Three Poems by Oktay Rifat, Translated by Christopher Middleton
PN Review 109, May - June 1996
In a Boat
That sky, that sea, captain, look at them,
Heavens above, the water must be like a woman,
Manika herself bestows no such blessing as this,
You could forgive a man for murder because of it.
Islands to the right, fish trap to the left of us,
I was rowing, Mehmet facing me,
Blue must have gone to my head.
Mehmet, I said, now for it,
Set the fuse, in with the dynamite,
Blast them up, the black-eyes, bream, the mackerel.
A day like this, I'll not forget it,
On the island, Christ's Hill,
Sea before me smooth as a dinner plate,
Sedef, Medef, Maden Islands,
Never in my life did I see the likes of it.
Then fright, sudden rustling fills the air,
Thousands of storks overhead
Flying back to Istanbul.
Face to the sea, once again I understood,
Stretching out in the boat, eyes closed,
How good it is to be alive.
For this you fight, for this with luck you die.
I understood that love of freedom, love of peace
Are one and the same as this, the joy of living.
Pristine our day in this belief,
And blue, because of it, glittering, glittering.
(1946)
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Horse Shaking Head
She saw in the field a horse, she put her arms around it.
The horse wanted to fly, it frisked in her embrace,
Flattened its ears, shook its head. 'Stop,' it said,
'I must go now.' up to the clouds it slowly went,
Then it flew, flew at a gallop. It sees a city
Underneath, streets, factories, blocks of flats.
It doesn't stop, it flies over mountains, meadows,
But then, why, it sees a house, patched, and on a tilt,
Geraniums in tin cans at its windows,
Smoke rising from its chimney, out in front
Two poplars. Down to the roof it goes, hoofs
Hardly touch the tiles, and then it sleeps.
If a child belongs to the house and sees it,
She'll be thinking: There's a horse. She puts her arms around it.
The horse wants to fly, it frisks in her embrace,
Flattens its ears, shakes its head.
(1976)
Rainy Morning
In the space of two days you quietly change, your hair lengthens,
eyebrows, eyelashes lengthen. In that forest of sprouting,
nothing held back, it's hard for you to find your way.
Abundance, here it is, each day a dazzle, our birds croak as if
drying up, our women put on weight; one through twelve the
chimes are a galleon being broken apart for scrap.
(1958)
Note from the translator: Oktay Rifat, 1914-88, was first associated in 1941 with Orhan Veli and the 'Garip' group of younger poets in Istanbul. Rejecting the stereotypically florid rhetoric burdening Turkish poems at the time, they favoured a light touch, a lyricism direct and tenzperate, self-irony and worldly wit: they were the first Turkish 'lnodemists' ('garip' means 'strange'). Rifat's middle and later work, no less fantastic, vigorous, and varied than that of his Greek contemporary Yannis Ritsos, with whom he is still compared, includes serene and luminous pastorals, as well as poems for and about children. The six texts here translated come from three of his books: Yaşayip Ölmek Aşk, Çobanil Şiirler, and Aşik Merdeveni. For other translations, see Ruth Christie and Richard McKane, Voices of Memory: Selected Poems of Oktay Rifat (Rockingham Press, 1993).
These poems by Oktay Rifat, translated by Christopher Middleton, are taken from PN Review 109, May - June 1996. The rest of the poems in this issue are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.
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