I Also Understand Nothing About Botany (Book)

Cahit Zarifoğlu’s work “I Don’t Understand Botany at All” is a compiled volume consisting of interviews, speeches, and conversations conducted by the author across different periods. It was first published in 2023 by Ketebe Yayınları. The 296-page book presents Zarifoğlu’s views on literature, belief, art, and social issues in a documentary manner. The book serves as a direct source through which the poet’s intellectual world and artistic understanding are conveyed in his own words.

The volume includes interviews published in various newspapers and magazines, as well as speeches delivered in different settings. The texts convey Zarifoğlu’s perspectives on poetry, writing, children’s literature, social values, and the cultural atmosphere of his time. It also contains his commentary on significant events of the period, such as the Afghan resistance.

The book emphasizes Zarifoğlu’s belief that the artist must serve as a carrier of social consciousness, his association of poetry and writing with spiritual foundations, his evaluations of literature’s linguistic and social functions, and his exploration of humanity’s search for values in response to the effects of modernity on the individual.

The book is a compilation of various interviews, speeches, and conversations by Cahit Zarifoğlu. The texts appear sometimes in question-and-answer format and at other times as direct transcriptions of spoken remarks. Zarifoğlu’s style in these texts is natural, intimate, and occasionally literary in tone. The texts are not arranged chronologically but organized according to thematic coherence.