Tripod. Contemporary man was the hero of Rifat’s lyric poetry. His collections Poems About Life, Death, Love and Roving (1945), Odes to Beauty (1945), Down and Up (1952), and The Crow and the Fox (1954) reveal social abuses.

Rifat later left Tripod and became a leading poet of the modernist group New Movement 2, which, rejecting a realistic and social approach, experimented with formalist techniques. Rifat’s new orientation was expressed in the collections Street With a Forelock (1956), Staircase of One in Love (1958), and The Hands of Freedom (1966). His plays, including Some People (1961), Horses and Elephants (1962), The Speckled Rooster (1964), and Among Women (1966), depict urban life with its social contradictions. Rifat also translates the works of European poets.