TUĞRUL TANYOL
(1953)
BASRA
The dead calm gulf's waters drew back.
The crazed stallion of desire got mad.
Autumn rushed into the gully of a shivering summer
like a snake rearing away from its black shadow.
Ah, the leaf that curls with pain and trembling happiness.
Is this a crumb of thought that brings life
to a feeling in an enigma? The total absence shattering
the sacred dust in the vast emptiness - pe'haps a moonstone
perhaps that Satrap of darkness cloaked in green
from distant Kerbela, on the haj to Mecca,
in pillaged and looted Basra city.
Medieval, with a white beard and black tuIban
he seeps into the dead calm gulf's waters.
Die, kill and be blessed
on the field where the crescent is split in two.
My God, where is the promised key to paradise.
The dark waters of the gulf bear away
the ownerless shadows of the purple corpses.
Translated by Richard McKane
CEM
(The plight of the poet in Turkey is compared to Prince Cem's
misfortunes.)
To Mehmet Mufit
The day faded, red drops gleaming in its skirts.
I wandered night's eroded garden
In a yellow rain, enclosed by endless rocks,
Memories shaking my heart, the copper smell of flight,
My childhood a throne room, my sultanate lost in Bursa.
All the gates closed, every gate a wall.
I turned, I saw that great mirror reflecting
The migrant rain where being and nothingness merge.
The day faded, red drops gleaming in its skirts.
There were no gates at my coming. Sunset, the quay
The sunken hulls off Rhodes.
Through my galley's swollen beams I heard the wind's whisper etched
Across the vast waters of my face.
High hills there, here steep and bitter ways,
A horse's neigh, dark scent of rose,
Secret passages under temple ruins
And the chorus of petrified dead in musty cellars.
Who goes there? unwary traveller in this spring dawn
And virgins walking in white winding-sheets.
Suddenly lightning! gates appeared and vanished
Defeat and pain, flight and exile. With the copper smell
Of loneliness rising in time's lost mirror,
This curse forged on my brow, this unknown journey,
I felt a thousand redhot irons sear my flesh
My body hanging from dark crenels ---
Myself a spring dawn's sacrificial victim.
Suddenly rain! one half of my face washed away.
Lead seals me eyeless! These are my bridal gifts
A bass wind moans in the desolate hollows
The desolate caves of my eyes --- whose turn now?
All my mates hanged from the drowned rigging of my sunken ship
Oh my Celal! dear Sinan!
Where does this sea flow? We alone are left
Rain blots out all the gates.
I, Cem, till yesterday ruled half an empire.
My image faded on the coins I minted
I died a thousand deaths, I watched my own corpse
Striking the shore.
I walked with greasy ropes about my neck (sunset, the quay,
The sunken hulls off Rhodes) and now
The world has no more place for me
No house or palace, neither throne nor rank.
Give me your hand, elder brother, let me near,
Take me in, have me strangled if you need,
Part of me totally dark, part suddenly rain!
Days were buried in a forest's soundless scream,
In the bottomless wells of its heart. Courage:
The darkness behind my eyes is a haunted land
--- I'll never reach.
The day faded, red drops gleaming in its skirts,
A horse's neigh, dark scent of rose
And no gates at my coming.
The gates erased,
I, stranded in lost time, was left outside.
In this cold, this darkness of desolation,
I am alone, my hands my only light.
FATHERS FAR OFF
Some nights there's a child
who quietly shifts in his bed.
Loneliness like daylight
spreading in secret caverns
multiplies his desolation.
Some nights there are stars
as distant and many as themselves.
The child shivers silently in search of the warmth
spun in the hours when dust settles.
Some nights we travel far.
We look, a door opens in darkness, dust flies up.
There a man moves quietly apart from a woman;
there a child curls up in himself.
Some nights fathers grow old and distant.
There's the muffled silence of a stone cast in water,
moonlight, shadows - a paper boat.
Some nights far off, behind a hill
the plain: the image of a scream in the cup of my hands.
WHERE MOTHERS STAY YOUNG
To write a poem all weeping must stop.
The poem begins where feelings rest,
Writing, where childhood ends and love feels chilled,
Where mothers stay always young.
The frozen heat of these piles of snow
That has never for centuries abated
At the threshold of our old home
With its faded windows,
Moves quietly into my heart.
Look mother, I'm that child up there
My skinny body trembling at your song.
On the crystal window thoughts appear and vanish
Struggling with huge snow-images outside.
I watched you from every corner of the room
A picture imprinted on my eyes, perhaps it was you
Who sketched my happiest moments, silence
Trembling on your lips from those worn tiles.
Now I rub the invisible windows of dusty memories
I'm outside, mother, it's snowing and I'm cold.
Take me in, hug me, warm my body
I'm falling, falling from high in that old room.
To write a poem all weeping must stop.
The poem begins where feelings rest,
Writing, where childhood ends and love feels chilled,
Where mothers stay always young.
THE COLD PALACE OF THE FAITHLESS NYMPH
She dabbles her feet in the chill water
loving her water-image that looks at herself,
a seagull flies
from the rocks where she runs,
a rider suddenly is on her,
she feels the horse's breath on her cheeks
and in one bead of sweat that falls from its cheeks
to her nipples
she traces its footprints through all the continents it crossed.
In the taut skin of its belly she hears
the boom and throb of never-ending drums.
From the chill waters where her feet are dipped
she creates a love-ring and casts it wide;
from the light that blinds men's eyes
who are caught in those rings
a dragon takes shape
and waits for those captive souls.
In that forest of captive souls
how many trees could escape?
Hearts hang in the sun to dry
on the sharp-pointed branches,
many a sightless man looking at the past
through hollows gouged
by sharp-beaked sparrows,
now waits for the cold palace of the faithless nymph.
Playfully dabbling her feet in the water
she looks at its scatter of limpid laughter,
she builds palaces of ice over winter's wounds,
under the ice the wound bleeds endlessly.
In the cold palace of the faithless nymph
woman finds herself
and man is turned to stone.
WINTER TALE
This winter we'll open new dream-tunnels in loneliness
and bury our faces a little deeper.
An old treasure-hunter will set sail for new islands;
the rivers again will be armed with pirate-ships.
Winter sleep, the long and tedious nights,
sometimes snow falls, sometimes from a book,
a child's left open, there steals a tale
of sultans, or three oranges or a riddle.
Winter obsessions, reality and dream,
who is the Sultan, who the child or pirate?
This winter we'll open up new tunnels and be buried
in blankets of snow.
What bark is this whose timbers inspire fear
in an old treasure-hunter? . . . a pirate-ship, for sure.
THE STRIPPED AGE
scooped-out regions of the sea, wind's tranquil childhood
some spectral people now scattered along the ways
the plant eating the corpse, the green of water-country
the river uniting us on the other bank in fields of happiness
ah! the place I've reached since my mother's desolate words
is a palace of loneliness, where caravans pass without touching
where are howling dogs and a road under the chilly moon goes no one
knows
where
where love is divided out in portons to be shared
what's left for me? I'm forty-three the stripped age
storm clouds swelling the palms of the sea
I trailed after them to these hill-tops
agonized eagle screams inside
the abyss was a stripped bone, there a spectral man
bleeding from deep wounds looked at me
it was a life bedecked with tinsel and tatt it passed
a mother's touch remained, on my cheek a pale tremor
Translated by Ruth Christie
Tuğrul Tanyol (1953, Istanbul) finished his elementary through high school education in Istanbul. He graduated from the Institute of Social Sciences at Boğaziçi University (1977). He completed his doctorate at the Faculty of Literature at Istanbul University (1980), and is currently a faculty member. He was on the editorial board of the poetry journals Üç Çiçek and Poetika, and is presently on the editorial board of the journal Özgür Edebiyat. He has written critical essays on poetry. His first poem was published in the journal Yeni İnsan (1970). Later poetry has been published in journals like Varlık, Somut, Türkiye Yazıları, Gösteri and Kitap-lık. His poetry has been translated into English, French, Spanish and German. He is a poet of the 1980’s generation and writes modern poetry with reference to poetic tradition, history and mysticism. Emphasizing lyricism and sound in his poems, he writes on themes of time, death, loneliness and love. His books of poetry: Elinden Tutun Günü/Catch the Day by the Hand (1983), Ağustos Dehlizleri/The Labyrinths of August (1985), Sudaki Anka/Water Phoenix (1990), Oda Müziği/Chamber Music (1992), İhanet Perisinin Soğuk Sarayı/The Cold Palace of the Unfaithful Nymph (1995), Büyü Bitti/The Magic Is Gone (2000) and Her Şey Bir Mevsim/A Season for Everything (2006).