MURAT NEMET-NEJAT Engages
Y’ol by Birhan Keskin, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
(Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)
Offering[1]
(or
a bit of accounting)
Every day once I
tried to return to this book. Every day once I walked out of the house and
walked with a broken cloud. Every day looked at someone and bent my head. Every
day I looked at a newspaper with vacant eyes. Every day someone talked, I
pretended to listen. Every day once I asked myself where am I, every day once a
northern winter settled in me. Every day I looked at your photographs before
me. Every day I got angry once and once I asked myself why did I get attached
so much? Every day I thought of justice and cruelty. May be of everything.
Every day I walked in the street with a barbarian and the civilized. I opened
every day the minarets with the sounds of the morning azan. Every day I tried
to part a curtain. Every day I thought I understood nothing, every day thought
I understood it all. I saw pigeons off. Every day I thought I could not stand
the day. I stacked books one under the other and magazines rolled next to each
other. Things that were a blur walked along with me. Every “totality” I saw
stuck in me like a knife, couldn’t understand it. Every day I pulled a piece of
stone out of me. Every day I implored sleep to take me in its arms. Every day,
day is ending but not the night, I said to myself. Every day I saw things
didn’t console me. I asked myself why we remember the days of separation
afterwards as a fog. Don’t forget your anger, I said to myself, if you forget,
you fall. I reserved at least one hour every day to standing up, to being
erect. Every day I ran through my heart the word “lifelong” at least once.
Every day the word “lifelong” pinged like coal in my heart. Every day once I
called you silently “my love.” Every day once I called you “heartless.” Every
day I thought of two old women sitting side by side and looking at each other
with tenderness. Every day I said that photograph of these women is torn. Every
day once I said “ah” and once I took it back. Every day I said “my road
companion” and I covered my face with sorrow. Every day I tasted your
bitterness. Every day not to forget but not not to forget I applied poison to
my heart. Every day I thought to become human how many faults she is hiding in
herself. Every day I tried to open a lock. There was something else, there was
something else: I had called out to you with the voice of the earth, and not
the voice of the world. What is an ordeal or what is a sin? What do they matter
to me anyway. You were the center of the world everyday, and I the endless land
maaaaaarks receding from you.
III
Because you regarded as too much my weeping after you
take these rocks they’re yours... and from now on
let all the drums pound, the oud strings snap
scream to the void, together.
We’ll cough up blood
blood
blood
Since the world is so cruel,
Unbecoming our heart.
Let all the drums echo,
what comes from the void
strike what fills the void
echoes in the void
See how the one sleeping on ashes is coughing up
blood blood
blood
let them know
IV
I... and every time
Whatever life could teach the ash
it has taught me.
(...)
I must have slept a long time in the ash
I slept a long time in the ash
I slept a long time in the ash.
II
The scream obstructed inside is lamenting outside
towards morning
sleep is refusing me
from outside somewhere a loooong
waiiiiil is erupting.
inside me the walls of cruelty.
sleeeeep take meeeee
in your arms.
when i get up
trudging along to the bathroom looking
sounds are breaking loose from my eyes.
inside then these tears flowing silently are yours are
saying. in the walls inside me
these stones are welled,
pulling out a sound i can’t pull out,
walled in the silence silence
of the stones,
thick, primal, towards the void, from the antechamber of the
night
tttwaaaards mooourningg:
I let you loooose on this lying world at last,
bitterly, bitteeeracidly
VI
me, you always, my love,
me, you always
i read it from the words flowing from your face
i cast a spell of love on your eyes, i cast a spell of
compassion on your hands
your mother disowned you
i wove you
into my life.
V
Don’t expect me to burn
I have burnt a lot, you know it.
I can’t burn, can’t
can’t my ashes are flying.
the gilette blade you plied in my dreams is in my
flesh.
without bleeding without hurting.
without
hurting
this world is ice, ice
ssssssss nothing’s
hurting
is false,
false what i’m saying
false, what you’re saying
becoming only
this world.
I’m already ash
ash ash aaah ash
if anything left
inside the ash my humanity’s
rising.
Let the world see now.
whiiiiite seeing
off on iiiiice
me
(liiice on iiice
white)
coughing up
blood
I
as they stood apart
the other calls the one who isn’t here:
they’re next to each other, when under each other
the world widens.
one offers the other fire
and like those with a different meaning
from an old book carrying their becoming with themselves
in an ooold book, then to add warmth
they’re adding a fairy tale
but yet becoming another fairy tale
transcending their becoming.
the other calls the one who isn’t there
that’s how magic becomes magic.
the other calls the one who isn’t there:
were they fairy tales...
Taiiiils...
VII
the world’s nothing
compared to the dome i built for you
let it collapse, let it go
—stars are imploding under—
as easy to doubt, as to believe
loose yourself to the world, or stay with me
i loved you so much beyond the world that
that we call it offering our heads as sacrifice on your
roaaad
us the barbarians.
VIII
broken down, yes, i broke down that edifice of lies:
for LLLies to reveaLLL themselves striPPed nakeDDD
you’re my nest
i your
S
IX
Casting me to a
world i don’t know
condemned, with no
sentence of my own, sileeeeeeenced.
our dream was called
aging together, that’s why, maybe,
it hurts so. do you
expect sentences of love from me
without the unity
which is a sentence?
doooon’t.
two women preparing
jam in the kitchen. with red peppers, etc.
a windy hill.
looking out on both sides,
horiiizon, etc.,
as if the earth not
a circle but slightly an ellipse.
besides, two women
not quite up to the curvatures of the earth, etc.
that’s how it was.
I’d believed her, as i believed myself.
to talk about love
that’s beyond what’s love! aaaah!
It was a dogma...
just.
that’s why i am so
diffused,
shoveled into this
world.
what do you want me
to say?
i have a tooth
irritated by the air.
that’s why my
silence, my speech.
besides i was
offended when i didn’t die by the initial pain.
first became human
then.
or or i was
remodeled from what was left.
which i remembered
surrendering to the pain
one doesn’t die, i
remembered,
one doesn’t diiii
iiie
ah, from the depth
of asia....
Parting
the Branches[2]
The roaring of the
forest will end, when?
I’m full of
scratches for a thousand years, parting the branches.
In that place...
where trees become visible one by one... is it far?
A sylvan
bombardment. We’d spent long, a very long winter,
and a summer
stretch... lie down a little, a little. Not so scary as
we worried, at least
with kids in the summer.
And it was a
secluded rare rose of the world, the spring.
Did we skip it
without smelling it, smelling it?
What occasionally
reveals itself is the g-spot of routine without
ever parting the
branches, without ever. But with no smelling?
I saw. She, feeling
dizzy because of the shaking of trees
the world was
feeling dizzy. Spare for me in the monotony of the prairie,
the routine of the
meadows, the placidity of the river, only this occasional revealing. Once more.
Only those times.
Spare them for me. Once more.
A slightly high
plateau, before mountains show their majesty.
Horses
They were like the wind, with them we were also like the
wind.
Their absence now
an empty space.
That must be the reason why
the sound of the grass is so far away now.
...
They were like the wind, with them we were also like the
wind.
Passing the clouds, the grass, the meadows we touched the
river.
Migrating to the mountains, descending the mountains we
lived by our names.
Life is a lightning strike we said, we learned it from them.
Our youth was the burning sun, the proud wind.
Our aged carried rain on their faces, grew their hair...
aaaah,
wee said... d... d... d.
Horses that suffer my grief, flattening the hills.
Horses that warm my heart.
A brown evening is round here, horses aren't.
Birhan
Keskin's Y'ol[3]
Birhan Keskin's (1963-) Y'ol
is about a love affair between two women that through breakup, loss and
suffering becomes transformed into a spiritual, potentially divine experience.
In that respect, it follows the path of the quintessential story of Turkish
poetry, Leila and Majnun, where
Majnun loses his beloved Leila whose family refuses to give her to him. He goes
insane ("Majnun" means crazy, lost, a vagabond). When finally her
family relents and bring her to him, he does not recognize her (he says,
"you are not Leila"), so transformed was his love for her to a
spiritual state of becoming. The very title of the poem points to this
metamorphosis. "Yol" means "road" in Turkish, which Keskin
deconstructs by adding an apostrophe after "Y." The last two letters
"ol" means "become." In other words, the title says
"the road of/towards becoming."
In the essay
"A Godless Sufism: Ideas on the Twentieth-Century Turkish Poetry"[4]
I argue that, though the word "god" is almost
never mentioned, a spirituality which I call "godless Sufism"
permeates modern Turkish poetry. The essay caused quite a olcontroversy in
literary circles at its first publication in 1995 and was attacked by all
sides. The secularists thought I was infiltrating religion back into the
language of poetry after Atatürk's reforms. The religious people thought I was
being blasphemous. In effect, I was doing neither. I was just pointing to
something that to me was "hidden in plain sight": Turkish character
is deeply, inescapably spiritual—often tinged with a violent eroticism— and its poetry reflects it. A yearning
spirituality, full of tears and suffering, is at the core of its power. Because
20th century Turkish after Atatürk's linguistic reforms had discarded a lot of the
Arabic and Persian vocabulary that embodied the spiritual/erotic Sufism of
those two languages (particularly of Persian and Hafiz's poetry), modern
Turkish poets had to pursue and rediscover it in the agglutinations of the
Turkish syntax and its pantheistic connections to a pre-Islamic central Asian
landscape. In this interaction between spirituality and syntax (which I call
Eda) Turkish poetry gains its stunning originality. Shifting the focus of
attention from vocabulary to the intonations, cadences of an infinitlely
flexible and suggestive syntax, Turkish poetry became an ideal, potent vehicle
for suppressed communication—be it sexual, political or religious.
Birhan Keskin's
poetry, particularly Y'ol, is in the
middle of this tradition, Eda. In fact, the first written response to "godless
Sufism" occurred in a review of Birhan Keskin's poetry by the Turkish poet
Ahmet Güntan in Kitap-lik. Güntan
said that he was at first bothered by the word "godless" because it
seemed to belie his own belief in God. Then, he realized that the term "godless
Sufism" referred to a presence, not spelled out; but pervasive in Keskin's
and many other Turkish poets' work without their being quite aware of it. The
term brought to consciousness, revealed the spiritual core of their writing:
that "god" was perhaps the most suppressed word, the invisible
pervasive presence, hidden in plain sight in secularist Turkey.
Y'ol consists of two parts: "taş
parçaları" and "eski dünya." "taş parçaları" consists
of forty-four "fragments" ("parçaları") which are sinuous,
austere coloratura[5]
songs focusing on the two lovers, their intimate moments, their quarrels, their
alienation from each other. "eski dünya" consists of thirteen pieces.
Their tones are more leisurely, philosophical. They are poems of ironic, often
heart-wrenching arrivals. A Central Asian landscape of prairies, mountains,
plains—the area where originally Turks came from—permeates them.
The present
manuscript consists of the entirety of the book, all the poems appearing in the
same order as in the Turkish original.
A Few Notes On Translating Birhan
Keskin's Y'ol.
During a long interview that covered many subjects in
Turkish for a Turkish journal, here is the way I described my processes
translating Birhan Keskin's Y'ol[6]:
"... The 'sound of the poem,' in the traditional sense, does not
represent the totality of the poem. For instance, the 'sound' in the poetry of
Eda is silent. Its music is among the words, in the movement the sentence
creates as it develops, in its cadence. The 'sound' of Eda is a sinuous, linear
movement of thought, as it evolves full of emotion and longing."
Birhan Keskin's Y'ol is exactly such a line. It is
something that is simultaneously seen and heard. I began the translation of Y'ol with the fragments in "casting
pebbles." In many of these pieces in Turkish there are spots like
"yooooooğğğğğğğ" ("...") or "uffffffffffffuk"
("...") that are reminiscent of concrete poems. These are spots that
suddenly stop the poem from being read aloud, "voiced out," creating
cracks, silences—voices that can be uttered freely in the mountains, but in the
daily world of suffering and hurt are suppressed, silenced. The second section
of Y'ol "the old world"
starts in the mountains, the woods. The language of this part is opener, more
relaxed, a language that uses longer
lines.
Translating Y'ol, I had on my mind the American
blues, the voice of Billy Holliday and the Turkish singer Safiye Aylar's
singing style. In American English, the blues lyrics constitute a treasure
chest of tangential, elliptical
language. Everything in blues is expressed in coded fragments. Particularly in
the last years of her life, Billy Holliday's voice is full of
"imperfections." The unforgettable beauty of her voice lies in the
variations in tempo and harmony she creates with her words. In other words, in
Holliday's language, while singing, there is something reminiscent of the fluid
word order of the Turkish syntax and Eda's cadences. While reading words like
"yooooooğğğğğğğ" in Y'ol
that reminded me of concrete poems, I thought of the way Safiye Aylar stretches
with diamond-like clarity the vowels in her songs. An emotional, almost
operatic force is hidden in the spare language of "casting pebbles."
Translating "casting pebbles," my problem was to synthesize those
"visual impurities," obstacles, with the rest of the language of the fragments to point to the emotional
power hidden in them that flared out through these obstacles.
[1]
The first ten poems in this selection (nine of them numbered) constitute the
first ten poems in the book and appear in the section called "casting
pebbles." They appear in the book in the same order as they appear here.
[2]
"Parting the Branches" and "Horses" are from the second se
ction of Y'ol entitled "the old
world."
[3]
Metis Yayinlari (Istanbul: Turkey), 2006
[4]
Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish
Poetry (Talisman House, Jersey City, 2004), pp. 323/34.
[5]
Keskin stretches certain vowels or consonants in "taş parçaları" in
the style of Turkish classical singers like Safiye Aylar.
[6]
The translation from the original interview is my own.
*****
Birhan Keskin
was born in Kırklareli, a town on the European side of Turkey, in 1963. She
graduated from the literature department of Istanbul University in sociology in
1986. She published her first poem in 1984. Between 1995 and 98, with her
friends, she published the literary journal Göçebe (Nomad). She worked as
an editor in numerous publications. Her poetry books are:
Delilirikler (Madlyrics), İskenderiye Library Publications, 1991; Bakarsın
Üzgün Dönerim (You Will Find That I Will Return Sad), Era Publishers, 1994;
Cinayet Kışı (The Winter of Murders) + İki Mektup (Two Letters), Göçebe
Poetry Books, 1996; Yirmi Lak Tablet (Twenty Milligram Pills) + Yolcunun Siyah
Bavulu (The Traveler’s Black Suitcase), YKY, 1999; Yeryüzü Halleri (The
World’s Conditions), YKY, 2002; Kim Bağışlayacak Beni (her first five books,
Who Will Spare Me), Metis Publishers, 2005; Ba (Ba), Metis Publishers, 2005;
Y’ol (Y’ol ), Metis Publishers, 2006); Soğuk Kazı (The Cold Excavation), Metis
Publishers, 2010); Fakir Kene (The Poor Tick), Metis Publishers, 2016). Birhan
Keskin’s Ba won the Altın Portakal (Golden Orange) poetry prize in Turkey in
2006. Her Soğuk Kazi won the Metin Altıok poetry prize in 2016.
Murat Nemet-Nejat’s recent work includes the
poems Animals of Dawn (Talisman,
2016), The Spiritual Life of
Replicants (Talisman, 2011), the collaboration with the poet
Standard Schaefer “Alphabet Dialogues/Penis Monologues”; the translations
Seyhan Erözçelik’s Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman, 2010),
the republication by Green Integer Press of Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (2015);
and the essays «Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman
Melville and Eda” (Letters for Olson, edited by Benjamin
Hollander, Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), “Holiness and Jewish Rebellion:
‘Questions of Accent’ Twenty Years Afterward” (Languages of Modern Jewish
Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Joshua L. Miller and Anita
Norich (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and «Istanbul Noir» (Istanbul:
Metamorphoses In an Imperial City, edited by M. Akif Kirecci and Edward
Foster (Talisman, 2011). He is the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman, 2004).
Murat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on the poems Camels and Weasels and Io’s
Song, and a collection of translations from the Turkish poet Sami Baydar. Camels & Weasels is part of a
seven-part serial poem The Structure of
Escape which also includes the poems The
Spiritual Life of Replicants and Animals
of Dawn.