We wish to commend Murat Nemet-Nejat's new translation of Turkish poet, Birhan Keskin's Y'ol, which in his afterward, the translator tells us, is "about a love affair between two women that through breakup, loss and suffering becomes transformed into a spiritual, potentially divine experience." I quote very briefly from "Offering," parenthetically cited as "a bit of accounting" and what some readers might take as an introduction in the form of a prose poem:
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 day I pulled a piece of stone out of me. Every day I implored sleep to take me in its arms. |
The first poem begins in despair:
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 |
Nemet-Nejat's afterward continues:
In that respect, [of transformation, the book]…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."
We do not have the original Turkish, unfortunately, but it is clear from this able translation that the poet experiments, both with separating and conflating words/sounds/letters:
In that respect, [of transformation, the book]…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."
We do not have the original Turkish, unfortunately, but it is clear from this able translation that the poet experiments, both with separating and conflating words/sounds/letters:
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 |
and which Nemet-Nejat amazingly translates in several poems in the series. Even as those vowels stretch, the connection with Leila and Majun indeed reverberates:
XXXIX
Love, between two people is what is never = I am not a Divan poet darling to chisel lines for you nevertheless, on the spur of the moment, I’d like people to know my attraction for your eyes, your hands, your feet. I’m of this mad times, this venomous moments the poet, in smithereens. What can I say, still, in me, from very ooold times, Ah, Lei... Ah, Leilaaaaa I left your name on a cold desert night. |
I am increasingly reminded of the poet, Ece Temelkuran's, similar Sufi use/understanding of animals and the natural world in her Book of the Edge. Keskin, in the second part of her work, the old world, and nearing the end of her account—moves towards the metamorphosis the translator speaks of, in an image, yes, in the language of a Sufi connection to nature (or, as Nemet-Nejat puts it, its " pantheistic connections to a pre-Islamic central Asian landscape"):
Ankara 2
I can not add any more to this scorched letter to describe my state I put a few blades of grass bent by the wind among its pages You, understand the rest. Ankara, I am your partridge, a black ring round my neck. |
To read Y'ol in its entirety, go to Spuyten Duyvil at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/y-ol.html.
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