Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu (1913-1975) |
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Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and, after spending two years in Paris, was appointed to the Academy's faculty, where he taught until his death from cancer. He is known primarily as a poet but he was also a fine painter. POETRY: Yaradana Mektuplar (1941), Karadut (1948), Tuz (1952), Üçü Birden (1953), Dördü Birden (1956),(1969), Dol Karabakır Dol (1974). ESSAYS/TRAVEL NOTES: Cânım Anadolu (1953), Tezek (1975), Delifişek Karadut 69 (1975).
THE SAGA OF ISTANBULSay Istanbul and a seagull comes to mind Half-silver and half-foam, half-fish and half-bird. Say Istanbul and a fable comes to mind, The old wives' tale that we have all heard.
Say Istanbul and a mighty steamship comes to mind Whose songs are sung in the mud-baked huts of Anatolia; Milk flows out of her taps, roses bloom on her masts; My childhood in Anatolia's mud-baked huts Sail to Istanbul and back on that mighty steamship.
Say Istanbul and mottled grapes come to mind With three candles burning bright on the basket— Suddenly along comes a girl so ruthlessly female, With a figure so lovely that I'd give up my life for it, Her lips ripe with grape honey, A girl luscious and lustful from top to toe— Southern wind and willow branch and the dance of joy— Hailing from a wine cellar, she makes you tipsy; As the song goes, "Like a ship at sea My heart is tossed and wrecked again."
Say Istanbul and the Grand Bazaar comes to mind: Beethoven's Ninth hand in hand with the Algerian March; And an immaculate bridal bedroom set Is auctioned off without the bride and the groom. A chubby lute inlaid with mother-of-pearl Recalls the famous lutanist on old records. Brandishing candlesticks and hookahs and rusty Persian swords. American cowboys prop up: "Hands up!"
American sailors wear lily-white uniforms Plucked from a huge daisy, clear as milk, clean as a cloud; Death looks ugly on so pure a white, But when they fight They put their combat uniforms on —Color of blood and gunpowder and smoke— Which gather hate but no dirt.
Say Istanbul and a huge fishery comes to mind Like a rusty cobweb over the Bosphorus, Or sprawling off the Marmara coast. Forty tunnies toss in the fishery like forty millstones. The tunny, after all, is the king of the sea: You must shoot it in the eye with a rifle and fell it like a tree, Then suddenly the face of the fishery gets bloodshot And the emerald waters become muddled in the turmoil. With forty tunnies at a clip, the skipper is spellbound for joy. A seagull perched on the mast catches a mackerel in midair and gobbles it, Then it flies away without waiting for one more; The fisherman smiles, sweet and kind: "That gull's Maria," he says, "That's the way she comes and goes, always."
Say Istanbul and the Prince Islands come to mind Where the French language is murdered By sixtyish matrons who sit around puffed up as hell; If only the lonely pine trees there could tell All about the hanky panky of the boy with the gal.
Say Istanbul and towers come to mind: If I do a painting of one, the other one grumbles. The Tower of Leander ought to know that's the way the cookie crumbles: She should marry the Galata Tower and have lots of kids.
Say Istanbul and a waterfront street comes to mind: Anatolia's poor godforsaken huddled masses land In its coffeehouses day after day, Some must go begging to survive, but shame keeps them away; A few manage to find a broom and become street cleaners—no less, Their faces smeared with a filthy fusty grin; Others shoulder a pannier or an ornate backsaddle, And they all get lost in the city's hubbub and fiddlefaddle. Tied to a greasy girth, some carry a piano on their backs Their legs wobbly under the weight, melting like wax, They pant and heave, drenched in sweat. A gentle porter is a must for a fragile item. Do the tender hands value a piano the way the porter does? Suddenly a mushy voice blares on the radio across the street: The most popular crooner of them all, Yelping and yawning, smudged with the greasy perfumes of Arabia: "Life is full of joy and sorrow, Some stay and some go."
Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind Where twenty-five thousand voices under the sun Sing our national anthem in unison And the clouds are fired like cannonballs. Dazzled by the sight of twenty-five thousand strong I rejoice in their joyful song And offer to pluck my heart for them like a red poppy. Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind Where my blood flows into the veins of my fellow men. Rubbing shoulders, we holler together Till our throats are sore: Lefter's kick is a sure score. Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind Where multitudes share the grandeur of the joy Born at the same moment: Myriads and millions Band together in my head. Then a line out of a poem fearfully flutters in the air: "Blessed are those who embrace their loved ones."
Say Istanbul and Yahya Kemal used to come to mind; Nowadays it's Orhan Veli whose name is on the tip of my tongue; His flair and flamboyance, his poems and his face Hover overhead like a wounded pigeon Which descends quietly to perch on this poem. Where? Just look, you'll find it there.
This city just drives you out of your mind; Good thing Orhan Veli's drinking glasses remain behind.
Say Istanbul and Sait Faik comes to mind: Pebbles twitter on the shore of Burgaz Island, While a blue-eyed boy grows up in circles of joy A blue-eyed old fisherman grows younger and tinier, When they reach the same height they turn into Sait And they roam the city hand in hand, Cursing beast and bird, friend and foe alike!
On Sharp Island they gather gulls' eggs, By midnight they're in the red-light district, In the morning they go through Galata: At the café they kid around with a harmless lunatic, "Whaddya know," they say. "You're holding the paper upside down." Then they set the poor guy's Newspaper on fire, Then they sit and weep quietly.
Say Istanbul and Sait Faik comes to mind All over this town's rock and soil and water, A friend of the poor and the sick, Whose pencil is as sharp as his heart is wounded, Bleeding for the lonely and yearning for the pure and the good.
Say Istanbul and Sait's last years come to mind: At his best age he's told he has just a few years to live; How could Sait bear the thought of it? The blue-eyed boy doesn't give a damn, But the old fisherman broods like hell; And a green venom bursts out of the sea Piercing the heart that feels, ravaging the mind that knows. The little blue-eyed boy And the old fisherman And that green venom smeared all over our lips... So long as Istanbul throbs alive in the sea, So long as language lives, so will Sait's poetry.
Say Istanbul and a gypsy woman comes to mind With a bunch of flowers taller than herself, Wherever the spring comes from, so does she. No crackpot that woman, but every inch a gypsy, She is the sun and the soil from top to toe, And a mother matchless among mothers: One kid on her back, one at her breast, one in her tummy. A gypsy woman always bulges with a baby. Devil may care, her life has flair: She roams the city from one end to the other Humbly selling tongs or doing the bellydance. "How about a quarter, dear?" she says, "You want me to tell your fortune, love?" Till the day she dies, she tells nothing but lies. Then comes the dream she had the night before: "I see a yellow snake. Son-of-a-bitch keeps bugging me. I wake up and what do I see? My little ones are on the edge of the bed sucking my toes."
Say Istanbul and a textile factory comes to mind: High walls, long counters, tall stoves... Tender slender girls toil all day long on their feet, In blood and sweat, weary and sad, Their faces long their hands long their days long In the factory where the windows are near the ceiling. Red-heeled fair-skinned girls—"No loitering, girls!"
Rows and rows of trees stretch out there, But the endless walls cut the girls off from them, From the amber fields and the purple streets Where the fair season rumbles and tumbles. A nineteen-year-old working mother, Is dazzled by the white foamy flow of silk Which whets her appetite to no end, she gets ideas; But printed silk is no good to make pants for her sons. Now if she could get a roll of ivory-white calico: She can do so much with it: drapes and sheets and underwear; The very thought of ivory-white calico dazzles her. When she dies giving birth to a third son, She still longs for a roll of calico. Young mothers like her are dime a dozen: At the factory somebody else takes the place of this one. That's the way it is: If one goes, another comes. Damn you death.
Say Istanbul and a barge comes to mind Brimful of onion, green as poison on coral red, Sailing in from the Black Sea ports winter and summer With one more patch on its filthy sail each time And the rust of its iron rods on our tongues And its motors speeding along our pulsebeats right into our hearts. A mermaid with huge scale-covered buttocks.
Say Istanbul and a barge comes to mind Demure and heedless Called the Sea Tiger or the Triumphant Sword.
Say Istanbul and Sinan the Great Architect comes to mind His ten fingers soaring like ten mighty planetrees. Then the monster of the shacks and shanties rears its head Where smoke and filth and blight ruthlessly spread. Our city suckles dwarfs at her giant's breasts.
Translated by Talât Sait Halman
(From An Anthology of Turkish literature, Edited by Kemal Silay) |