Translated by Mevlut Ceylan
Arif Ay’s first book bears the title Hira. The title is significant; hira is the name of the cave where the Prophet Muhammad first received revelation. Ay sees the poetic role as closely paralleling the prophetic: both prophet and poet are seers. This essentially religious vision of the poet’s place in society pervades all his work and helps explain the unpoetic title of his second collection: Dosyalar (dossiers). A dossier is a file the secret police keep on a person, particularly if he is a dissident. Ay dissents from the received view of Turkish history as imparted by state organs and institutions; he views with dismay the collapse of national institutions following the First World War, when they were replaced with institutions on the western model. In his verse he laments the passing of a culture and its replacement with a wasteland of the spirit.
Ay was born in 1953 in Nigde, central Anatolia. He read Turkish Literature and Islamic Theology at Ankara University, and worked as a civil servant before accepting a post as a lecturer in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature in the Faculty of Science and Letters at Kırıkkale University. Ay, who has published nine collections of poetry, has a wide appeal for the youth who flock to his readings in Ankara. The secret of his attraction lies not only in his scorn for hypocrisy (as seen in ‘Ramp’) but in the directness of his voice, sometimes compared to a clenched fist in its relentless ambiguity.
He writes in vers libre which became fashionable in Turkey from the 1940s onward, using modern methods to indite modernism. His most recent collection Candles of Poetry uses the same metric form as the previous collections. Critics hailed it as his most mature work, establishing him as a major figure amongst contemporary poets.
Ay cries aloud, and his tone is often bitter. He is particularly scathing of the cash nexus, with its all-pervasive materialism, which he sees as having sapped the moral values underpinning the Turkish spirit. A nation cut off from its spiritual roots (the forgotten alphabet refers to Arabic, the language of the Qur’an) ultimately faces extinction, this long sleep which the somnolent system state education anticipates:
sleep, sleep, go to bed and sleep
that’s what they taught you
on your first day at school.
‘Time’, a haiku, expresses the poet’s sense of futility. Another poem in haiku tradition, ‘Horses’, conveys with epigrammatic pithiness a meaning not immediately apparent to a non-Turk. The Turks were a race of hardy horsemen out of Central Asia: the horse is a symbol of what they were when they formed the vanguard of Islam. Such a horse, divinely appointed or assigned, is riderless because he is the vehicle of faith itself, of the supernatural truth of Islam. Horses amount to a repetitive, almost obsessive image. In ‘Ostlers’ the nostalgia for a remote Turko-Islamic past causes the poet to imagine himself dead:
like a flowering sky
the night rises over my skull.
His poetry is affirmative as well as destructive. And ‘Labour’, with its echoes of Horace, replaces the Latin poet’s faith in the poetic faculty with a religious faith in the eternal edifice of supernatural, religious truth. In the Qur’an the believer is referred to as a labourer, who labours in the garden of the Lord:
Their Lord has answered them: ‘I will not allow the deeds of any one of you to be lost, whether you are male or female, each is like the other. I will certainly wipe out the bad deeds of those who emigrated and were driven out of their homes, who suffered for My cause, who fought and were killed. I will certainly admit them to Gardens graced with flowering streams, as a reward from God: the best reward is with God.’ (3:195)
Ay’s popularity also rests in part on his skill in love poetry. ‘Asking’ is an example of this genre, showing another side of Ay’s inspiration. A gentler mood suffuses his verse at these moments.
River
I am a thundering river
in the lands of darkness
with a single stroke
I wrench the sleep
from the eyes of night
Poems of Destruction (fragment)
I would like to know you, sir
put aside your mask
all frogs have a night of their own
my absence and my voice have a night of their own
find me a place to leave my voice
What is it that whittles mankind away, sir
silence or speech
how do men multiply, sir
let us find a place to dump the speeches
In the sitting rooms of all houses
there is now a bright hungry guillotine
all sewers are open to us sir
everything flows towards heaviest indifference
forget about the one that doesn’t flow, sir
you always stay put
like an antiquated port from times well past
where fishes of unknowable age swim in moonlight
you are an antiquated mister, sir
I am falling apart in the darkness
find me a place to leave my silence
a shining ship of death on a sorry wharf
we are truly romantic executioners, aren’t we sir?
Ostlers
sometimes I can be divided into three or five
sometimes into infinity
I don’t know if you’ve been told
but I am a docile stable-boy
looking after horses
the horses are long dead
the ostlers long gone
a broken currycomb scratched into tombstones
like a flowering sky
the night rises over my skull
Looking at Istanbul
This is Istanbul in the sun
When you look at her
She is standing on guard
And resists your attacks.
These are the minarets
That convey news
From heaven to earth
And from earth to heaven.
When a generous heart
Looks with love,
Doors open to the sea
And streets mirror the morning.
Only with love does she come to you,
When you turn your eyes,
This is Istanbul.
Torment
a desk has teeth to bite a man
dead paper and lively pen
do not make neighbourly sense
the child starts being a little book
and then grows into a fire
words roam and roam around
hurt and godless
man is a lost item of furniture
alive with worms
night is a tight knot
haunting our rooms
everything bites everything else
sleep is held at bay
Love
are those who love
and those who are loved
bruised and mangled
over there as well
are the middayshadows
long over there as well
Birds
to tell us the time
birds flap their wings
by our window
birds are the pendulum of the sky
their inexhaustible passion
winds up the clock
they carry our houses to the sky
they are the crew of heaven
they pull us out
from our darkness
Guerrilla
to the oppressed and to those who
suffer with them and fight at their side
the stars are fading away
how deep is your countenance
our heart is a wasteland
the walls of the world are collapsing
here the sun is so fresh today
the roads flanked by cypresses
the guerrilla is out there
thousands of suns in his eyes
come, move on
remember stars fade and shine
we march with the Book in our hands
when the trees cover
the face of the guerrilla
like a night bird
before the pitiless gun
he turns, and turns
and falls in spirals
once more
the honour of the earth is shattered
A Traveller in Enlightenment
my friend I am a passenger of love
distance is the measure of stars
closeness is the measure of my love
as bright and as dark
as the stars
I am a passenger of enlightenment
Dull
where the sun’s heat boils in the sand
you can see me gathering the dark and gleaming
snake skins
with my hand I scoop your voice
I shed my skin like a shirt
where the sun casts a spearing shadow
Past-Participle
it is not in vain
that time stands still
that clocks err
Doomsday
mind you, time’s carrionbird,
be off with your galleons
my heart walks before me
on its way to the Day of Judgment
Ramp
look the liars are passing, I can tell by their hats
they do not like the sun
their shadows are longer than themselves
they greet prostitution they fornicate with money
and then go on pilgrimages with saintly beards,
songs of usury
poet, tell me what kind of poem is this?
must you reel off unsettling dreams
must you upset this moonlight
how quickly you’ve forgotten your alphabet
sleep, sleep, go to bed and sleep
that’s what they taught you
on your first day at school
Voice
the mountains facing me
are all rubies
oh holy Jacob
where are the sheep
Sand
there
the simple
the universal
building
Asking
what time is it I asked
the wind was still
I looked into your eyes
the sea had receded
what time is it I asked
the sun was just rising
I waved to the birds
there were smiles in their eyes
what time is it I asked
the night was new
make the night long I said
rippling tides echoed through the length
of her eyes
Here
the wind blows quietly
a tile falls into the garden
the sun looks at my hand
a rain drop falls in my tea
a cloud like a ship slowly
draws up to my table
hand in hand we climb up
to the deck of the evening
here are the stars we say
we repeat the names of flowers
later as though nothing has happened
you feed the chickens first thing in the morning
Carnations
Like two people meeting for the first time
Carnations came between us
Like their scents and voices
Like their faces and hands
Carnations came between us
Parting moved in between us
Then sorrow and hunger
Darkness fell
You said something impossible
And it became possible
Everything happened at once
Carnations came between us
Guest
There’s the steep road
Who is leading that caravan?
There’s something inside us that grows
People should understand
That the squares are always filthy
And filth flows
The day is a ball of steel
Without love and affection
Children grow
Neither scales nor cranes
Can match a heart’s endurance
Wastelands will be salty
Decay and rot shall end
Time
A dry sea
Caught
When I throw my fishing rod
Into the day
Labour
Neither cement
Nor steel
Are stronger
Then the wall built
Sky
Where are those deep heavens?
We had in the villages
Why, why do we not have them
In the cities?
Horses
Whilst the sun rises
Those wise horses
Carry the skies
On their backs
Parting
The dreams are loaded with laments
And the flowers blossom early in an Andalusian morning
From Merve the beloved comes to the shore
The Tigris flows by the evening tales
The beauty of Istanbul, perhaps, is a childish beauty
But the children live a thousand Badr wars in their hearts
Istanbul’s face is scratched and the cut goes deep
Alas, henna is the colour of the sea
Dripping from the hands of mothers
As Andalusia ages she smells of iodine
Now, our love is warmer than our hatred
I am the child wearing the face of St.Sophia, the orphan
Oh heart, a thorny rose in my handkerchief
Thousands of voices have divided our voices
Those who silenced our voice
Have died one by one
This is the endless struggle
Of my heart
Dear heart you’re warm!
What Time
And what era
There’s no repeat of loves and roses
Your face is an illusion in the mirror of innocence
In the wild waters of time in which I am shattered
Ebb and flow of time and fire are the same
A rose of wind, a shadow of cloud
The yellow leaves, death and cries
Tell me, what time and what era
And when
Requiem
Someone somewhere
Someone in our very soul
As he faces the firing squads
Our blood is the fire that flows
Jerusalem is the name of the blazing sea
Part of me throbs
Wherever I am
Standing as a nightguard
My love is forlorn
Jerusalem is as strong as mountains
Its honour stands still and larger than life
Like a huge mountain
The children speak to the mountain
They talk about the honour
Wherever I am
Standing as a nightguard
Even if sorrow hits a thousand times
It grows
Water increases
Children grow green
Jerusalem grows
Wherever I am
Standing as a nightguard