& Silk & Love & Flame
� BIRHAN �
KESKIN & Silk & Love & Flame
Translated by
George Messo Introduced by
Amanda Dalton
2013
Published by Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Original poems by Birhan Keskin © Metis Yayınları, Istanbul 2013 Translation copyright © George Messo 2013 Introduction copyright © Amanda Dalton 2013 Design by Tony Ward Printed in Great Britain by Lightning Source 978 1904614 57 9 (pbk) 978 1906570 51 4 (hbk) 978 1906570 40 8 (ebook) Acknowledgements Poems in this collection have been selected from Kim Bağışlayacak Beni (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2005) Ba (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2005) and are reproduced by kind permission of the publishers. The translator would like to thank the editors of the following journals and magazines in which some of these translations first appeared: Absinthe: New European Writing, Calque, Green Integer Review, Metamorphoses, Near East Review, Shearsman Magazine, Turkish Book Review, Turntable / Bluelight (online) and Words without Borders. He would also like particularly to thank Liz Amado who gave her time so generously in correcting his first drafts and whose many suggestions are now part of this book. Cover photo: Birhan Keskin Arc Publications gratefully acknowledges financial support for this book from the Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture & Tourism (TEDA). This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Arc Publications: ‘Visible Poets’ series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
Contents
Series Editor’s Note / 7 Translator’s Preface / 9 Introduction / 13 from Ba (2005) 22 / Eziyet • Torment / 23 22 / Hüzzam • Melody / 23 24 / İncir • Fig / 25 24 / Kesif Su • Dense Water / 25 24 / Afrika • Africa / 25 26 / Ferah Ayini • Rite of Ferah / 27 28 / Yelpaze • Fan / 29 28 / Ankara • Ankara / 29 30 / Nehir Manzarası • River View / 31 30 / Fiyort • Fjord / 31 32 / Vaziyet • State of Affair / 33 32 / Koyu Kıvam • High Density / 33 34 / Güneş… Yıldız • Sun… Star / 35 from Yeryüzü Hallerİ / States of the Earth (2002) 38 / Zümrüdüanka • Phoenix / 39 38 / Balık • Fish / 39 40 / Dağ • Mountain / 41 42 / Ova • Plain / 43 44 / Buzul • Glacier / 45 46 / Göl • Lake / 47 46 / Deniz • Sea / 47 48 / Çöl • Desert / 49 50 / İncir • Fig / 51 50 / Yolcu • Traveller / 51 52 / Kapı • Door / 53
from 20 Lak Tablet / 20 Polished Tablets (1999) 56 / Enstrümantal • Instrumental / 57 58 / Penguen • Penguin / 59 60 / Nar • Pomegranate Dream / 61 62 / Yaprak • Leaf / 63 62 / Huzur • Tranquility / 61 64 / Tünel • Tunnel / 65 66 / Su • Water / 67 68 / Yolcunun Siyah Bavulu • The Traveller’s Black Suitcase / 69 from Cİ nayet Kışı / Winter of Murder (1996) 80 / Dua • Prayer / 81 80 / Baldamlası • Honeydrop / 81 82 / Zaman • Time / 83 84 / Cinayet Kışı • Winter of Murder / 85 90 / Kaktüs and Teksas • Cactus and Texas / 91 94 / Mağara Çiçeği • Cave Flower / 95 fromBakarsınÜzgünDönerİm/IMayReturnUnhappily(1994) 98 / Ve İpek ve Aşk ve Alev • & Silk & Love & Flame / 99 from Delİlİr İkler / Crazy Lyrics (1991) 102 / Delilirikler I • Crazy Lyrics I / 103 104 / Delilirikler II • Crazy Lyrics II / 105 108 / Apollon I • Apollo I / 109 110 / Apollon II • Apollo II / 111 Biographical Notes / 112
Series Editor’s Note
The ‘Visible Poets’ series was established in 2000, and set out to challenge the view that translated poetry could or should be read without regard to the process of translation it had undergone. Since then, things have moved on. Today there is more translated poetry available and more debate on its nature, its status, and its relation to its original. We know that translated poetry is neither English poetry that has mysteriously arisen from a hidden foreign source, nor is it foreign poetry that has silently rewritten itself in English. We are more aware that translation lies at the heart of all our cultural exchange; without it, we must remain artistically and intellectually insular. One of the aims of the series was, and still is, to enrich our poetry with the very best work that has appeared elsewhere in the world. And the poetry-reading public is now more aware than it was at the start of this century that translation cannot simply be done by anyone with two languages. The translation of poetry is a creative act, and translated poetry stands or falls on the strength of the poet-translator’s art. For this reason ‘Visible Poets’ publishes only the work of the best translators, and gives each of them space, in a Preface, to talk about the trials and pleasures of their work. From the start, ‘Visible Poets’ books have been bilingual. Many readers will not speak the languages of the original poetry but they, too, are invited to compare the look and shape of the English poems with the originals. Those who can are encouraged to read both. Translation and original are presented side-by-side because translations do not displace the originals; they shed new light on them and are in turn themselves illuminated by the presence of their source poems. By drawing the readers’ attention to the act of translation itself, it is the aim of these books to make the work of both the original poets and their translators more visible. Jean Boase-Beier 7
Translators’ Preface
In the spring of 2004 I was on the verge of leaving Ankara for Riyadh. I’d been cleaning out my shelves and stumbled on a yellowing copy of Kitap, a weekly books supplement belonging to the Turkish daily newspaper Radikal. In it I came across a review of Yeryüzü Halleri by Birhan Keskin. I not only knew the author’s name, I even had the book. Two days earlier I’d packed it into a small box, unread, ready for shipping. It had sat on my shelf, undisturbed, for nearly two years. That random re-encounter in Kitap formed the catalyst of what was to become & Silk & Love & Flame. Over the next two years I sought out and read everything I could by or about Birhan Keskin. In 2005 the Istanbul publishing house Metis made the job easier when they reprinted all of Birhan’s five early collections under one cover, as Kim Bağışlayacak Beni. Then, in the following year, Birhan won Turkey’s prestigious Golden Orange Award for a new book, Ba. With so much attention focused on her work it seemed like a perfect time to suggest a book in English, so, with a bunch of rough drafts and notes already translated, I hurriedly contacted Birhan. With the help of her good friend Liz Amado, Birhan scrutinized my work with unwavering attention to detail. Her suggestions were invitations to reread and return again and again to the poems, just as her corrections became opportunities to re-engage and to slowly re-hear her poems emerging in my new language, to re-tune and refine what was, to my English, a very unfamiliar music. Birhan’s Turkish is finely honed and minimal. It is, at the same time, powerfully visual and evocative. Her lines are balanced and exact. At times, the challenges of translating her poems were considerable. My initial attempts 9
produced long, ponderous English lines which dressed themselves in sounds which seemed to be neither Birhan’s nor mine. I wanted the pattern of her music to show itself naturally through the shape and metre of my versions, and I found that by staying as close as I could to Birhan’s original punctuation, to her scorings, I was able to replicate some of the many contra-tempi where meaning, music and line dissolve, overlap, abruptly end, restart and repeat: The waiting boat at the coast, distant horizon its iron all rusted in an afternoon shadow memory holding a mirror to my life shed of its silvering ( from ‘Tranquility’, p. 63)
Punctuation was a vital key that gave me the flexibility to follow the patterns of ambiguity and suggestion that seemed at any moment to open up, and with it I tried to go further, deeper into the poems. Fluid and elusive, Birhan’s poems inhabit a space between cognition and remembering, testimony and invention. For the translator these are qualities that can appear like a mirage, with such tantalizing clarity, only to disappear the moment we try to speak the work in English. Eventually, the Birhan Keskin of my English poems became more and more visible, and more and more recognizable as the poet I had first read in Turkish. And when finally they began to talk back to their source, to echo Birhan’s unique poetry of the self, I felt we had the essence of a book in translation, the making of a new, invigorating and surprising dialogue. In an artistic culture traditionally dominated by men, Birhan Keskin is one of a growing number of women poets, 10
Lale Müldür, Betül Tarıman, Çiğdem Sezer, and Bejan Matur among them, who have risen to prominence since the mid 1990s for their bold, challenging verse – a phenomenon I document in my anthology From This Bridge: Contemporary Turkish Women Poets (Conversation PaperPress, 2010). Her singular claims as a stylist extend the poem’s linguistic range to embrace every facet of contemporary experience, in Turkey and beyond; a city-dweller whose unpredictable urban syntax brings the natural world and the inner worlds of the self into ever sharper and compelling relief. To a generation of younger poets, such as Gonca Özmen and Zeynep Köylü, her influence is palpable: the affirmation of a vital, necessary art. Over the years that I worked on Birhan’s poems I was helped, directly or indirectly, by more people than I could begin to thank. Dr Şenol Bezci at Bilkent University in Ankara saw more clearly than anyone else how closely I’d come to the mark without actually hitting it. I benefitted time and again from conversations with friends, never missing an opportunity to test their ears, most trusted of all: and therefore to Stephen McLoughlin, Kenny Fountain, Scott Christensen, Pam Cardwell, Bjarni Bjarnason and Deena Linett, my warmest thanks. To John Davis who, trapped in an office with me, more than once felt the weight and velocity of my need to talk, I offer my sincere gratitude and apology. Müge Sökmen at Metis Publishing, Liz Amado and Birhan all made this book happen in the way that it did. A residency at Translation House, Switzerland, in the summer of 2007 gave me additional time alone with the poems. Finally, it is to the people closest of all, who lived these poems as much as I did during those long years in Saudi Arabia, that this book belongs, to my wife and son, Semra and Bashaar. George Messo 11
& Silk & Love & Flame
EZİYET
Ağaç duruyor. Yol da, ot da. Duran bir şey var bende. Ağaç gibi. Onu ayaklandırıp, oradan oraya gitmem zor. Bende bir ağaç duruyor, bir ot. Eserse arada rüzgâr Ağacın saçlarını o tarıyor. Aşk ayaklandırmıştı bir kere hatırlıyorum, ama… Şimdi rüzgâr. Şimdi güz. Ağacın dallarını zorluyor.
HÜZZAM
Bütün suyunu dışarı terleyen Kuru ota döndürdün beni Kırkına ermeden, neden? Kış odasında camda buğu şimdi nefesim Bozkırda erguvan rüzgârdı eskiden.
22
TORMENT
The tree waits. The road too, and grass. Something waits still in me, like the tree. Difficult for me to rouse, to go from here to there. A tree, grass, waits in me, if wind sometimes blows it combs the tree’s hair. Once love roused it I remember, but… Now wind now autumn compels the tree’s branches.
MELODY
You turned me into dry grass That sweats out its juice Before I turned forty, why? Now my breath is mist on glass in the winter room Once it was purple wind on the steppe.
23
İNCİR
Ne yaprakları hatırlıyor ne güneşi Ne de düşmüş dalından. Balı içinde kurumuş bir heves gibi Duruyor yerinde geçen sonbahardan
KESİF SU
Puslu ve sarı bir Çin sabahı gibiyim bazen Sağım solum kış, şehir Üstüne ay mavisi düşmüş bazen uzak nehir Dünya bana göre bazen, bazı zehir.
AFRİKA
Savanda, sararmış kuru otlar arasında Dolanan yalnız bir fil gibiyim. Durduk yerde bir Igaussu şelalesi, Ya da aklımdan şimşekler geçir benim.
24
FIG
Remembers neither leaves nor sun Nor falling from its branch Its honey like a dried desire within Still in its place from last autumn.
DENSE WATER
Sometimes I’m like a misty yellow Chinese morning Winter, the city all around me, Sometimes a far-off river where the moon’s blue has dripped… Sometimes the world is for me, a kind of poison.
AFRICA
On the savanna I’m like a lone Elephant wandering in The dry yellowed grass. Conjure me out of the blue An Iguassu waterfall or lightning.
25
FERAH AYİNİ
Dünyanın bir yerinde, burada, bir göl öylece duruyor. Mavi eflatun bir sabah Dünyanın bir yerinde kendini yavaş yavaş kuruyor. Bir kadın, benden biraz küçük, ılık ılık, bana dünyayı, sabahın hayretini anlatıyor: (Bir su şiirinde ben, gürül gürül akan aşağı illermişim eskiden) Bir kadın, benden biraz küçük, Sıçrayan Su olsun mesela adı, üstümdeki sessiz örtüye yağıyor. Burada, dünyanın bir yerinde, bir göl, öylece duruyor, Arkada dağlar var, onlar; daha da dağ daha da dağ daha da dağ diye benim eflatunuma vuruyor. Bir şaman, burada, bir şaman davuluna Sabah olana dek kayının kederiyle vuruyor.
26
RITE OF FERAH
Somewhere in the world, here, there stands a lake. A blue lavender morning somewhere in the world slowly forms itself. A woman, a little younger than me, softly explains to me the world, the astonishment of morning: (Once, in a water poem, I was lowlands that flowed mightily) A woman, a little younger than me, let’s say her name is Splashing Water, pouring on my silent shroud. Here, somewhere in the world, there stands a lake, There are mountains behind it, beating my purple saying more mountain, even more. A shaman here, beating a shaman drum Until morning with the sorrow of a beech tree.
27