These are the third and fourth poets from the Stony Guest project, after Maryam Boyaciyan and Nedim Baruh conceived and written by translator Neil P. Doherty. Imaginary translations of imaginary poets, whose overarching story is layed out by their unreliable author in a piece called THE STORY.
Cover art: Photo of the ruins of the church of Salaparuta, Sicily, courtesy of Modio Media.
OHANNES SESSIZOğLU
Deyrülzafaran
i have come to beg
poor child
not to be let in
not to kiss icons or cassocks
no
the arc of christ’s tongue
is not what i have come for
the harsh syllables
hacked out of a desert
now sown
with soft words
nor his single letter
hidden in your vaults
not for your blessing
on the head of my children
nor your myrrh
on the tears in my soul.
for none of these
have i eked my way
child
it is merely for
the word for water
that
i
have
come
Argo
Every year
at the first
dawn
of
summer
through the
various trees that
grow here
at the edge
of the world,
I see the Argonauts
pass,
lured on
by the
taste of
the
burnt fog
of Colchis.
Every year
I write these
lines,
every year,
I contemplate
the shape
of the Argo,
the smell of the brine,
the violet lash
of the sea.
Every year my
feet curl up
and my legs
stir towards the
pull of the
waves.
And so I
call out to
the tired arms
heaving the
free born oars,
to ears scoured by
salt and water.
And every year I
see my paltry words
fall
on the bone dry
grains of
the
shore.
After Kenan Sarıalioğlu
Half Asleep
Half
asleep
Half
in syllables of
sea
harbour
stilled
sails
breaking in
drying
wind
ah
sleep child
do not stir
to ask of
me
those
drowned in
dry markets
sun overhead
deaf to
their sad
pleas
those
lost
overboard in
deserted agoras
gulping
wave brine &
lee
ah how
they
stretch
their rosy
arms
out to
my keel
heart on sleeve
cap in hand
cursing their
little paeans
to
me
so
hush
child
sleep
do not
stir
to ask
of
Ohannes Sessizoğlu
I have decided to break all sorts of conventions and to offer my own biography. I have little trust in the methods and research skills of the editor. Upon hearing that he was assembling a collection of the poetry of what he presumptuously and somewhat preposterously, calls ‘The Stony Guests’, poets who have been buried in some “great anthology of forgetting”, I grew uneasy. For we, from where we currently dwell, do not quite see it in this manner. It was enough for us to have lived, to have experienced what we experienced and to have attempted to write it down. So what if our books are impossible to find, so what if nobody can remember our names, so what if the very language we wrote in has perished. This all seems from here to be hugely trivial. Yes, some of us were bent on making a name for ourselves and others had notions of leaving something precious to posterity. Yet as Sait B. Karakaya has attested, the words of even the most beloved poems are forgotten, are misremembered, are misspelt, are erased and, even worse, misunderstood. One lesson our generation learnt, (perhaps this is not an issue now, though it is difficult to understand from here, as getting what remains of my hands on a new journal is a tad difficult) is that words shed the skin of their meanings very quickly, and dress themselves up as something totally unrelated to the shape the reader expels from his or her mouth on a daily basis. How can you be sure the meaning, the aura, the feel and the texture of even the simplest words are the same now as when Homer, Sappho, Ó Rathaille, Goethe, Haşim or Akhmatova used them? Well, you can’t. A rose is a rose I hear you say. But is it? What if were a code word among medieval Bulgarian poets for the heady intoxication of love in Spring, what if it were a symbol of the unity of body and soul for Kurdish writers of song, what if it were a Serbian nod and wink for an uprising in the thirteenth month, and what if I told you the Ancient Welsh used it as a synonym for the seduction of young monks in the damp cold that comes down on a February morning? I have strayed from the goat path. What I am attempting to say is that we are not forgotten or neglected or anything as dramatic as that. We were read, we were left unread, we were quoted, we went unquoted, we were used and abused in love and hate and fumbling attempts at song. We were. The poems were one, but just one, way we were in the world. And, if you think hard enough on it, still are. The rest?
I was born in Feriköy to a family that spoke three languages at the same time. I chose Turkish and watched in fascination as the old language crumbled into the arms of the new. I wrote some poems, I left many more unwritten. That is all.
ANAYIZ PAPAZYAN
poem
between the poem and the street
lies a cat curled up into herself
her paw by the dirty puddle
stirring the remnants of the rain
butts, papers of the passers by
skirting past her eye:
tree lines streets, the lifting fog;
a ship nosing slowly to the hard shore.
a sober gate onto a clear morning:
the rose grinning at the honest fox.
and stealing round the corner
the promise of an old man’s kiss
trailing papers out from under its coat
between the poem and the street
lies a cat curled up into herself
& if we have worked no theory
& if we have worked no theory
of master & slave
of the organization of house & state
-our music still rifles the leaves
of the few trees left gasping on
the steppe
& if we have stitched no laughter or tears
into the idle lines of our washerwomen
to sell them to the highest bidder
on that feeble thing they call a stage
-our voices still blow
over the sparse grass of the plains
& if we have erected no dome
over light & space
counting beyond the span of our years
-our horses still know the
danger of dreaming
under the walnut shade
& if we leave nothing on paper
or stone know
our poems were
the bane of the mighty
the despair of the vain.
Brackish
out of my dress I slip
and brace myself for the slap
of cold of damp on my skin
silence rapt in a glass of water
placed by the window
the room: sealed abandoned
to drizzle over the rooftops as
the general huddles into himself
the knave steals down the stairs
a bowl of cherries
and cheap almond liquor
balance precariously in his hands
was it not here right on this bare floor
that we’d make love, losing our grip
on our already shaky grammar
stubbing our toes on the
unspoken words we’d spread out on the boards
gasping on each other’s shores
you remain, the almond liquor
conquering the room, so hard to love,
spitting the pits into his palms,
cold and quiet like some forgotten,
the heaving of chest hair, undrinkable water,
his penis tracing an arc of seriousness,
for which, i am sure, our ancestors had a word
the general turns in his sleep
the knave creeps back up the stairs
the last of the cherries
and the cheap almond liquor
balanced perfectly in his hands
silence rapt in a glass of water
placed by the window
the room: sealed abandoned
to the sounds of victory
slapping on my bare skin
Anayiz Papazyan
Why would you need to enumerate the facts of my life? To show that they can be squeezed into a few inches of white paper? The grief I felt when my mother died during my fourteenth year? Is that a fact that should be included in this short biography? Which of my poems was lit up by the howls of a girl cut adrift in a household of males at the very age when she could approach her mother as a woman rather than a mere figure? Has any poem ever caught that? Perhaps not you stammer. Well, I can safely say now that none has. Or ever will. And yet we persist in writing them. The second great fact was the single journey I undertook, while still alive, from Mersin to Istanbul in carts, trains and busses. I remember swans descending on a lake, clouds dispersing over snow-stained hills, two men crouching by the railroad as the rain poured down, a flock of sheep untended on some plain and bare foot children selling yoghurt one frosty morning. These are facts, these are things of greater import than the men who abandoned me in cafes in Şişli and Beyoğlu, or students who turned away from the syllables of the Armenian language and the old age that crept into my bones in the winter of 1938. Of the pieces that were published in magazines long since forgotten, I tried to fill them with the silence that haunted our homes, the street corners where our teddy boys dwelt no more and the curled-up photographs of football teams erased from the history of their league. I wrote whenever I felt inclined, whenever the need would tap on my shoulder and grin into my face. “Ah, but you are still here”, it would say before fading away into the flowery paper that festooned our walls. I know, you do not need to breathe a word, I failed but for that I am very grateful.
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.
