Cover art by Ginevra Cave.
From Neil Patrick Doherty’s unpublished manuscript “The Stony Guests – An Anthology of Imagined Translations”, containing verse and biographies of the imagined poets. The selection offered here includes poetry translated from imagined poet Maryam Boyaciyan‘s work, with her full biography at the end of the article. Her challenge to the biography written by the ‘translator’ can be read in The Stony Guests – The Story, an article included in the Out of Bounds section of this issue. In subsequent issues, TDM will showcase additional ‘poets’ and their full biographies.
Maryam Boyaciyan
An Awkward Love Poem Written in a Language Not Fully Mine
Bestow on each other names
bright and new
that our lips
cannot perfectly form
so our tongues
cannot wholly taste
then from our bed we step
the sun lighting up
the quieter corners of the square
leaving in our wake
streaks of blood & hair
scraps of love in the heat
formed that strike the ear
as somehow wrong but
drawing back the curtains of night beam
like something unquestionably
right
…an all-conquering and vainglorious city
-When I wade across the river
will you still be
the mud under my feet
the reeds steadying my hands
the promise of a city
waiting to be founded
in the first light of morning?
*
-My gifts lost for ever
on the hard stone of the road
I spread out before you
my last remaining wares:
the smell of bread of roses
lingering in the lines of my skin
the bitter tang of childhood’s wine
curled up tense on the tip of my tongue
the rust of our village’s only key
snug in the palm of my hand
poor trinkets on which to build
an all-conquering, a vainglorious city
*
–Let the dust blow from under your feet
step down into the river cold
no eye have I for your gifts
no need have I for any of your words
the city you are to build
sleeps still in the warmth of the mud
the name you are to leave to posterity
sings through the wind in the reeds
step down swim and right into me
*
all-conquering vainglorious city.
My land has been laid low, here I am at your door
The cities I had written
in your image
out on the great salt plain
– of them not one brick remains
The tents I had sewn
in the shape
of your full bud breasts
-of them not one stitch remains
The laws I had dictated
in the sound
of your early morning voice
– of them not one decree remains
The seas I had tamed
in the evenings
you sang of the shore
– of them not one grain remains
The skies I had harnessed
in the nights
sleep fell from your face
– of them not one star remains
The language I had purified
in the dictionaries
that spelt only your name
– of them not one word remains
for past the sleeping border posts
over the lazy twisting roads
on the wind whistling
through the carefully pruned gardens
the fork tongued
leavings of our dreams
have come
my land has been laid low,
here I am at your door
Maryam Boyaciyan was born in that warren of streets known as Tatvala as the Empire staggered and stumbled. Sometime in the late 1890’s her father abandoned his native city of Van and tramped the length of Anatolia until he came to Kasımpaşa, that shy neighbourhood that lies directly across the water from oldest part of the Polis, and there he began hauling sacks of low-grade coal up and down its streets. The cliché of the peasant working his way from rural poverty to urban riches only half applies in the case of Arto Boyaciyan. There was not a single soul in those days who doubted his capacity and appetite for hard physical work but whispers of a lost will and a hastily dispatched old Greek woman in the then sleepy village of Ortaköy became enmeshed, sometime before the old century ended, in the syllables of his name. As death and catastrophe stalked the Empire the Hamidian Police were unable, for a myriad of reasons, to pin anything on him. And so, despite the semi-darkness that enshrouded the name, middle-class salons and mores beckoned. Marriage to the daughter of a Beyoğlu confectioner produced two striking looking children: the dark haired, blue eyed Danyal and the light skinned, smiling Maryam, who, after an uneventful childhood, decided to leave the school for young ladies she had been attending in Harbiye -an institution to which her mother had attached the greatest importance- in 1918, in order to travel to Russia to take part in the new society that was being ushered into existence there. Needless to say, the lack of passport and anything resembling money, coupled with the fierce will of a father with a secret hanging over him put a swift end to any dream she may have entertained. Instead she was encouraged to take lessons in the relatively new art of photography. This, it was hoped, would keep her mind from all things Russian. And seemingly it did. However, it quickly took on the proportions of an obsession and there was not a single soul in the newly built apartment block the family moved into in Kadıköy that was not cajoled into posing for her. At nights, when only a few lights from ships twinkled on the Sea of Marmara she would read the poetry of Akhmatova and Blok and translate them into Armenian and Turkish from the shaky French versions published in a journal in Lyons she had delivered to her door every month. This she kept as a closely guarded secret.
Not one of them suspected that, over tea and cheap cigarettes, Maryam would feverishly write poems in Armenian, the language of her childhood. The mere idea of a woman writing love poetry struck her as mildly scandalous and so every poem was locked away with a cache of her more illicit pictures and the letters an admirer in Sinop had written to her in 1933. Not until a French-speaking Russian poet from Astrakhan happened to stroll into her studio in late 1952 and mention how he had sat with Akhmatova in her various Petersburg homes over the long years of the Bolsheviks, the Terror and the Siege did something snap inside her and quietly, so quietly she asked her customer to elucidate further; something he was only too willing to do. Maryam shut the shop and set a small flame under the samovar and listened to the heavily accented-French of Timur Makhmadov tell her of snow, revolution, stale bread, fear and the lines that, over the years, dug slowly but surely into Anna’s face. Moved beyond anything she had words for, she stood up and pulled the dossier containing her poems out of the drawer and dropped it onto the lap of the chattering Russian. “And these, these are my little creations”, she smiled, blood racing in the veins of her neck. “That I cannot hope to read”, smiled Makhmadov. So shyly she began translating them into her imperfect French, all the time watching the reaction of her strange guest who, after the fourth poem, asked if he could have the poems copied to bring to friends in Yerevan, stammering: “Even in your High School Constantinople French they are striking, deep as the sorrow of your people”. The volume was issued in 1954 in the Armenian SSR and went into five editions in two years. However, Maryam told nobody, indeed she never spoke of it at all. Once the volume was issued, it seems, Maryam abandoned the writing of poetry and bought a lapdog to accompany her on her walks on the Moda shore. Among the vast treasure of her photographic archive a single copy of “My Land is Laid Low; Here I am at Your Door” was found. A few poems were translated into Turkish and for a week or so Maryam became the toast of literary Istanbul. Then she was forgotten again until Makhmadov knocked on my door last night and related all this. I now present it to you, dear reader.
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.
