A translation by Neil P. Doherty and Gökçenur Ç of seven poems by seminal Turkish poet Behçet Necatigil, printed here as an accompaniment to this essay on Necatigil by Gonca Özmen.
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The Ring
Scuffling in the ring someone
Though no one else is there
Into virtue they forever pushed us,
Laying mines in our fields.
Fugitives from the fire they smuggled
Worlds crumbling like us.
What was that? pockets rent
By money crying, me, me.
Bank after bank on one of
The busiest streets of the city.
Night. Now over:
Were they here on this street
Deserted and dark – this is all they’d see.
They pushed, night fell, everyone retreated
And yet they arrived –
How can I speak of this?
Scuffling in the ring someone
Though many are there.
The Flowers of Fear
No flowers of the prophet –
Nor bluebells, nor cyclamens;
It was always flowers of fear
That graced our pots.
From the skies that we stared at frightened and jaded
Hope in tomorrow is all we ever asked
Children, homes and bread…
But happiness, is this all there is?
Should a seed green in a poisonous ground
From the hemlock it has drunk blooms
A flower of fear, a corrupted crop.
It needs to be grafted; it needs to be cut
But isn’t it too late for us.
Every line we reached became a wall
When we couldn’t scale the slippery moss
And what comes next you know well
The world is beautiful…
If in it you don’t dwell.
Panic
Now Pan has abandoned the deserted meadows
For the cities where millions dwell
At noon during the long, scorching summers
He wanders over concrete and asphalt,
From luxurious pads in apartment blocks
Into the flashiest cars he leaps,
Keeping always those huge banks at his back,
And his minions there by his side.
He trains his sights on the quiet, the inarticulate,
Avoiding those who might bare their teeth
By factory wall and dull fortress gate
He pounces on the meagre joys
Of exhausted men of haggard women.
Not only in the scorching summers
But in each and every day of the great cities
He combs the boulevards in silent and treacherous laughter,
Coming face to face with him the destitute
Turn dizzy as barefoot they pound the hard, wet asphalt.
While in the city’s belly and in its remote corners
The needy, hungry and sick crawl
He isn’t quite done with humanity yet
He stokes this civilisation into fury
With atomic bombs and ballistic missiles.
If tomorrow, he lurks in the dark headlines,
Is hidden in bread and poisoned water
Or if his shadow has fallen on children’s faces
What hope can the like of us have in the future.
In every colour, race and drop of sweat
Among all of the oppressed…Pan!
If we cannot live with dignity in this world
What have all the past centuries left to us?
Bed
Somewhere everything is like the last days of Pompeii.
We are as we were when the lava was poured over us.
As for clothes strip & discard those old ones.
There so far away – fallen behind
He thinks: who are they who came & took
My coarse old clothes
To dress me in coarser ones still.
Sleeping so long on the mattress they laid down
That looked so different then,
But was really always the same.
Perhaps once it was some lovely, ever changing pattern –
As childhood restores the old glass cabinets....
No matter how much they turn its face it still
Falls behind.
Harbour
Their masts wrecked in heavy storms; the ships come &
Take refuge in us – we think we have found them.
They see nothing but the far distances.
We mend them – they go & we stay.
Then, at night- let this be the last, the last,
Send no more – we beg of the sea.
And then our loneliness grows
– more terrible still.
Guest Worker
Quickly it dries in the summer room
The laundry I hang out
Slowly I step through the doors
Perhaps word now will come.
Strangers venture out at night
The deserted streets all ours
In the dark a song
That goes unseen by day.
In the evenings come anguish
The need for, the revenge of home
Darkened and greyed
We will return one day.
Bearing Witness to the Age
Fling it off into the distance
And right back the boomerang comes
Empty squares, from top to bottom,
And from left to right,
So which letters should I pick
To solve the riddle?
Jagged
Ruins of ancient battlements
Then inside like some
Suicide the newer layers
Were the deception of
Companions known
Who would you believe
Which roads would you walk?
Childhood, once again, only childhood
And though it was bitter
We are grateful for it,
What other happy state could take its place?
If those grandmothers and daughters and houses
Exist no longer,
Whose land then is this
Over which I dwelled too much?
The orders
Sundering me from it, and it from me
Disrupt and do not leave us to ourselves,
Like me, so many values have just passed away.
Yet I am still there, resisting this age
What am I to you, what are you to me?
An old tale or something
Once dreamed.
Fling it off into the distance
And right back comes the boomerang
Behçet Necatigil; translated from the Turkish by Neil P. Doherty & Gökçenur Ç.
Background image: Alinari, Pompeii: The Columns of the Stabian Baths Gymnasium (Photograph by Alinari, 1931. 1931; Wellcome Collection).