Translator’s Note – Gülten Akın (1933-2015) occupies a very important place in the Turkish Poetry of the twentieth century. She was the first woman poet to challenge and break the male stranglehold on poetry. Her early volumes, a mixture of smouldering anger, arresting imagery and sometimes jarring rhythms were the harbingers of a voice that went on to become greatly admired and respected. Not only did she challenge male dominance in poetry she also questioned the idea that women poets had to write a something that many male critics were quick to label as “women’s poetry” by dealing with a wide range of societal issues in her later verse such as history and politics. She can be considered a trailblazer for the generation of exceptional Turkish women poets who are currently writing and who all acknowledge the debt they owe to Gülten Akın’s work. In English a very fine volume of her work entitled What Have You Carried Over? Poems of 42 Days and Other Works which was edited by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne was published in the United Sates by Talisman House Publishers in 2014.
Translated from the Turkish by Neil P. Doherty
Sand
I once had a lover who would send me
the sand of the city he lived in
but me I was always curious about the wind there
was it soft or harsh did it blow continuously
did it rise up all of a sudden and scatter
in the sky what it had grabbed from the ground
We shared cities later
master wind and I the novice
he’d blow and in fury pass right through
filling my eyes with sand
__
Stain
At the knottiest point of our age we stood
let someone write us, for it we don’t
who will
the quieter it stayed, the blunter grew
the fine knife we used to hack out the rough day
where are they: the miracle that gleams
and the magic that glimmers at every stir
another day gone unseen
another day passed withering the grass
and so we learn it was blind, as if there were
no road and no passersby
and no one to record the passersby
they said
lock them up and put the key back in its old place
though really
it’s a shameful thing, or so Camus says
to be happy on your own
voices and other voices, where are the world’s voices
quietly so quietly
the stain has seeped into the fabric
__
Tea
The sound of nightingales, of flushing strawberries
in his hand held out to me
weak morning tea
and agitated ease
somehow we had grown used to living like culprits
where, where should we hide them
our souls that he closed we closed tightly
now (for the first time?) brush off one another
the sea flattened out flattened out and disappeared
we in a dream, but for the sound of the boats of the fishermen
the mountains dark and violet
surely so surely they approached and overran us
& we the lost in the land of the lost
brushed
silence with the wing of a sparrow
we denied
the sky, the heavy clouds, the bay
all that sank without a trace
the evening, passing through the old voices of the neighbors
in the taste of apple and yoghurt
drew us down into the depths
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