Cover art: Graffiti mural in Marseilles, photo by Pina Piccolo.
BOGHOS ÜRYANZADE
The Envoy Returns
Why have they sent me here
To this old harbour
Where the words of enemies
Who once refused to die
Still steal over the battlements
Over the ghosts of canons pikes oil
All the obsolete instruments of war?
Why have they sent me here
To wait in this dusty agora
With various useless gifts
Balanced in my arms my eyes fixed on
The land where my feet played as a child
Grown now grey grown strange grown utterly away
From all I care to know all I care to learn.
Why have they sent me here
Who wished to forge a simple undecorated art
Free of the arabesques and grace notes
That turn each step on this unholy ground
Into a treacherous maze
Of happiness’s I could never strip bare.
So why have they sent me here
Merely to soil my hands
In all that I am?
All I want
All I want is
to let time leave
to do nothing
as it slips away
but
sit still
in an old coffeehouse
drinking tea,
nursing my stiff
right hand
watching the strands
of every story
in my head
unravel
in the sawdust
of the floor
Loading Lumber
Loading lumber proved disastrous:
slipping,
sliding,
splitting hands,
spitting blood
/and so the not so simple
and not so virtuous children meet their end/
If you are wondering what this
is doing in my poem,
I am wondering what it is
not doing in yours…?
The single extant photograph of Boghos Üryanzade shows a man uneasy in the dark suit draped over his shoulders, eager to be out of the studio and out into the fresh air. It is said he worked as a stevedore, porter, pimp and tattooist in every post of the republic. Born into a Turkish speaking Greek-Armenian family in the city of Kars he walked barefoot to Ankara to join his older brothers in a soot-stained building near the parliament of the new state. From there he ventured to Izmir where he learned how to wield the tattooist’s knife and to speak rudimentary French from the European sailors who came to him to be decorated. The last we hear of him is as a porter, ferrying clients from the quays of Eminönü to plush hotels in Galata and, it is rumoured, possibly running guns for Dashnak. Only a handful of his poems survive, we have no idea when and how he wrote them but we must be content to imagine him sitting with a glass of tea in an early morning teahouse willing his roughly bitten pencil to crawl over the blotting paper he had bought from Ahmet Effendi’s huckster shop. “The Envoy Returns”, the most notable thing in his tiny oeuvre, displays a deep imagination and yearning for lands and peoples the poet knows he will never see.
THE PSEUDO-MELKON
And
I do accept the
‘and’
the premise that I am
and
I am not
here
breathing in this desert air
among the deadened ‘z’ sounds
and
scattered bedouin prayer
and
Yes
I am
and
I am not
offering you my neck
finer than any grain
of your ever flowing
sand
The Sublime
-by way of apology
Without the (spurious and half-digested
notion of the) sublime, he was never able
to feel anything right:
– buds broken softly in spring
– wild violets, cyclamens in her hair
– heightened words salted in despair
– steps walked in perfect metre
– breathless rhyme laid out in neat
– lines of wind just impolite enough
– never to ask when they can blow
And,
the soap for her back left untouched
the word for her thighs left unsaid
the lips for her neck left unpuckered
But
he reels
“the breath of the house
never lured us
never called us down
into mere poverty”.
The things you know me for are merely childish
He is delicate. With thin legs, tall,
a lock of grey hair swept over his
forehead and the residue of what might
once have been thought playing out under
his arched eyebrows. He transforms himself before us
on Tuesday mornings, sometimes he appears
young and lost, at other times old and
almost sure of himself. Though it
has to be said when the weather is
inclement he often doesn’t show up
at all. His footprints, and you must
surely have noticed them, are the one thing
that have not changed, or at least none
of us has ever seen them do so.
-It is said he is still waiting for his first seduction.
Of all the pen names found in the journals of the 1930’s none is as preposterous as that of “The Pseudo-Melkon”. No trace of a person who once lived and breathed is to be found behind this mask. Whatever trails might be pursued lead the pursuer into mere fiction. All that is known is that the poet wrote in a Turkish mostly free of traces of the Ottoman idiom that had yet to be purged from the verse of his contemporaries. There is also an ironic tone that seems slightly ahead of its time. One wonders what the lover to whom his best poem, “The Sublime”, is addressed thought of the confession, which smacks of a husband guilty of ignoring his wife’s needs as he chases after grand aesthetic theories and notions. Or perhaps the poet was a woman playing with the conventions of the age. The thought too strikes one that there never was a lover at all and that The Pseudo-Melkon sat in dusty beerhalls writing these things alone, merely to keep his hand in. Sadly, we will never know. Yet, in these few lines the voice of this unlikely poet still rings out.
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.
