MAJOR BILINGUAL COLLECTION BY TURKISH POET METIN TURAN RELEASED BY MUNDUS ARTIUM PRESS

Turan has built a body of work that examines belonging and exile, urban and rural issues, the lessons of the past, and the persistence of human connection.

DALLAS, TX, UNITED STATES, August 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Mundus Artium Press today announced the publication of The Silence of the Wind, the most comprehensive English-language edition of selected poems to date by acclaimed Turkish poet Metin Turan, translated by Betül Küre, Baki Yiğit and Cem Akaş.

The bilingual book introduces international readers to a poet and scholar whose literary career spans more than four decades. Known for his polyphonic range, formal daring and integration of folk heritage and modernist technique, Turan has built a body of work that examines belonging and exile, urban and rural issues, the lessons of the past, and the persistence of human connection.

In the volume’s introduction (also presented in a Turkish translation by Aysen Ritzauer), Mundus Artium president Gjekë Marinaj describes Turan as “a poet of thresholds — linguistic, geographic, historical and bodily — whose lyrics move between intimacy and public witness, vernacular song and metropolitan disquiet, private memory and civic urgency.” The poems gathered here, Marinaj writes, “do not smooth those tensions into resolution. They make them audible as counterpoint, refrain and interruption.”

Turan’s poems shift between dialogue and monologue, expansive balladry and minimalism, tenderness and bluntness — often within a single piece. The collection’s geography moves from the romance of Istanbul to the power and poverty of Ankara, from the poet’s native Kars to the cherry blossoms of Seoul, from Frankfurt’s pavements to the coal harbors of Zonguldak. Approaching Turkey and its diaspora reverently, the poet salutes his native culture even as he confronts its social challenges.

Throughout, Turan tests the boundary between love lyric and metaphysical longing: a face becomes a “lilac sun,” eyes open onto “an aquamarine infinity.” Love in these poems is never abstract — it lives in the material minutiae of daily life. The book’s planetary awareness is equally forceful: “I Will Not Write Peace Poems” acknowledges the limitations of protest poetry even as it enacts protest, while “Questioning” mourns humanity’s failure to curb violence and consumerism.

The volume also includes an epilogue by Elmas Şahin that places Turan in conversation with T.S. Eliot’s modernist city poetics. Both poets imagine the modern metropolis as a spiritually exhausted terrain, with Turan adapting Eliot’s London-based wasteland motif to a distinctly Turkish context.

Metin Turan was born in 1966 in Kağızman, Kars Province, Turkey. He has published seven poetry collections, including a previous bilingual collection, The Lyrical Cloud, released in Turkey. His honors include the Turkish Folklore Service Award (1995), the Ruşen Hakkı Poetry Prize (2004), the Pertev Naili Boratav Folklore Award (2005), the Özkan Mert Poetry Prize (2023), the Dil Derneği Prize and the International Changwon Literature Prize (2024). His poems have been translated into more than fifteen languages. He has taught Turkish literature at Kyiv National University and folklore at Yıldız Technical University.

The Silence of the Wind is published in paperback by Mundus Artium Press. The book’s ISBN is 978-0-939378-27-2.

Mundus Artium Press, housed at the University of Texas at Dallas, publishes world literature in translation and related scholarship to broaden access to global voices.

Ana Alvarez
Mundus Artium Press
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Poetry by Metin Turan | Read by Aysen Ritzauer

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