By Efe Duyan.
We’re Strangers Here, Dear Sir
He isn’t the kind that dies, he says,
Did I suggest the opposite
As I stood looking at his face?
But there’s no hiding around here, my dear Sir.
Doesn’t he know that in these streets
Death is present in the eyes of everyone?
He takes out a ledger or two with old writing –
‘His last will and testament’
I bend towards it, as if this will make things clearer.
We’ll hide, won’t we, my dear Sir?
We’ll hide as much as we can hide in this forsaken place.
Here, houses abandoned in every street
A thousand years of history summarized in architecture. I wonder –
Does he love the years he has lived? Accept
the ones collapsed and gone. They say
wine still burns his throat – is it strange to celebrate that?
I am confronted with a sweet and sneaky fate.
It’s snowing hard outside, we line up all we have
Around a tin can made of fire
We’re not kids now. More’s the pity I think
‘The man’s glad about it, my dear Sir.’ Let’s hope
Blacks and sleepless Bulgarians don’t rush out
Let’s hope incomprehensible oaths don’t collide in the exhaust fumes
He couldn’t care less that he had died and was in the street
How it happened I don’t know. I was just the one he stopped to talk to there.
Now I’m a stranger in these parts – good thing, too,
That I’m a stranger to this shitty world of ours-
For it’ll set on fire the knots inside our heads
I talk of dreams I think are really great,
Limitless maps and so on – and even though
Maybe no-one’s listening, that’s just fine by me.
It’s snowing hard outside
And I keep rubbing that summary of history in my palm
I’m so afraid, what if no-one listens? Not a soul…
It’s snowing hard outside
‘But there’s no summary of life, my dear Sir’
This loneliness of fire
Will always find a tin can to burn in
To melt away the barbed wire it comes up against.
In The Midst of Darkness
an old man and I are chatting
about things – he’s fed up with everything.
Leaning towards me, an elbow on the table
he says that life is simple if we get rid of assumptions
– earthquakes past and future in the papers
– A Chinese man covered himself from head to toe with his eyelids
– rivers burst their banks
– where is Burma? I’d like to know.
various statistics from the Tuzla shipyards,
a picture of a young man who didn’t know he was going to die
he’d been going to a tea garden in the evening
– where did the newsman get that bit of information I’d like to know…?
a mirror in the old man’s eyes
whispers of things in decades yet to come
when page three photos are full of my faces
and getting old is just a lie
things I have forgotten are like a knife
as soon as they are cut off –
what does it matter if no-one knows our honesty.
Me and My Toy Lightning Flashes
D’you think it didn’t happen, my dear friend?
I’ve told small lies and fibs, of course I have.
They’re like loose change here in my pockets
And of course I’ve told much bigger ones as well.
In the city of great dreams and great lies, let’s get this clear,
Everyone’s Istanbul belongs to them alone.
Mine belongs to several women
-no names, of course-
Full of all they have thrown out of other towns
Everybody’s days belong to them, dear friend
Just as everybody goes and lives their death themselves:
For the bus driver it’s the steel feathers
Of the Bosphorus Bridge that give him wings;
The Governor’s Office for the retired policeman;
The entrance door of a pistol pointed at his head;
The street I walk down of a morning is the middle
Of a handfull of pills for a woman who’s been left;
And the pavements of Surdibi are
The eyes of a homeless man who’s gazing into mine
You, like a god with his nose in air, pathetic and disguised –
Be sure to take a good look at the world!
Look at his Istanbul,
But you can’t touch it, just look
Like low-down angels; new observations
Write new verdicts in the margin in books of dreams
The Istanbul inside his overcoat – forbid that for a start–
A few banknotes hidden in a shoe – give that away.
He’s heard of Ayasophia – now talk about its architectural features –
But you and your toy lightning flashes –
All you can do is pass on to History what you’ve seen, all you can do
Is be dead scared of what you’ve seen, face the tree and count to ninety-nine
Look, there’s nothing at all in common between that guy and hope
But he loves this city more than anyone, smile
At the sun that will hit your face a moment later and
Maybe it’ll smile back at you.
But you don’t even know, do you? That
There’s a cloud covering the sun.
Now who’s going to be sorry for whom?
You for him
Or he for you, who knows?
An Excuse
broken bottles and that crutch of his around
I put myself in his place, knowing
that walking is happiness itself etcetera…
I know each child has unanswered questions, and
happy endings only exist in dust on windows at the back
but first of all, like the gulls circling around the city tip,
we must hunt with marble balls, one by one,
for things we in this neighbourhood know as fear
And then we must go and find that question
Oh for the sake of a thousand beavers! If we must die
then we must die together. Lets in any case –
isn’t that why I’m here?
but as the local train goes clattering on its way
I forget all I’ve learnt from the blackboard
of cracked walls we pass.
On arriving home it’s all gone from my head.
For the first thing we must remember is our dreams.
That waking up, etcetera, is happiness itself.
Then we must release the seagulls near the tip into the sea
The guy holds out his wine to me,
I must find a good excuse.
The Forgettable Death of Engin Çeber
A man is dead
I do not know him,
He is just another face in the morning paper
I stared at him for a second
And we shared a moment
One mask to another
His name a misprint
I realise later. When
Did life become a foreign word?
A man is dead
I didn’t even think about him
Let this be my crime
My share of the common ball of sins.
Let it lie,
A man is dead
Wind the violence like a clock
That ceremonial nothingness, the syrup of consolation
That cloud of forgetting,
Let the lie puppet my life
Let my heart pump this lie.
Let it flow in my veins
A man is dead
Let me hide the stench of death with autumn air
Let me walk in a country of lies
And let me include you in my blame.
We never knew who Engin Çeber was
He was born, he grew up and the details
of his death are reported in my morning paper:
when he was beaten up by the police on the street,
at the police station in Ä°stinye;
in a cell at the Metris prison,
just before he lost consciousness in a hospital.
He was all alone
And I am sure he was not afraid of death,
but rather of the not being understood
This alone closed the sleepless nights of revolution on his eyes
And his adventure in history
Was left incomplete.
This loneliness is not his, but ours
His heart’s desire is not his, but our
If I could just hear the last beat of his heart
Touch the last object he looked at, know his last words
Or when he last laughed – if I could know these things.
Your friends say that you liked to laugh, that you never took
Your hat off but in your prison photo your head is bare.
I wonder about you. I want to know you. For instance,
what did you think of last? Were you thinking of your past lovers?
Your friends tell me you were cheerful
I didn’t know you but your picture makes me wonder –
Did you really love life so much?
You left us and became a single face in the morning
paper. You left us in the gap between sorrow and curses.
A man is dead
I did not know him,
I stared at him for a second
And we shared the same moment.
In a moment I will take a hat from my wardrobe
and I will wonder – ‘Is it something you would wear?’
Looking at You
Upturning the turtle, little girl runs away
For the first time, turtle sees sky
Trans. by Raman Mundair
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Efe Duyan, born 1981 in Ä°stanbul, is a poet and architect. After graduating from the German School of Ä°stanbul he studied Architecture and Philosophy at Middle East Technical University (B.A.) and History and Theory of Architecture in Yıldız Tecnical University (M.S). He teaches architecture at Mimar Sinan University. His poems and essays have been published in several literary reviews such as Edebiyat EleÅŸtiri, Öteki”Siz, Damar, Kavram KarmaÅŸaand Akköy. He has been on editorial boards of the reviews Nikbinlik, Damar, Sol and Sanat Cephesi. He has published one collection of poems, Takas (2006) with Kemal Özer. His book The Construction of Characters in Nâzım Hikmet’s Poetry was published in 2008.
