THE GREATEST POET
It happened in Vienna;
a stroke of bad luck brought him there.
All the clothes he wears have been turned,
and often,
he says, he sleeps and wakes in them.
Though in their day they were all tailored
by Poole's in London,
they are all faded.
He has an overcoat
that was once black and is now mouldy green,
and a monocle, now his lamp at night.
God, what a life!
Pockets full of holes,
but no matter—there is nothing to fall through them.
He has just one worry:
closing time is early in the taverns.
He goes around with a dirty rag
that is his handkerchief.
His galoshes are someone else's, and when he walks
they flop, and mostly slip off his feet.
His headgear is not fez, not a cap, not a turban, nor yet a kalpak.
Could it be a hat? God forbid! It's something specially his own,
of another shape,
something like a beggar's bowl.
Nobody knows his origin, and they ask:
"Who is this freak, this wretch?
Quiet! Let's not scare him..."
And then they laugh and snarl at him.
Sometimes they feel a charitable urge—
"Penny for the poor!"—
and there is just one who calls him "the greatest poet."
Translated by Bernard Lewis
THE HIGH SEAT OF CONTEMPLATION
By the sea there is a pleasant place, gazing out upon the world
An ocean wave turned to stone, upon it rests a man
Who sits there like a phantom, ever occupied with thought
He is dressed all in white but seems to be in mourning
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
Have you seen these lonely places, do not think them empty
They are peopled with my fantasies, filled with import
They are surrounded by impotence yet replete with eternity
This is my place, a high seat on the margin of the sea
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
Hear the city's hue and cry girdled by a silence
Hear the cloud pour laughter, the bolt of sudden violence
Watch the thoughts emerge from trees, listen to the brook
In these wild places, come and hear eternity
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
Think on Being that commands manifestation of its own essence
From whose eternal substance are created earth and sky
Think on the sea whose every drop is an endless billow
These are the divine mysteries spoken by one heart, one tongue
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
That is the nothingness of the past in Will's red abyss
This the future's darkness in the blue of eternity
There an endless Grandeur stands in light and shadow
All beings, all things, all together in love
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
Ever do they kiss, the planet Venus and the mote
Bird and fish travel a single path, bat and moonbeam too
Sit for a time on this ocean-encircled pulpit of stone
See God in the moment containing all from sky to land to sea
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
Each constellation moves, the very embodiment of a thousand ages
Though outwardly a shadow, don't suppose it a transitory thing
This form—high and low—inclines toward its point of origin
They go on joyous and laughing, all recipients of Divine Grace
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
A voice returns in the valley, over and again, down cascade the
streams
The field is blue-green, sheep cotton-pink, mountains many-colored
The orchards all silver and gold gathered from the horizons and the
sea
If my heart is alone amid this merriment I can but weep
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
In the mist a tiny girl descends solitary from the peaks
As the sleepless dawn-star hangs on the point of rising
The sea's turmoil echoes in the wind-messenger's dream
Camel bells revive my heart's pain with memories of home
Clouds and waves and stars intimately surround me
Ever joyous are the stream and bird and flower and tree
Translated by Walter G. Andrews
[From
An Anthology of Turkish Literature, Edited by Kemal
Silay]
