Cover image: Photo of Limantour beach, California, by Tracy Allen.
SIRAN BAKIRCI
Who wrote this?
Who wrote this tea I drink
& every line of all we have hidden away:
rotted child bones
dog eared prayer books
& the last words of the forgotten dictator’s
dictated speeches
for all of these. his eyes blue & ablaze
were written by a hand as plump and fleshy as
the one you hold out in front of you.
i can he says suddenly changing tack
for weeks on end listen to nothing but the same
piece of music
exploring its strengths teasing out its weaknesses
until i have it
resolved and resigned
& i shout
i am that which, of myself,
necessarily exists
i am on the last string
necessarily me
but the sky is a sea
stretched tight on a rope above our heads
and we shelter fearing it will spill
& yet again wash the stain
that tiny voice left at the first sign of morning
so stir again and tell me
who wrote this you,
this i, this poorly spelt
we
just tell me this
then leave me be
A Sacred Thing
He soon grew tired of the pretence of cold
Of the utter barbarity he had shone like the gold
That had adorned the poems he sold
To the highest bidder in the agora
& found again
in the country lanes
the taste of the bitter butter
his singing aunts would churn
& found again
in the country lanes
the names of the smaller birds
come to feed from his soft hands
& so he began
to sing
of exile as
almost,
almost
a sacred thing
A Moral Text
Take a stick & thrash his eyes
till the images of what he has seen
trouble the air no more
for the goodness that we do
we do for the simple joy
of rolling it up in a ball
& tossing it unseen into
the depths of the sea
At Our Doors
Those not raised at our doors
denied the luxury
of our clothes
walked from the poorest of towns
keeping always their backs to the
shore
those not raised at our doors
will know nothing
of the language of the
stork
the song of the
yellowed thrush
& the fall of september evenings
on the curled up threshing floors
for we,
left behind in the borrowed light
we,
wrap these lines up in the finest of feathers
to urge them to alight,
though
we know
they can not
they will not,
on
those
far from
our
doors
Siran Bakırcı
The two volumes Siran Bakırcı published in the early fifties are almost impossible to find now. The printer and publisher, Serhii Hadjiandreas, witnessed his premises being burned to the ground during the pogrom of 6-7 September, 1955. Everything, including the type for Bakırcı’s two collections were totally destroyed. While there are certainly copies lying about in various houses throughout the great city they rarely turn up in second-hand bookshops. Mine were tracked down and sent from Alexandropoli and Burgas, where friends had been scouring through archives on my behalf. Bakırcı was, as the few reports of her attest, a formidable intellect, capable of incisive and witty conversation in Greek, Turkish, English and French. It is said she wrote an exhaustive study of Nazım Hikmet’s first book 835 Lines, and sent it to the poet as he languished in Bursa prison. However, it has never surfaced and there is nothing in Nazım’s letters to indicate he ever received the manuscript. The notoriously camera shy Bakırcı left not a single photograph behind. Her only relative is an old blind musician living on the outskirts of Athens who speaks of her love of dance, blue eyes, the Greek of Fener, tango and the silence that falls on the city once the call to prayer has ceased. None of these things made it into her verse.
SAIT B. KARAKAYA
Anatolikon, fragments
I
….it is of pillage & the silence of poets
we must speak Of the flights of discarded
leaves & the failed promise of the peach
——————————————————
set down in the pillar of autumn’s forbidding
Greek Planted in the soil for our eyes to scour
—————————————–to feast upon….
II
…with the bones of——— ancestors
rattling in their bags, they came
——–and thirsty, their——— longing
for the sea, for rain and the taste of each
& every fish & so with salt, with caked blood
we———- ————-smearing their lips with
the sounds they sold in the East—————-
as their tongues—————–in our poor man’s wine
their mouths—————–stretched to give praise
to you…
III
…beyond the walls oh—————————–
I placed my drunkenness in your——————
and donned your holy black cape————-
destined never to trace the———————
never to—————the shape——————
never to taste the dew curled up in your morning thighs
—————————ever ever again
and so, into your hands I commend———
——————————————————-
ah accept now this paltry confession.
IV
…it was towards evening
when I came to ford
the river
the last few coins
rattling in my hand
the water still
just there
beyond the midget swarms
and the words of men……
V
…& learning the paths to your door
my feet————————-
over stone over sty
over the ways of thought
they tread———————-
through the olive
the myrtle and the
gentle maple leaves
you have strewn in your wake….
VI
for Melih Cevdet
Mustafa,
——————–all——-years ago
When you awoke and found that note
That ate you up from the inside
Know now it was not my hand that wrote it:
“The morning so—————————-
and the taste of salt on his————-
oh what else could I do—————-
than mount on his horse and away
into the touch of the thrilling air”
VII
Caught between the desire
To leave the thigh of an ox
On the plate of a slave
And the (itch?) to tighten
The chains round his chest.
From a Medieval Anthology
I
You reduce the pillar of my
Home to sand and ask “where
are your children ma’am?” but I
do not I will not ever know
now all you have left to me: this stony
womb these tattered words and
the soldiers outside bearing their heads for
battle
II
I will run like a wise
deer to the bows of the
hunters over ground as dappled
as the hide of my children
telling their lost beads
I will run
like a wise deer to the bows
of the hunting
men
III
In grease in dirty
flour the poet
looks in childsong
in childgrief the
poet opens her
eyes even all this
this will not suffice:
on the knots of
the table she
carves the
oaths the years
have not yet
erased from the
fastness of her
heart.
In contrast, a little more is known of Sait Bünyamin Karakaya, born in Bartın on the west coast of the Turkish Black Sea in 1902. In the photographs of him that have come down to us, the viewer is struck by the large mop of almost shockingly blonde hair and his steely cold gaze. In 1920 he fled Bartın for Ankara in order to play his part in liberating Anatolia from the Greek invader and, just as the tide was about to turn in favour of the ragged army of Mustafa Kemal, he was injured in a skirmish near Eskişehir. At first the wound he received to his left hand did not seem very serious but it soon turned septic and he was informed by a surgeon who had spent the greater part of his life in Bosnia that he would lose it, but that, otherwise, he would make a full recovery. On the declaration of the Republic, nursing his stump in overly-long jacket sleeves he attended teacher training college and within a few short years he found himself drifting from teaching post to teaching post in a series in cities across Anatolia: Tokat, Kütahya, Burdur, Mardin and Kastamonu. In the quiet steppe evenings, he devoured the classics of Russian and French literature and trained his pen to write short stories based closely on what he had gleaned from Daudet, Chekhov and Maupassant. While they were well written, it seems, they lacked any insight and struggled to focus on the epiphanic moment on which the fate of a good short story often depends. He writes bitterly from Kütahya to his brother Ercüment in Bartın that “no magazine has yet deigned to publish a single word of mine; no editor has deigned to dash off a few lines of encouragement. I am, I feel, simply wasting my time at this. But then again, here in the steppes I have an enormous amount of time to waste”. In the following months and years, the short stories were given up in favour of backgammon, tobacco, strong tea and the study of Ancient Greek. This new passion, it seems, came from a desire to understand the past of the land for which he had given up a hand and for which the Greeks had staked everything, and lost. During the winter of 1929, after the alphabet was changed by government decree he began to write what he termed “documentary poems” in the manner of old gravestone inscriptions in Greek and Ottoman that he found around him as he wandered from dusty town to deserted village. What is striking is that he produced a plain poetry that eerily echoed developments elsewhere. Yet, it was impossible that Karakay had even heard the names Ezra Pound or Konstantin Kavafis. Over the course of the early 1930’s he began to assemble a poetic history of the peoples of Asia Minor, but every experiment he produced was again rejected by publishers in Istanbul and Ankara. This time the rejections were accompanied by angry letters asking him not to waste their time with poems that had half of the words missing or were “the product of some rural madhouse, out in the God forsaken steppes. Products of someone totally ignorant of how poetry functions”. By 1934 he was convinced that he had no gift for any form of writing and sent his brother a small packet of the poems he thought might be worth keeping in the family home in Bartın. On the 3rd January 1935 Karakaya left Tokat to walk to Sivas and was never heard of again. In the 1950’s Ercüment Karakaya had his brother’s poems published in a handful of literary magazines where they were once again attacked as imitations of western modes. A chance meeting with the older Karakaya in the train station in Afyon led to a friendship which opened a door just enough to let a tiny chink of light fall on this page. We dedicate this essay to him.
Neil P. Doherty is a translator, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1972 who has resided in Istanbul since 1995. He currently teaches in Bilgi University. He is a freelance translator of both Turkish and Irish poetry. In 2017 he was one of the editors of Turkish Poetry Today, which was published in the U.K by Red Hand Books. His translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, The Dreaming Machine, The Honest Ulsterman, Turkish Poetry Today, Arter (İstanbul), Advaitam Speaks, The Seattle Star, The Antonym, The Enchanting Verses and The Berlin Quarterly. He is currently working on volumes of poetry by Gonca Özmen and Behçet Necatigil.
