Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Republic and Renascence
115
My feet and my rhymes are fettered,
My days pass with such lame feet of verse,
Don’t think I’m bragging if I say so myself,
My life is the loveliest poem.
Can Yücel (1926–99)
And so on, with all those majestic rulers—
Th
e glorious Ottoman Empire,
On whose realm the sun never set for 624 years,
Kept the whole world petrifi ed:
It was a legend, it died.
Nüzhet Erman (1926–96)
Like a fi le rasping such a wind blows
Th
orns glow but not the fl ower
Th
e travesty of an epoch strokes its tarred surface
In its warmth blood freezes it doesn’t get lukewarm
True existence straightens up on elbows
Th
e enemy sleeps water doesn’t.
Metin Eloğlu (1927–85)
Th
e weary faces of fathers on their faces,
Th
e mad fury of mothers on their faces;
and on their foreheads love’s ineradicable seal,
—My son, my wounded father.
Özdemir İnce (b. 1936)
Glittering seas noiseless poems closing doors
Are carrying the meteors to you
Th
e fi rst arrow tested on the wrong target
Mumbles deliriously about you
Sezai Karakoç (b. 1933)
Drowning its passion every night in cloudy booze,
It fails to fl y over the ramparts of Byzantium;
Groping through the darkness that grows dense in its heart,
It aspires to be like the poets in whose lines deer wander about.
Cevat Çapan (b. 1933)

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116
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
We are the tired warriors worn down by defeat aft er defeat
Too timid or ashamed to enjoy a drink
Someone gathers all the suns, keeps people waiting for them
It’s not the fear of shivering but warming up
We are the tired warriors, so many loves frighten us off 
Gülten Akın (b. 1933)
“A dungeon for dreams and ideas!”
Th
at must be
the biggest dream and idea of tyrants.
Ferit Edgü (b. 1936)
Every child is the clock tower of a town
in which aerialists swing toward death
the terrible tower of the death hours
one foot toward his mother the other toward death.
Kemal Özer (1935–2009)
Poetry is fi re’s messenger,
the arsonist.
It is the bird perched on the volcano.
Ülkü Tamer (b. 1937)
Poet you too took the path of your ancestors
I fear your weight cannot carry those countless calamities
Cahit Zarifoğlu (1940–87)
Only the tears of others
will remain from this love
and as you know it is always others who are witness
to death and life
Melisa Gürpınar (b. 1941)
Suff ering is the slow horse that trots back the distance it rode
Life’s hidden and ill-omened birdlime.
It makes us taste unexpected joys
And lends color to a bird’s wings,

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Republic and Renascence
117
Ripping the night open, weaving the day
It shows what simply doesn’t exist as existing.
Metin Altıok (1941–93)
My homeland is dragging me down and now I am like a house
whose plaster has fallen off 
It’s about to collapse, useless, ugly
Love me, guard the warmth of the kiss where your hair comes together
Prepare your hands to stay in my palms for years on end.
Ataol Behramoğlu (b. 1942)
What we craft is a great song. Each melody has lasted
a hundred years. Its end is a tale. What we
graft is a great song if only it could last
long 
aft er us . . .
Sennur Sezer (b. 1943)
White angels swim through its waters
human destiny, a scattered torso
now the world’s suns and the moon’s daybreak winds are growing pale
wilting at the soaring grove
and the moon glides with its silver rowboat into the roots of trees
Gülseli İnal (b. 1947)
the swans too are bound to darken
if death is narration
some days our bourgeoise necks will lose
their passion for stout ropes anyway
Murathan Mungan (b. 1955)
no one catches sight
of the wild ducks in the deltas
or the way they fall off the backs
of the female ducks
no one knows
but no one!

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