TURKISH AND PERSIAN POETRY
Will my funeral start in our courtyard below?
How will you bring my coffin down three floors?
The lift will not take it
and the stairs are too narrow.
Perhaps the courtyard will be knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons
perhaps there will be snow and children's cries mingling in the air
or the asphalt glistening with rain
and the dustbins littering the place as usual.
If in keeping with the custom here I am to go,
face open to the skies,
on the hearse, a pigeon might drop something on my brow, for luck.
Whether a band turns up or no, children will come near me,
children like funerals.
Our kitchen window will stare after me as I go,
the washing in the balcony will wave to see me off.
I have been happier here than you can ever imagine,
friends, I wish you all a long and happy life.
Moscow, April 1963
* This was the last poem Nazim Hikmet wrote – he died
soon afterwards. Translated by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar
from Modern Turkish Poetry (Poetry Book Society
Recommended Translation)
TUGRUL TANYOL (born 1953)
The dead calm gulf’s waters drew back.
The crazed stallion of desire got mad.
Autumn rushed into the gully of a shivering summer
like a snake rearing away from its black shadow.
Ah, the leaf that curls with pain and trembling happiness.
Is this a crumb of thought that brings life
to a feeling in an enigma? The total absence shattering
the sacred dust in the vast emptiness - perhaps a moonstone
perhaps that Satrap of darkness cloaked in green
from distant Kerbela, on the haj to Mecca,
in pillaged and looted Basra city.
Medieval, with a white beard and black turban
he seeps into the dead calm gulf’s waters.
Die, kill and be blessed
on the field where the crescent is split in two.
My God, where is the promised key to paradise?
The dark waters of the gulf bear away
the ownerless shadows of the purple corpses.
Translated by Richard McKane from Modern Turkish Poetry.
My hands remember a glass,
a glass full of water on the tablecloth.
What I held were my days,
fingers invisible at noon.
Streets of my childhood pass by.
Just now in the coffee-house I’m waiting
my own return from school
with lunchbox and satchel.
The tramcar sings a song
in the square.
The sea’s lapping the sides of the ships,
the clouds in the hunters’ bags.
And the tinkling bells of the water-sellers,
the siren-shrieks of the city’s toy-cars,
in the day the cicadas
or the shady foot of a plane-tree.
Translated by Ruth Christie from Voices of Memory:
Selected Poems of Oktay Rifat.
FORUGH FARROKHZAD (1933-1967)
In the Cold Streets of Night
I have no regrets;
Submission fills my thoughts,
A painful submission;
I kissed the cross of my destiny
at the top of my Golgothas.
In the cold streets of night
Couples always part in hesitation;
In the cold streets of night
There is no sound but
"Goodbye, goodbye!"
I have no regrets;
It seems as if my heart
is flowing somewhere beyond time;
Life will repeat my heart
And the blowballs that sail away
on the lake of the wind
Will repeat me.
Ah! Do you see
How my skin is bursting?
How milk is forming
In the blue veins of my breasts?
How blood is beginning
its cartilaginous growth
In my patient loins?
I am you,
you,
And also one who loves,
One who suddenly finds in herself
An obscure tie with thousands
of nostalgic, unclear things;
And I am the strong lust of the earth
That draws in all the waters
To fertilize all the plains.
Listen to my distant voice
In the heavy mist of the dawn incantations;
And look at me in the silence
of the mirrors
And see how I touch again
The dark depths of all dreams
With the remnants of my hands,
And tattoo my heart like a bloodstain
On the innocent moments
of happiness in life.
I have no regrets;
Talk to me, my beloved,
About the other "I"
Whom you will find
in the cold streets of night
With the same loving eyes,
And remember me
in the sad kisses she puts
On the kindly lines
beneath your eyes.
Translated by Mahmud Kianush from Modern Persian Poetry.
MAHMUD KIANUSH
FREEDOM
Freedom does not make its nest
In isolated cries;
Tell the dissidents to grow a tree
Rising high above the sun,
With branches spreading
All over the earth.
When the night brings fear and loneliness
Into my house,
In your house the sun has just risen;
And your shadow
Is no longer your enemy,
But a kind fellow traveller.
Perhaps freedom,
In its wanderings,
Would perch for a short while
On the rootless branch of your cry,
But do not forget that the night
Has still its sojourn in my house,
And the sun also
Will not stay in you house forever.
From Through the Window of Taj Mahal
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