TRANSLATED FROM THE TURKISH BY NEIL P. DOHERTY

Translations dedicated to Chris Barron

Pharaoh

…’s grown up. You’d go to bed with a pharaoh of the early
mornings. The rainy months of exile.
Hairpins in your mouth. A bird, that likes to perch. On your arms
with their fiendish tattoos.
And your brother would carry your hair, black as coal. A city built, in
your smile, appears.
…. to a gun, ‘I love’, written on its butt, you’d run. An opium poppy,
ready to carry its passenger.

Epitafio

Drowned, they came from the sea in the early afternoon, to the indigo col-
oured houses secreted away on the quay of the green felt cafés. Her fate in Spanish –

They are bending their heads down before their big sister, just as in the
morning. So she could comb and part their hair down the middle. A dead
knot –

In screams and shouts she is calling them, out of a street of playing cards, over
the sandstone paving, in thousands and thousands of children’s games. A dra-
wn devil –

They see, and how beautifully and endlessly they laugh. Though
they will not now
come. Their bundles are being done up. They’re in a hurry. Decayed

Will she appear before them again, that fat woman who wanted her buckles
all done up, or also on the hard and mossy roads to Africa, their big
sister?

A Sightless Cat Black

And comes an absent-minded acrobat. Out of the sea of late hours.
Blows out the lamp. Stretches out by my weeping side. For the sake of Prophet Daniel.
Downstairs a blind woman. She’s family. Rants in a language I don’t understand. A heavy
butterfly on her breast. Broken drawers within. Up in the loft drinks Auntie Sorrow. And
embroiders. Let go from all those charitable schools. Through the street passes a sightless Cat
Black. A newly dead child in its sack. Whose wings didn’t fit in. He cries, the old rag & bone
man. A pirate ship! just sailed into the bay!

Masterful

1. The impoverished bird never forgets; it was the year of the book burnings.

We saw the sudden and stately entry through the forty gates
Of a headless horse, its pale ornamented rider within.
According to the Dervishes, shattered death was returning from the East.
And that is why the city is divided in three by a bitter water.

2. The impoverished bird never forgets those boys whose masters are dead.

On coming out of the sea, they combed each other’s hair.
Ah Istanbul my boy, the finest slice of the watermelon
You hide away, embarrassed, your heart, and smell of rotten flowers.
Over the reading text city fly dark pigeons.

3. The impoverished bird never forgets either, this golden law of dialectics.

In history, how many good princes shouldered their own horses without knowing it.
And here, on their sarcophagi are engraved masterful ghazals

A Dead Hungarian Acrobat

And then the awful laughter abated
And then I could see no one
They were all looking for me
A dead Hungarian acrobat found me found me
As the Simoom was blowing in from the sea

Elegy for a Handmade God

Well how did it happen that he remembered drowning at sea
well you know I can’t really explain how it happened

He was that fixed on death, no head for biology
a song now eats his hats and the whores grow fewer

But don’t cry like that no please don’t just
here, tramless, turning to child and bitter orange

Boss, did peruz the chanteuse really live?

Phaeton

for Erol Gülercan

What’s playing on his master’s voice gramophone
is it seems the delicate melancholy of her loneliness
my sister boards a phaeton of suicidal black
and through the streets of pera’s deathly love she passes

In raptures perhaps she who had gardens full of flowers
stops in front of a flowerless florist’s
her purple montenegrine revolver wrapped in tulle
photographs of oleanders and algerian violets in the window

I who have refrained from suicide these past three nights do not know
if the ascension to heaven of a suicidal black phaeton and its horses
was down to my sister choosing to buy the algerian violets

White Russian Woman

three tables down a god smoking a bafra
legs crossed,
in his window, a city, in the city, a street
                           ‘In the street’ a white russian woman
                            running out from behind the chairs
                            the white russian woman is running away
a train now
having finished the bank business pulls on his trousers
you the colossus why is it that you’re living in this house
                          just whyyy
                         are you forever cashing in abusing
                         this handmade god why
with his cigarette smoking fingers
your man is still at his window
and the white russian woman is running away

Also, read Road and other poems by Yatish Kumar, translated from the Hindi by Subha Sundar Ghosh, and published in The Antonym:

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