OKTAY RIFAT (1914–1988)
Selected Poems
Translated from the Turkish by Ruth Christie and Richard McKane
Agamemnon* I
1.
Leaving the ships to be scraped we trudged on, and reached a valley; each of us rolled a cigarette with fingers gnarled or missing.
A smoke killed time as we crouched and leant against the rocks.
The quickest way to kill time! It gets less and less or ends for good. Or then again, it expands against the pull of earth and the northeaster! Panting like squirrels, suspicious, always suspicious!
Whatever is ours is behind the mountain. But they are there, running away in the sudden flight of a partridge, or in a lizard’s glance, in every hole and under every stone.
They turned their fiery, sharp, savage weapons of destruction against us, cowardly with their long-shadowed spears, murderous as their guns or mortars, shells and bazookas.
Just when we say they can’t increase, they do! Their faces are like ours but inside their armor are gods, their luminous eyes terrifying!
“What have we done wrong?” we asked, “can someone tell us our crime?” We know the weight of guilt. Our backs bent double under this rock, our teeth blackened with this water.
If we must end up in hospital wards or in prison cells, or be sold dirt-cheap in the labor market, so be it!
From behind the barbed wire let’s look at someone taking random instant photographs of the white muslin over the copper yoghurt vessel, or the huge Prison full of light!
In the evening the water in our jug is finished and perched on stone, or sometimes concrete, our birds all fly away.
One piece of lokum* remains on the rose-patterned plate—God knows how! The fruit on the branch consumes night for us.
Yes, for us! Agamemnon laughs at this. Diomedes† belts on his swords to become the icon of deathless epics.
We walked on, crushing the reeds and arrived at the valley; smoking, we leant against the ancient rocks.
We crouch on the earth—dear earth!—but they stand upright—chacun à son goût!‡ They say they are descended from gods and their mansions have courtyards and fountains;
They play poker to the death on their rigged tables, they stack the cards and throw their bone chips for results,
They drink water from silver cups—blessed water!—we from the hollow of our hands. They have the fingers of cheats, ours are bony and workworn,
They fall and bleed like rotten rowan trees and ache all night long. And we mount the oxcarts to move away. The mountain path is easier at night.
We wait for the sparsely feathered farm-bird to sing; but from a distance the little bastard is silent on our tree.
They turned their fiery, sharp, savage weapons against us, with their long-shadowed cruel spears, murderous as guns and mortars, shells and bazookas!
We pruned the tree-trunks, thinned the tobacco seedlings, hoed the cotton automatically, how can we stop caring for them?
Our wives like deer with young, humbled, sweaty, some with a hoe or a sickle, poppies on the plain bleeding inwardly.
It’s evening, white as sheep’s wool the Pole Star is born, a rustling tremor moves mountain and rock. When it says, “Come!” you must up and leave, impossible not to leave!
Rainbows between two ages, great absorbent waterspouts moving in darkness, gushing skyward with rocks and earth,
And naked babies, village huts like leeches clinging to a barren mountainside, no windows, no tiles, made of poverty-stricken, sundried mudbricks.
2.
They struck us through the chest, they drilled a hole of destiny between our breasts! Back and breast became one, flesh bleeding through and through.
They struck us in the back, between the shoulders, the wind-fed spears pierced our necks, all hopes trembled on a branch of time.
They struck us through our hips, our bladders! Bronze clashed with bone, bone finally cracked with a human cry.
They struck us through the back of our necks! Their spears clove the root of our tongues. Our mouths filled with our teeth. Biting the bloody bronze with our palates!
They dragged us to hooks and ropes, loosened our hair to the wind, our untouched dreams still budding in our bosoms.
They buried us in fresh graves that we dug before we died, they lined us up against trees and walls and shot us all down at the same time.
They were many and had Diomedes at their head, but we had Helenos and Sarpedon* on our side, masters of every kind of warfare.
Agamemnon, you are with them, Priam and Hector† with us. If they are many and owl-eyed Athena backs them, what can we do!
Who’s to blame if they die? If they submit quietly to night and lose their lives in all their fineness, new generations will arise and sing the songs behind the mountain,
So the sail can be furled all day with song,
So if water wants the sea it can reach it,
Or if it wants it can end on the plain,
So the lokum can remain on the rose-patterned plate.
3.
They turned their fiery, sharp, savage weapons against us and with all their daggers drove us panic-stricken to the black loaves of bread.
In exile now, we were being wasted beyond the beyond. The flat bread not enough for us!
This is the fastest way to vanish; to crumble away bit by bit, to be lost forever. You say you are black seed, we are Phoenicians.
Further, they shout, further, to tales of desperation. Even if we cower in hollows of religion, further still! To vanish far away.
When they want to pluck us and cast us away, no one cares! Their mansions have fountains, they have prisons and hospital wards within.
They stick masks on our face, of tragedy or comedy. We have no mirrors to see ourselves in.
They thrust us into patched breeches, our women into black robes and empty us out into the city squares and stations. We looked nervously out of the windows, all the time suspicious, jumpy as squirrels.
They erase from under us the very earth we tread on! They blind us with hot irons. Go to the furthest beyond! Always behind bars, on stone or concrete.
They deprive us of sunlight and trees; they strip our arms of their ability to work and push us, push us away: to live shameless and reduced to fewer and fewer.
But it is we who invented time! The god Zeus sees us, silent on his throne untroubled on our behalf, swifter than lightning, finer than the abundant rain.
Yes, it is we who invented time! We sowed and reaped, we established the hourglass with plow and sickle; gradually the first notch in the bark deepened.
From the seamless rock we took the axe and fire. With the best-quality clay we molded the white-socked horses. We breathed love into nature.
We walked, we walked on to the sea to add the summons of the horizon to its phosphorescence and we whetted heavenly copper with the salt of dreams.
Therefore our trees blossom separately, the day of the plum and the almond are different, for our days are different;
As for them, they roll down a barren timeless mountain, pile up and lose control, strike mountain and stone, and foam in vain.
4.
All roads lead to loneliness in the sea’s flank—my Beloved Sea! We came to the misty domes and suddenly battle began.
Like day, belief in death dawned, gleaming at the point of the spears, and heroism in the bloodsoaked square looked out for anything suspicious.
Broad daylight crouched in the mountain caves, the plain gathered its courage to its skirts, trees lay in mist, pain flowed on, wordless, reluctant.
Every day the waves begin again, rough and rocking, morning and evening we’re sick for home.
Those strange, idle horses, lashing out at the purple clouds, clearly indifferent to us, immortal steeds, stallions of the sky.
Cartridge belts filled and emptied with loss and waste, horn and drum played the music of death, continually sinking and swelling.
And the sharp tongues of wolves, licking at stagnant black water, belching death, sated on sticky liquid.
When discharged from service, we rest on the railings of the deep-bellied ships and throw a knapsack on our shoulder and set off on our way.
When we suddenly lay down the stretched bow, and light fails, when we abandon the winch and our longing dies, we mix time with Samian wine and stay with the earthenware pot.
Let us linger a little, linger at the happy feast and lower our masks of tragedy or comedy from their staffs to the brightly worked kilims.*
They turned their fiery, sharp, savage weapons against us and herded us toward the black bread.
But the cassava tree grows heavy with fruit, a beautiful tree, grafted from legends, red and green, unfailingly tracing the four seasons.
Some write our fate on our brow, fearful, crosswise, crooked in every detail, painful and absurd!
If we erase it, will the Writing of Clay, the main writing, the powerful Iambus* appear?
If we break off as we prune with our few distorted hands the large-eyed almond trees, will the thread of life spun by the three Armed Fates unravel?
5.
We sprayed them with bullets, we were defeated; the hungry mill of the bayram† revolves with blood. This head, or tail, or spleen! If this is a welcome by the gods, what can we do?
We gnawed and grew warm; a hyena stuck out his tongue, upright compared with a human’s licking the stagnant black water, belching death, sated on red liquid.
The green of a lark’s idleness! We buried tender maidens for the barren kings. The gods, the large-eyed, horned gods, our gold-toothed pirates!
If this is how we make peace with loneliness, woe betide us! Blessings and fire fail to appear, the present crouches before great and small, our rope ladders swing in emptiness.
We look through the lenses of eyelashes that grow dull and close before they open again, different cattle low, different horses neigh.
They piss on the warm earth, squatting like humans, smelling tree and earth, they howl and rave in their own lands; they insist on the meaningless joy of living.
Occasionally they look us in the face, before they divide land and sea. Irresponsible perhaps, but always lofty, supreme. It’s clear that they regard us as one with the Great Nobodaddy.*
They have balanced on a perch in the past; if we knock they won’t open their doors; their outer and inner are the same; they are long-haired and panicky like us.
So we knew them as gods, we killed and ate them, for what, to feel what, we don’t know!
Blood and bullets gushing from the earth, anger howling in the midst of our cholera, a single seagull-feather, turning and turning as it falls in the salty water.
They whinnied and neighed and, most frightening of all, were silent, on the road that passed through spring to loneliness, crowding close to ever-multiplying deaths.
They lie down in the sunny bee-laden meadow of days, in their blood the full force of May, suddenly more leafy and lively in the windmill of green.
Wrists fettered by war: the sands and sea of war! The halo wastes away, fades as war darkens.
If we sink the spear in earth, it grows green, bronze-tipped it’s hard to hold: so many leaves in the half-closed eyes of the plain, dazzled with May;
So many tumbling clouds, so much rain splashing on stones, emptying and slipping from the hand of war and want; nibbling the sunny, bee-laden grass.
With even more powerful guns they overwhelmed the women, hopeless as though fettered by fire, charging with the speed of water’s emptiness,
In the most terror-stricken period, they began in May and fell, completely fell, long-necked, gradually laying their heads down on the nettle-filled pillow of Night.
Defeated, worse than defeated, alive and crippled, worse than dead, lopped off, fiercely ripped out of the earth.
But when we sink the spear it grows green: bronze-tipped it’s hard to hold: so many leaves in the half-closed eyes of the plain, dazzled with May.
In so many yellows, the yellow of ages, and so many greens, a somersault of greens, in the greenest of days, right to Mount Ida.*
Agamemnon II
Had to go. Had to wait. Had to look at men, vehicles, roads.
A garden below, within us, scorched by autumn winds, untended; trees unpruned, bug-ridden.
Why squat by the side of ditches? Something that never ends, why keep silent as though it is finished?
Had to be silent in the great tumult, get up at an ungodly hour, at the hour when birds fall.
Had to talk, pick up the fallen birds. Why were they fated to fall and never meet night?
Our man smiled with his few teeth. He talked Kurdish in a whisper. He talked bad Phrygian.*
A wolf was gnawing at a piece of wood, stretched out a leg beside me, a paw alongside.
Scissors alongside, a towel right here; so many things far off, so far away.
They stay in the emptiness, like memories, gnawing at us.
Halt! Stop! Sword and spear right here! What about us? Who are we next to, who are we close to, over here?
My fingers fluttered by themselves, my left eye watching. I walked a rough line, sea farther away.
When I reach the sea the clouds come to meet me. The pebbles rattle, the heart grows big and expands!
Seagulls come and go. The back of the mountains hardens with distance and years pour from the rocks.
Exile comes and goes. The earth with its four poles, life with its four corners, becomes a ship. The surroundings dissolve: goat cheese and flat bread.
A lump in my throat. Loving comes and goes. What use are gaps between love if you don’t love.
What use is so much longing, meeting if no meeting! Sleeping if no sleeping, beauty if no beauty!
What use this suspicion behind suspicion, this grape-eyed dog, sparse coat, ready for the scrap heap!
Had to love and miss, to look at the street from the window, to be embraced by love, but not embraced.
The rope is so sad it can break. If it breaks the person will go mad and perhaps the nets of night and day will break.
Had to gather and cry night and day. Either move in the emptiness or stop, it’s all one.
Had to fight. To rise without rising, walk without walking, attack, strike.
Had to strike and not strike. Had to die. What is the use of dying if it’s like dying?
Had to break the unbreakable, to sit again, eat flat bread, drink water again.
To pause just a little! Have a smoke, stretch a leg that’s gone to sleep, turn lightly to one side, bend knees and stand up again!
Stand for how long? Why are your palms chafing?
“One comes, one goes!” Wait for the one who doesn’t come, then rejoice, make a noise and laugh as though they had come!
Had to rejoice and laugh, the purple clouds of the god flying over the mountain peaks.
Like a peasant plowing a field the god Zeus cascades his hair over the mountains and combs it with the lightning comb.
The heart expands and swells. He’s one who’s not little and he tells of the big one. There’s one with a profile like an immortal.
Slow as a shadow, stealthy as a snake. Squeezed into an indistinct time, between nonbeing and being. Only that man with his profile continuous, unending, never beginning, free from care and foolish.
Had to stretch and sleep. To close eyes in their nest, to empty without emptying, to stand still like standing.
What fair did I see you at? Which garden did we meet in? Did your hands slip from my palms?
Was what I wanted to think of your baggy trousers, your curls caressing my neck in this fearful dream?
Come, grow in my daylight, grow really big, grow as one grows.
Be mine without losing yourself or diminishing, be mine! Or move with morning in the emptiness, or stop, or never exist.
Had to believe without believing. Love comes and goes. Had to squat on the rocks of evening.
Had to look at the middle finger again, crooked inward; then somehow lie in the shade of a willow.
Had to carve a stick. Had to carve a thin branch.
My goats come down the forest path. The waters gone black. It must be evening.
Is it evening or not? If fire breaks out, all nature catches fire, so sinks the sun.
And if this ox comes off my tongue? This rock on my back, could I slowly let it go?
If I could sleep like sleeping, get up and look over there, like my own self, again, again….
Agamemnon III
1.
Our memories mix with leftover rains, the splendid Tree, collapsing in ruins, is shedding its leaves, unaware of new rivers.
Those years when the bridegroom’s clothes lay deposited in a chest and water ran in the reeds from the sandy earth to the spacious sky;
Those years that never bounce back, like an acrobat or the tumbling toy; they never bounce back even as we look; with another lake right there behind us and the sound of water we hear when we prick up our ears;
The flame sways in a stubborn delicate balance like an inner echo, like the sea, defiled and resolute;
We return to the fountain with the inscription and Sultan’s signature, we lean our mouths to the iron spout, the water decreasing little by little.
There was a message far from peaceful, from some instrument outside time, evidently not a god!
We should forget, forget quickly! Our cypress tree growing in the distance, all alone until war and the sword should cease again!
If we cut the branches at a single blow, all the insects would swarm over us from their sky path. Something falls, heavy and slow; evening or morning: it’s all the same.
But for this rocking the heart would break. We’re on the plain again: here’s Mount Ida, here’s Sinois, the seven-headed monster.
It was Achilles who found them and set them in place; who put the fallen head back on time’s body.
Achilles, you are our enemy here! You lay down the law for us: when you’re here, we’re here.
Our young warriors are recognized along with you—we are shield when you are spear, we are spear when you turn into shield;
You connect us to the days of history, it’s you who make us individuals; I was thirsty with you and hungry, shared your bed, was there with you and your black girl;
Everything begins and ends with you, whatever moves with you stays with you. You are my other face, my light in the dark.
You are the sword I hold at the ready, the breakwater that strikes my head, flooding in spray and foam as my wave crashes over.
2.
Here’s what we were thinking, standing side by side as Hector caressed the stern of the ship: we got into line, one by one like a chain, each link closed, each gap alone, our elbows touching: that’s enough for us men!
We look out through loopholes at the enemy, we are silent and like birds cry out in chorus.
The carpenters are up front, the wood carvers, gradually chipping and shaping the wood like flaky pastry;
There are those who love temporary work, and are bound to hearts that decay, there are those who know how to stay with stone and iron,
Those who do their thinking with adzes and two-handed saws, and their thirsting with barrels, scattering fates in wood shavings to make the wooden caskets.
We got into line, one by one, like a chain, linked but separate, our elbows touching: that’s enough for us men!
The plumbers are here! Making all kinds of liquid flow, knowing the laws of compound vessels, unblocking the blockages, dealing with spurting leaks;
They work with water, then with gas, with little taps, laying down dreams of long slender water;
The optical experts are standing behind, their songs magnify; they clarify each problem; the iron wars intensify in the lens.
And the lathe operators! The turners, the awl users, digging into the insides of emptiness.
Hand moves to iron, iron to hand: looms working like clockwork;
The unchangeable turns into something else, useful but terrible; resistant to cracking, like an almond that cracks;
The deepest silence will find its tongue, soft and damp;
Every evening that we watch, every evening behind the clouds a caravan whose little bells squeeze the heart;
A book right by a glass on the table, on the checkered tablecloth—a most immortal pause.
On the right at the front are the model-makers: they know how to sharpen their pairs of compasses, rebelling by night, embraced by time’s hour-hands;
They turn to draw a line on the vellum, their hands offer a bitter hieroglyph to the round sundials;
They are like waterless lakes, with all their dead frogs, squeezed tight, incredibly tight, silent and poised as an acrobat.
“So be it” they accept. We agree it must be. We all look at you and see you as no burden. This is the hour when humans are like Earth!
We’re here to give nourishment! To feed and satisfy wolf, bird, tree, humans, whatever—but death is grander than all.
3.
Today we gathered our dead from the plain. All gone quiet like the children’s game of Footsteps, stopped on the narrowest rung of life, completely silenced, defeated by the pull of earth,
Stripped of their arms, ashamed; scattered as though by autumn winds, the young still splendid at this stage, the old resigned and wise.
The eyes of many open, blinded by the sun, death between their cracked lips, festering wounds clotted and maggot-ridden, pasture to other lives.
The mighty dead with their little weapons! Palms outspread to the vast sky, they reached back to where they came from, earth and water.
They long to be refined by fire, or to grow as great as possible, to sustain other lives though they themselves no longer live.
Meanings and symbols are exhausted, suddenly and by many separate ways the end is reached, the end of sun and earth;
They lurk in malarial voids; the final balance of lyricism is separated by a single comma, with no future.
Their ships have vanished in the blue ryefield of adventure, willingly they’ve entered the circle of fire, the mine has exploded into a black swarm of insects—the infinite Bee.
Scorched by sirocco winds, their rations scattered, their drink sour, only a dry biscuit in their knapsacks.
Their unbreakable judgment broken, now there must be another hearing and Zeus the judge, the great sovereign, must gird himself with the starry robes of heaven.
Father and son, betrothed and married man, a closeness so close it’s not.
Heat so hot it’s cold! A bare foot, its memory bound to kilims, a different grip of the plows a different twist to the bolt.
This rush-mat left from him, this pain from him! These blue overalls, this cap, this grooved knife, whose if not his? If his, though, where?
Where’s Yesterday? Where the day before? Where the day we shared that lasted for years? Where the white shirt in the dappled sunlight that falls on the mulberry branch?
A wheatfield reaped, a hut in ruins, a tree that exists and lives only in thought.
And so alas! We didn’t describe them, let them stay with the pale tea in the coffeehouse with the patchy wall, we knew they were the salt of the earth.
All day they are with the bird, the sky with its sunny face, in the tin vessel and broken razor, in the hundred stooping roving köfte*-sellers on the pavements.
Swaying as they move, they can easily resemble rock and pain as they disperse at the indulgent hour to their separate shelves, like islands great and small.
I know we see you; it’s impossible not to see you—it is he who looks from the window, or wanders in fear; he is in the one who is touched, in the one who smells; we see him too when he looks beyond and combs the hair of the ferryboat on the pillow of roofs; we see you; it’s impossible not to!
To be different belongs to them; the unlike, the broad-hipped, the nobodies, all are theirs from beginning to end.
We keep calling, “Come with a message, come to us!” We are in the most fearful, horrible state of revolt; come put a stop at once to this agitation! Come, standing there with your indifference!
Come my child, come my ray of light; come, rocking on the highest branch of the tree: come with no ears to hear, with no eyes! Come, ours, mine!
You, walking with me where we lived together, by the wellhead where we drank rak
and laughed from the heart, a traveler with his horse, you, chained to my foot, the mountain with the shepherd’s pipe and the deer!
You for whom I tear my hair, don’t go but come! Later, if you like, don’t look but come now! Put an end to my pain, cleanse my wound with salt.
Come, give birth as the sun rises! Get your feet out of your blanket and walk! Get into your stride, walk straight to me.
Only there could we find it—only there it is not divisible. Something has to crack, or fall and come to a stop before we can cling to it.
I shed the bloodiest tears! Come, you who are all, who grasp all the living and the dead; you, only you!
You who pass in the red tram, buried in the coiled spring wheel of madness and discovery; a shadow green at the pulley-wheel of the well.
You, the one who appears beside me at every turn, through thick and thin; you, a blue whistle: you who turn the globe, skimming the surface;
You, absent; you in agitation; drying in the sun; heat at the foot of a whitewashed wall; sharing and being shared; the current that flows through the word, the pure poem.
4.
Every tongue eventually spoke its last, sun and earth came to the final end of every path, a heron on the last beach balanced on one leg, one foot with hope.
If hunger is appeased by plenty, never change the happy round of hunger and fulfillment, never let it diminish but continue on and on till night.
Suppose we look in the mirrors till night, on one foot! Suppose we have no fear of love and poetry and convert the diseases of high living into health on longing’s branch!
Suppose we load ourselves with fruit and dress in all nature’s precious stones and pulling like great oxen put an end to suffering! We would come face to face and ask, “Who are you?”
“Who are you who look like a brother?” Why only one nose and eyes apart? Why this loneliness so splendidly dull?
We herded along great suffering like huge oxen; our suns like sunken ships beyond the seas.
What’s to be done? And how? How can we break out roaring from the iron cocoon? How? How? Outside of us now there must be mountains, lights, books, and all of that!
To be between rabid madness and inaction…like this we stand still, the sound of the ambulance siren is dying away.
“What then?” we think; with the dead there’s death, with the living, life! It’s always this way, there’s fear of love and poetry, and bastard diseases that appear on longing’s branch.
And if the end means nothing, that’s how it is! Here comes the greatest message, powerful death in the race to the summit gradually hoisting its flag.