Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

with the speaker calling for a new name for Istanbul to
represent its new spiritual (and historical) consciousness:
you are asleep now in the white washed Byzantine
room, you are very
alone. one of the ancients is saying, “Donʼt cry.”
“Tomorrow is your birthday. Tomorrow a new
name will be given to you.”
Lale Müldür was booed and stopped when she wanted
to read the poem in public in Istanbul. The fact that one of
the great poems of the 20th century was booed off stage
refl ects the confl icting forces in Turkey and the critical
position it has in our time. On the one hand, one has a
majority of the population instinctively turning away
from the West, insisting on the Islamic and ideological
singularity, purity, of Istanbul. On the other, one has a
poetic and political vision, incubated in Kemalism but
different from it, which dreams of a synthesis reconciling
antagonisms in a new order. It is a counter-vision to the
dilemma between civil war and reconciliation which has
beset many other cities in the Middle East, from Beirut to
Baghdad to Tel-Aviv.
b) “Coffee Grinds,” Seyhan Erozçelik, 1997
The poem is made of twenty-seven coffee cup readings
of fortune. The speakerʼs eye constantly moves among
arrangements of hardened coffee grinds—abstract shapes—
spinning a Shamanistic yarn of hope, desire and the future.
This telling and fi lling a pregnant emptiness with words—
full of animist images of nature—is the eda of the poem.
Hidden in this poetic gesture is the liberation of the former
Turkish republics: an Islamic population, but still with pre-
Islamic roots in Central Asia, which looks to Turkey as a
spiritual beacon:
A mass of coffee grindsʼs fl ying to the sky. A
profound sadness is getting up,
about to get up, and leave, leaving behind its space
empty, that is, nothing to interpret
in its stead. Either for good or evil.
A portion of universe waiting to be fi lled, is whatʼs
left.
Something has ended, youʼre relieved, have gotten
rid of a burden.
(What the load is, I canʼt tell.)
c) “souljam,” küçük İskender, 1994
Composed of six hundred forty-eight fragments, “souljam”
is simultaneously the most anarchic and mystical of Turkish
poems. The contradictory impulses of Turkey coexist in
this poem in their most violent and extreme forms, but in
exquisite balance nevertheless. Culled from entries in a
journal the poet kept from 1984 to 1993, the arrangement
of fragments seems arbitrary, following the subjectivity
of the poetʼs mind: an expression of exploding chaos.
On the other hand, a yearning spirit permeates the poem,
across fragments, suggesting that the seeming chaos
belongs to one single mind, that the chaos is illusionary, its
subjectivity divine.
One has in the poem the balance of contradictory
forces, the Sufi Arc of Descent (away from God) and
Ascent (towards God).
“souljam” is the nihilistic expression of a deeply
religious sensibility. While militantly gay and full of
blasphemies, the underlying emotion is a yearning love.
Stylistically, also, the poem pulls in East and West in
extreme incarnations. Ottoman poetic turns of phrase,
pop references, and scientifi c arguments “jam” (both in
a musical sense and the sense of violence) in a fertile
eclecticism, a cauldron of thoughts and feelings.
The refusal of the Turkish parliament to let in the
Americans and the poem “souljam” are part of an
existential continuum. Given the anxieties of Turkey about
its Kurdish population, the refusal was a self-destructive
act. But it was also a spiritual, popular act of solidarity,
of empathy beyond its borders. Like the poem, it was an
ambiguous destructive/regenerative gesture, pregnant with
truth.
The reality of Turkish poetry is that of looking into a
mirror. More than giving answers, it refl ects with dazzling
clarity the crisis and the potential rebirth of our time.
This poetry helps us understand the contradictions that
are Turkey without giving answers or opinions as to what
one can do. It only shows that the Turkish crisis is not
something which happens “there,” in a specifi c geographic
place, but, in a most concentrated form, is the crisis of all
of us, East and West, where we stand and where we may go
at this moment in our history.
_______________________
This essay originally appeared in The Daily Star (an Englishlanguage
daily published in Beirut, Lebanon), November 20,
2004.
Translation Review 79