HILMI YAVUZ
(1936)

JUDAS TREE AND TIME

when roads are transformed into leaves
                     and leaves into roads 
it's the Judas tree that encircles the promontory 
waiting and waiting and waiting... 
from which side of grief are you 
road soiled that you are?

                     it was you
a rose singing, even if 
you were to say, I've found the poem of poems, 
in that strange turn of thought, 
yearning for the poem prohibited 
                                      and bitter...

here's Time: 
Time's sad hour 
the Word 
whose slow, moired season disappearing 
and love is henceforth sung as a yearning... 
I've suddenly realized, how strange! 
the lake-likeness of your face...

I'm besieged 
in the nights buried in masses of snow 
a vast sheet of linen 
from afar, from very far 
it was a poem 
singing death 
and singing it again...

Translated by Ender Gurol

INWARDNESS  

Everything grows inward. What is a lake 
But its own sunken bed? This was in the wake 
Of sorrows unfurling their black 
And deep flags over my hull: 

Everything grows inward. My body 
Suddenly is country conceived; 
"I am the keel of my own self I am?" 
This is what was said. The sayer 
Was one of the other travellers; 

Everything grows inward. When the rose 
Is imminent in the bud. 
Language is on a pilgrimage to meet 
The word of love waiting on the shore 
Of incoming autumn. 
Everything grows inward. and now sadness, sadness 
The greatest opponent. 

Translated by Nermin Menemencioglu

Hilmi Yavuz was born in 1936 and graduated from Kabataş High School for Boys (1954), after which he worked as a journalist for a while and studied Philosophy in London while working for the BBC Radio (1964-1969). Coming back to Turkey, he wrote literary critiques for prominent newspapers. He taught History of Civilization and Philosophy at Boğaziçi and Mimar Sinan University. He is now a senior lecturer for the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Bilkent University. He started writing poems while still in high school for the Dönüm journal. His poetry is founded upon intense modern poetry and Turkish cultural history. He probes into deeper levels of poetic consciousness in his multi-dimensional poetry. Hilmi Yavuz has also published fictional works, essays and criticism.