Translated from the Turkish by Neil P. Doherty
Facing the sea, a confession
Onto the pupils of our eyes the seagull was tracing the city’s silhouette,
& our white kissing mouths & our heads
Lined up on strings. Time is tight…
…. much too tight for the trees, though you’d swear
it was swelling and ready to explode.
“I am an international terrorist, me,”
he said,” … W.B. Yeats here in my pocket!”
Ruined loves, his life like a puzzle he’d put together many,
many times…
Time was licking the booze
that had spilled under the table.
All of a sudden we started to talk of this and that,
Sitting there, drinking at a bar…
__
History and Turtles
He struck the match, tossed it into the ash tray.
And everything within started to blaze,
a triangular pool, falling calendar
flowers papers, and the pearls’ nest
of fragile history.
Was it the turtles
who shouldered the accumulated dregs?
They are gathering up mouthportable tulips
and waking away, the turtles.
I do not understand
__
While reading a poem of W.B. Yeats to you,
I got lost in your nooks and crannies.
Wine grows lovely in the mouth
and love lovely in the eyes.
The wine in our mouths, it comes and goes,
from your eyes to mine, love comes and goes.
In the mirror stands life, the mirror
you’d fallen into, it cracks, leaving not a trace of mist.
And not a trace of breath
in me.
The glass in my mouth, you in the mirror,
in this world the only truth we will ever see.
I cannot look at you, I who bit the mirror,
who gnawed at your secret, my lips are now bleeding.
And you, you are looking at me,
your eyes in my eyes,
your pupils on the tip of my tongue.
Your eyes right inside my mouth.
“The deaf cannot remember” you say to me.
I know, it is the blind who remember.
I bring the glass up to my mouth,
looking at you, I weep.
Because I am blind and I remember you.
You are the last person I ever saw, how could I forget…
Look, as I lick your eyes,
I’m turning blind, I’m stumbling.
Stumbling and falling into your mirror.
I am becoming one with the mechanism in your heart.
Like clockwork we come and go together,
I’m growing longer, thinner in your blue veins.
But what if this heart stops!
But what if that heart stops!
I bring the glass up to my mouth
Looking at you, I bleed.
All of a sudden my eyes open.
My love, now I see you and now I weep.
Because I cannot remember you,
I can remember you.
I just remember that I remembered.
Your dregs remained behind in my heart,
grew lovely the more I remembered you.
We have no time to shroud all the loveliness.
Even the eyes of the blind are opening.
I look at you, seeing you now.
You grow more lovely the more I see you, I cannot keep up.
I am imprisoned somewhere between
the dregs in my heart and the truth.
I bring the glass up to my mouth,
you ooze out of my eyes
right onto my lips.
I touch your salt with my tongue.
Who is it that weeps?
Your love grows more lovely in my mouth.
My love for you was, perhaps, a mistake,
There’s no such thing as the perfect slave anyway!
I was reading a poem of W.B. Yeats to you,
all innocent,
Suddenly lost in your nooks and crannies
__
Despair, has ended
Let those who know, know and let them tell those who do not. Now that the Weasel has
fled the City, despair has ended. Despair and its book. ‘City’ I use, I have always used in
the sense our master Cavafy did -Istanbul, Konstaniyye- whatever name it bears… Those
living in Cavafy’s time just called it Polis for short. That is, the City. That follows us
wherever we go… carrying with it its despair.
In short, if there is no City, there is no despair.
Or there is another city, but it is not called Polis for short.
How odd, this is the first time I have spoken so plainly
__
Translator's Note
Seyhan Erözçelik was born in Bartın, a town on the western coast of the Black Sea in 1962. He published his first book “Düştanbul” (Dreamstanbul), was published in 1982 and this was followed by a large number of increasingly adventurous, playful and experimental collections until his untimely death in 2011. Throughout his work we find a philologist’s delight in words, Erözçelik mined the Turkish language for rare items of vocabulary and often invented new words from old roots. He also wrote in the dialect of his hometown and used other Turkic languages to almost undermine the official written version of the modern Turkish language. He often played with syntax, allowing the reader to construct many possible readings. There is little doubt that over the course of three decades that he was one of the most original poets in Turkish, as Efe Murad puts it: “Erözçelik creates a poetry of ideas where word is plugged into spirit, through the eye and the ear, creating an inextricable whole, reminiscent of the dynamic motions in film”. A volume of his poetry, “Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds”, translated by Murat Nemet-Najat was published in 2010 by Talisman House Publishing.
