Writer and
translator (b. 1915, İstanbul – d. 14 June 2000). She was the daughter of the
“Dawn of the New Age” poet Tahsin Nahit and stepdaughter of Falih Rıfkı Atay,
wife of the actor and poet Cahit Irgat and mother of the poet Mustafa Irgat. She
grew up under the guardianship of Falih Rıfkı Atay. She started her elementary
education at Notre Dame de Sion and graduated from Arnavutköy American Girls
(Robert) College as a boarder. She graduated from Istanbul University,
Faculty of Literature, Department of French Language and Literature. She went
to Paris to
study for her PhD on English Literature but returned because of the war (1940).
When she was a student in Paris,
she helped her friends who were members of the Polish Communist Party while under
surveillance by the French police. She completed her PhD at İstanbul University.
She became an assistant, associate professor (1947) and professor at the
Department of English Language and Literature that was established in 1941. She
worked as a lecturer at this university until her retirement in 1977. She
published her main works after she retired. The books that introduced her to
the literature world and made her well known were her memoirs. There were many
famous figures in her memoirs such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nâzım Hikmet,
Neyzen Tevfik, Halide Edib, Falih Rıfkı, Sait Faik, Mehmet Ali Aybar, Behice
Boran and Necip Fazıl. She translated from Thomas Malory, Henry Fielding,
Balzac, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, William Golding, John Galworthy, Herman
Melville and Shakespeare, etc.
WORKS:
RESEARCH:
Shakespeare and Hamlet, 1984, Edebiyatta
Ütopya Kavramı ve Thomas More (The Utopian Notion in Literature and Thomas
More, 1984), İngiliz Edebiyatı Tarihi
(History of English Literature, in 5 volumes, 1986-1993),
Virginia Woolf, 1995, D.H. Lawrence,
1997.
MEMOIR: Bir Dinozorun Anıları (The Memoirs of a
Dinosaur, 1998), Bir Gezginin Anıları (The
Memoirs of a Traveler, 1999), Elizabeth
Çağı Tiyatrosu’nda Soytarılar (Clowns in Elizabethan Theater), Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare, in 2
volumes.
Her
translations were also published.
