Tablet & Pen

CAN YÜCEL (1926–1999)

Selected Poems

Translated from the Turkish by ehnaz Tahir Ruth Christie

Poem X

Those cavalry lights riding by the horse chestnuts

woke the honeysuckle up so very early

and they will freeze forever!

And the olives with old Greek lace

Blowing wind!

Whoever saw such a rose-eating rooster

Its voice with the scent of dawn…

It’s as if a wine bottle filled up in prison

is rolling down the hill

Other roosters also rise

with their ladder-embroidered crests

And when the babies’ dreams

dangle down the balconies

like a relay race with red flags

The roosters rediscover the sea

Thieves!

And the sea

with the marine shadows of Turgut Reis^*

Is offended by all these lines

And its face turns first red

then purple

Blowing wind!

This morning

is a flight

from a vendetta a child

Way before dawn

Will be shot by the bullets of the sun

And when the evening arrives on the pine trees

and darkness falls

Upon the hills

So beautiful is the blowing wind

Blowing wind!

This morning

and this spring

is a flight

A wick running for the gunpowder

Whiff

So beautiful is the blowing wind!

Blowing wind!

So beautiful

So very beautiful

Even when it blows not

Beautiful.

Translated by ehnaz Tahir

The Wall of Love

Was it you or your loneliness

In the blind dark we opened bleary eyes

Last night’s curses on our lips

We would frequent art-lesbian-lovers,

Galleries and public places

My daily care was to remove you into the midst of men

An ammoniac flower in your buttonhole

My loneliness my incontinent countess

The lower we sink the better

We loitered in the pubs at Kumkapi

With beanstew, beer, and wine before us

And police battalions behind us; in the mornings

My Guardian Saints would find my carcass in the gutters

Hot as the garbage-collectors’ hands,

With their hands I caressed you.

My loneliness my bristle-haired beauty,

The higher we stink the better

I looked in the sky a red flash a plane

Steel and stars and human beings galore

One night we leapt the Wall of love

Where I fell was so clear so open

You and the universe at my side.

Uncountable my deaths, their resurrections.

O loneliness my many songs

The more we can live without lies the better.

Translated by Ruth Christie