PASSAGE TO EFSUS
YÜCEL KAYIRAN TRANSLATED FROM TURKISH BY DERICK MATTERN
ART BY FAINA YUNUSOVA
§ I must’ve drifted off..
drifting off is like being put to bed as a child
letting yourself go with the current, submerging in the stream
and drifting away without waving goodbye to the light of the world..
like collapsing from exhaustion after a long day’s work
like feeling stuffed after a Sunday morning breakfast
I let myself drift off in the happiness
of fully understanding myself
as though toying with my life
by removing one of the letters from an adjective
in a sentence and replacing it
I’ve never gone with the flow
water draws across flesh like a razor
it’s not possible to reach the primal memory
drifting off is just like returning to my mother’s arms
and waking up is a sudden waterfall
waking up to fall down
smashing and crashing against the sides
meltwater rushing from my arms
I used to wake up to my mother’s voice, once
on the page of a blank notebook
..I must’ve drifted off
§ my mother too didn’t know the Latin alphabet
and so would let herself be called illiterate
but she had learned from her father the old script
three months each year she spent reading through the Kur’an
at dawn for three months each year, I’d wake to the sound of my mother’s voice
when she read the Kur’an, her voice took on the melancholy tone of Kur’an recitation
melancholy meant to be wary against the allure of happiness
melancholy meant to be ashamed of our own faces’ beauty, especially in our youth
melancholy meant to be wary of ourselves
because what was within ourselves would lead us astray
melancholy meant muddying the calm of the dawn hour
the dawn hour, when the world is cleansed by waters sent down from above
the down hour, when my mother read the Kur’an
reading the Kur’an meant making a clean slate, through Allah’s voice within us
reading the Kur’an meant returning to the first garden at the dawn hour
dewdrops on tree leaves like tears of the morning
our friendship with the serpent not yet begun
mountain peaks smoking.. in our grass huts
the memory of that first garden is the memory of my mother’s voice
tending the roses by the door every morning
reading the Kur’an meant making oneself each morning into that first man
articulating god’s civilization in a human tongue
and lamenting our abject powerlessness in the world
my mother said, such were her beliefs
her whole life these beliefs sustained her
she could do nothing to help us.. she was helpless in the face of our plight
when she read the Kur’an, the tears of Allah fell from my mother’s eyes
my mother from her own voice built a continuity in me
that is how the Kur’an’s melancholy passed from my mother’s voice into mine
§ I never could take my mother to the Kaaba
my father gave her no hope of it
my son will take me, she’d say when I was small
a future indefinitely postponed
for my mother, there was no other utopia aside from the Kaaba
as I grew up, I dashed her hopes
I was destined for another utopia..
I’ve always been skeptical of being inoculated with ideas
when a body is grafted onto a tree of a different species
which is foreign to which..
coins will not be cast with my mother’s profile
nor will she be commemorated with ceremony
she won’t be talked about on television
she won’t be laid to rest in a mausoleum
meals will not be offered in her name at a külliye..
being the child of no one of importance offers a certain freedom
yet nothing of my mother will continue aside from us
aside from memory she has no other place
her voice in my voice
inscribes a map on my hands
I never went to bed without taking off my socks
surely the land in which we dwelt was the land of Egypt
About the Work by Derick Mattern
If you’ve ever stared out a window on a long drive, ruminating about life, only to doze off, you can imagine what kind of poem Yücel Kayıran’s Efsus’a Yolculuk (Passage to Efsus) is: halting, looping, searching, doubling back to move forward. Kayıran’s master epic is framed as an overnight road trip from Ankara back to his hometown in rural eastern Turkey. As the car takes him toward Afşin, as Efsus is now called, Kayıran’s memories turn toward childhood, his mind drifting between the present and the past. His book-length poem forms a meditation on history, revolution, and personal complicity, a broad sweep that affords him a vantage point from which to take both secular power and religious authority to task. Passage to Efsus charts Kayıran’s path from leftist fervor to disillusionment, threading his way through the impasse of the secular/religious binary endemic to Turkish nationalism. Lauded as an “individual journey in an epic narrative setting with a philosophical approach to social history,” Passage to Efsus won the 2018 Yunus Nadi Prize, and has been described as “the first bildungspoem in Turkish poetry.”
My selection here draws on just one of the many tributaries weaving through its 3000 lines. Passage to Efsus is composed of 104 continuous sections, but these three excerpts are not contiguous in the original Turkish. Taken together, however, and juxtaposed out of context, they coalesce one of the several stories Kayıran tells about the origins of his poetic voice. He has mentioned in interviews that he found his voice on the banks of the Upper Euphrates, where he taught as a young post-graduate, but these passages put forward an earlier, more personal origin story, central to the formation of his poetic identity. Kayıran navigates a complex conundrum not uncommon among bookish boys growing up in rural villages, especially in tumultuous 1970s Turkey. Caught between the lure of leftist solidarity and the domestic double-bind formed by a religiously observant mother and a distant, secularist father, Kayıran’s origins leave him multiply committed and multiply estranged. In this way he also resembles his nation’s increasingly post-secular society, making his “bildungspoem” not only about his own formation, but about Turkey’s past and present as well.
These three passages also harken back to the origins of Passage to Efsus itself, initially much shorter and titled “Kâbe’ye Yolculuk” (“Journey to the Kaaba”). Originally only about a dozen pages, this poem appeared right before the 2013 Gezi Park protests. As years of political turmoil culminated in an abortive coup d’état in 2016, Kayıran expanded “Journey” into the book-length Passage to Efsus. While images from this harrowing period of Turkish history haunt Kayıran’s full-length poem, his mother and the Kaaba are only barely discernable in the earlier, shorter version. In expanding his poem, Kayıran imbues it with personal as well as political history, as if to suggest that his journey is not a pilgrimage to a single sacred site but a voyage through his own past, swirling slowly inward as his journey homeward winds through the night.
* *
YÜCEL KAYIRAN is one of the leading poets and critics writing in Turkish today. Born in 1964, he grew up in Afşin, Kahramanmaraş Province, in southeastern Turkey. After education in Ankara, he taught high school philosophy for thirty years. Author of six books of poetry, his second book, Beni Hiç Göremezsin (You’ll Never See Me) garnered the 2005 Golden Orange Prize, and his fifth, Efsus’a Yolculuk (Passage to Efsus), won the Yunus Nadi Prize in 2018. Also highly regarded as a critic, Kayıran has published four books of essays attempting to marry poetry and philosophy. He lives in Ankara with his daughter.
DERICK MATTERN’s translations of contemporary Turkish poets have received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the British Centre for Literary Translation. His versions of Yücel Kayıran, Haydar Ergülen, Cenk Gündoğdu, and Şükrü Erbaş can be found in such outlets as TERN, Tupelo Quarterly, Berlin Quarterly, World Literature Today, EuropeNow, Copper Nickel, Exchanges, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Gulf Coast, and Guernica. A recent graduate of the PhD program in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, the poems presented here won the inaugural Mary Jo Bang Award for Poetry Translation.
Source Text by Yücel Kayıran
§ dalmışım..
dalmak bebeklikteki uykuya yatmak gibi
bırakarak kendini bir akıntıya nehire bulanmak
ve uzaklaşmak veda etmeden dünyadaki aydınlığa..
yorgunluktan bayılmak gibi bütün gün çalıştıktan sonra
doymak gibi bir pazar günü sabah kahvaltısında
dalgınlığıma verdiğim mutluluk için
doğru anlaşılması için kendimde olanın
sanki hayatımla oynadım
çıkarıp değiştirmekle bir harfini
cümledeki sıfatın
akıntının yönünde akmadım hiç
jiletle çizer gibi keser su da insanın etini
varmak mümkün değil belleğin ilkçağındaki vücuda
dalmak işte böyle dönmek gibiydi annemin kucağına
uyanmak ise aniden beliren bir şelale..
uyanmak, oradan düşmek gibi
çarpa çarpa sudan duvara..
ve birden büyümek
kar suyu kaçmış kucağıma
annemin sesiyle uyanırdım eskiden
boş bir defter sayfasında
..dalmışım
§ annem de bilmezdi Latin alfabesini
“okuma yazması yok!” kabul edilirdi bu nedenle
ama eski yazıyı babasından öğrenmiş
her sene hatim indirdi üç ayları boyunca
seher vakti, annemin sesiyle uyandım her sene üç ayları boyunca
annemin Kur’an okurken, Kur’an’ı okuyuş tarzındaki hüzünlü sesiyle..
hüzün, ihtiyatlı olmak demekti, mutluluğun baştan çıkarıcılığına
hüzün, utanmak demekti benzimizdeki güzellikten, özellikle gençlik yaşında
hüzün kendimize karşı tetikte olmak demekti
içimizdeydi çünkü bizi kendimizden peşi sıra alıp götürecek olan
hüzün, serinliğe bulanmak demekti seher vakti
seher vakti, dünyanın gökyüzünden inmiş sularla yıkanma vakti
seher vakti, annemin Kur’an okuma vakti
Kur’an okumak, kendini temize çekmek demekti, Allah’ın içimizdeki sesiyle
Kur’an okumak, ilk-bahçeye gitmek demekti seher vakti
sabahın gözyaşıdır ağaçların yapraklarındaki çiğ tanesi
başlamamış henüz yılanla arkadaşlığımız
dağların doruğu duman.. çayır çimen evimizin içi
ilk-bahçenin hatırı, annemin sesindeki hatıra
her sabah kapının önündeki güllerin bakımını yapmak
Kur’an okumak, kendini ilk insan gibi kılmak demekti her sabah
insan sesinde dile getirmek tanrının medeniyetini
ve ağlamak dünyadaki sahipsiz güçsüzlüğümüze
annem öyle derdi, annemin tezleri bunlar
bu tezler hayatta tuttu onu bir ömür boyu
bize yardım edemiyordu ya.. çaresiz kalıyordu ya halimiz karşısında
Allah’ın gözyaşları iniyordu Kur’an okurken annemin gözlerinden
böyle doluyordu içime dolmakta olan annemin sesi değildi sanki Kur’an
annem kendi sesinden bir devamlılık kuruyordu bende
böyle geçti Kur’an’daki hüzün annemin sesinden benim sesime
§ Kâbe’ye götüremedim annemi
babamdan umudu yoktu..
oğlum götürür derdi, ben küçükken,
uzak bir geleceğe ertelenmiş
Kâbe’den başka bir ütopyası yoktu annemin
büyürken ben bir başka ütopyanın yazgısına
boşa çıkardım umudunu annemin..
kuşkuyla baktım hep aşılama fikrine
bir ağacın gövdesinde başka bir türe ait beden
hangisi hangisine yabancı..
yüzü bir paraya basılmayacak annemin
bir toplantıda törenle anılmayacak
ondan bahsedilmeyecek bir televizyon programında
bir türbeye defnedilmeyecek
yemek verilmeyecek adına bir külliyede..
özgür kılar insanı önemsiz birinin çocuğu olmak
fakat bizden başka bir devamı yok annemin
hafızdaki yerinden başka bir yeri yok
sesimdeki sesinden
ellerime çizilmiş bir harita
uyumadım hiç çoraplarımı çıkarmadan
yaşadığımız yer muhtemelen Mısır’dı