Two Poems

translated by George Messo


"I filled silence with names." Codified things. I have known the sky's and the trees' infancy. There have been trees I have made friends with. There still are. I didn't understand the Milky Way. Nor numbers. (They behaved as if they had yet to be discovered.) Except for eight (5+3) with whom I became intimate friends. (Who hasn't?) A little with zero too. (It's not been so easy to find zero.) I've heard terrible things about three. Why? I don't know. To know is a number. And I've also met one. You can't think with one. Some numbers are born guilty. One of them is one. I loved stones without asking why. The relation between the pebble's name and its shape has not been proved. I couldn't find a thing on the history of black amber. Fine. Mystery is everything. There are some consonants I couldn't read. (The letter's spirit abounds in consonants. American Indians knew this well.) I accompanied birds. Except for the turtledove, birds know nothing of numbers. Horses, I understood, don't dream in the East. (In Homer horses weep.) I have seen mountains walking. And thinking as they walked. Recognition impedes reason. The World is ours! Said the snails, talking among themselves. I can't say I understand that. Nor that I don't understand it. One should read snails.

As you talk about rivers the rivers themselves are talking, grasses are in your eyes. Time is an illusion. Write this down somewhere. It's not true that spirit has no outward facing view. Jesus' ghost still roams the earth. (I only ask. It's only to question that one writes.) Those who forget their youth stagger in the morning. The rose exists because it is named. Stone got its name when its face was found. (Which is why masons turn stones around and around in their hands.)

I want to return to your eyes. And then . . . There's no such thing as "then." "Then" is outside history.

 

 

The sun fathers a cloud in my pocket. I wrote: the stone is blind. Death has no future. Things have only names. And: "A name is a home." (Who was it said that?) Yesterday I wasn't at home, I took to the hills. A gorge looked at us, what it said still lingers in my mind. It was this: we sensed infinity within it. Objects are held in time. The tailors' lamplighter Hermusul Heramise's goatskin rose to its feet every spring. Rain cannot not rain. Stone, not fall.

What was I saying, the world has no thoughts. Grasses don't get bored. A pencil thinks it is a tree. The horizon, a hoopoe. I don't know about you, the world is here to be mythologized. It has, therefore, no other end. Transformed into a myth, to be a myth! That's what we call eternity.

Wherever I start, that's where I return. So I'm going. I have work to do on that grand statement, death.

Translation copyright © George Messo, 2005.

Ilhan Berk was born in Manisa, Turkey, in 1918. Considered by many to be Turkey's most influential avant-garde poet, his early poems and books of the 1940's owed much to the realist aesthetics of the Birinci Yeni, the First New Wave. From the 1950's onwards, however, his voice grew increasingly more idiosyncratic and experimental. His Collected Poems, including over half a century of poetry, runs to more than three volumes. The publication of his monumental Book of Things, (Þeyler Kitabý) in 2002 confirmed Berk's reputation as Turkey's greatest living poet. He lives in the Aegean town of Bodrum.

George Messo's first collection From The Pine Observatory was published by Halfacrown Books in 2000 (revised 2nd edition, Near East Books, Ankara, 2001). His second collection, Entrances, will be published by Shearsman Books in May 2006. He is currently teaching in Oman.