Selected poems of Orhan Veli for The Firecracker Press to pick from

My friends at The Firecracker Press sent me a nice invite today.

I am trying to set up a reading series at The Firecracker Press where poets & authors read while we print a broadside of one of their poems. More details to come, but would you be interested in participating? 

Uh, yeah!  

I have poems I have written, as Firecracker would know; they printed my one chapbook, A heart I carved for a girl I knew. But I am much more passionate about my cotranslations, because it is far more interesting poetry than what I come up with on my own.

I have done cotranslations from the Italian of Roberto Giggliucci with my dear friend Leonard Barkan, a world-famous comparative literature scholar and art historian whose academic home is Princeton University, when he isn't parked in Rome or Berlin. The TriQuarterly published one of our translations of Roberto, "Easy poem about hotels"; the rest of our collection remains unpublished and uncollected.

I also have done cotranslations from the Turkish of Orhan Veli with my equally dear friend Defne Halman, a famous Turkish actor and the first VJ on Turkish television (the Martha Quinn of Istanbul). We have published some of our translations of the great Garip poet, here and there; but since we translated everything Orhan Veli ever wrote, there is plenty more to pick from.

So, today, I picked through it. I sent this batch of unpublished personal favorites to Firecracker. Let's see what they choose to print that broadside of. Saturday, August 21 is when I will be down at the print shop on Cherokee Street reading some of this stuff.

***

SELECTED POEMS BY ORHAN VELI

Translated from the Turkish

by Defne Halman and Chris King

**

HEADACHE 

I

However beautiful the roads may be

However cool the night

The body tires

The headache never gets tired

II

Even if I go into my house now

I can go out a little later

Since these clothes and shoes belong to me

And the streets belong to no one 

**

LOVELY DAYS

These lovely days destroyed me

On a day like this I quit my job

I got hooked on tobacco

On days like this

I fell in love on days like this

I forgot to take home bread and salt

On days like this

My obsession with writing poetry always recurred

Days like this destroyed me

**

I CAN’T EXPLAIN

(moro romantico)

If I cry

Will you hear

My voice

In lines of verse?

Can you touch my tears?

I never knew songs were so beautiful

And words so insufficient

Before falling into this trouble

There is a place, I know

Where it's possible to say everything

I come pretty close

I feel it

I can’t explain it

**

MY SHADOW

I'm sick and tired

Of dragging him around 

For years, at the tips of my toes

Let's live in this world a little bit

Him by himself

Me by myself

**

HAVE I BEEN CAUGHT BY LOVE?

Was I also going to have thoughts like this?

Was I also going to be left sleepless?

Was I going to be silent like this?

Was I not even going to miss my favorite salad?

Is this the way I was going to be?

**

GUEST

Yesterday I was really bored

All the way into the night

Two packs of cigarettes

Didn’t do a thing

I tried to write

It didn’t grab me

I played the violin for the first time in my life

I roamed around

I watched people playing backgammon

I sang a song in a mode all my own

I caught a matchbox full of flies

Goddamn it, in the end

I picked myself up

And here I came

**

SPREAD OUT

She’s stretched out

Flopped there, all spread out

Her dress is hiked up a little

She’s lifted her arm

Her armpit appears

And with one hand she’s holding her breast

No evil in her, I know

None, none in me either, but ...

No way!

This is no way to lie down!

**

MY GOLD TOOTHED ONE

Come, my darling, come to me

Let me buy you silk stockings

Let me treat you to a cab

Let me take you to the music

Come

Come, my gold toothed one

My dark-eyed, wavy-haired one

My little slut

My one with the cork heels

My rock & roller, come

**

REMEMBRANCE

The knife gash on my forehead

Is because of you

My tobacco tin

Is a souvenir from you

Your telegram says

“Even if both of your hands are in blood, come”

How can I forget you?

My lady of the night

**

WITHIN

We have seas, full of sun

We have trees, full of leaves

Morning and night

We go

Go and come back

Between our seas and our trees

In poverty

**

SOME DAYS

Some days, I’ll just pick up and go

Amid the smell of nets fresh from the sea

I go from island to island

In the wake of the shearwaters

There are worlds, you can’t even imagine

Flowers bloom with a bang

Smoke blasts from the soil

Look, the seagulls, those seagulls

A different urgency in every one of their feathers

Some days, I'm up to my neck in the blue

Some days, I'm up to my neck in the sun

Some days, just loony

**

THE SLACKER

This is my gig

I paint the sky every morning

While all of you are asleep

You'll wake up and see that it's blue

The sea will tear sometimes

You won't know who sews it

I sew it

Sometimes I'll just goof off

That's also my job

I'll think of a head on my head

I'll think of a belly on my belly

I'll think of a foot on my foot

I don't know what the hell to do

**

FOR THIS COUNTRY

What didn’t we do for this country!

Some of us died

Some gave speeches

**

HEAR THIS OR ELSE

If you don’t hear the sound

Of nuts cracking open on branches

Just see what will become of you

If you don't hear the sound

Of the rain coming down

Just see what will happen

The ringing bell

The speaking person

If you don’t feel the smell

Of the seaweed

The lobster, the shrimp

The wind that blows from the sea ...

**

TOWARD FREEDOM

Before the day is born

You should set out

While the sea is pure white

The lust of holding the oars

The happiness of being useful

You'll set out

You'll set out with commotion of nets

Fish will welcome you

You'll be happy

As you shake the net

You'll hold the sea in your hands

Glittering scale by scale

When the souls of the seagulls

Are quiet on the graves of their rocks

Suddenly, all hell will break loose on the horizon

Mermaids? Birds? What do you think?

Maybe revels, parties, festivals, celebrations?

A bridal procession

Silver and gold thread for the bride's hair

Bridal veils, fanciful stuff?

Heeeeeey!

What are you waiting for?

Throw yourself into the sea!

Don't worry if you’ve left someone behind

Can't you see there is freedom everywhere?

Be a sail

Be a rudder

Be a fish

Be water

Go as far as you can go and keep going

**

THE MERMAID

What was it, had she just come out of the sea?

Her hair, her lips smelled like the sea until morning

The rising and subsiding

Of her chest was like the sea

She was poor, I know

But come on, you can't talk about poverty all the time

Directly into my ear, gently

Gently, she sang songs of love

What had she seen, what had she learned, who knows

In her life spent throat to throat with the sea

Patching fishnets, throwing fishnets, gathering fishnets

Making fishing lines, collecting bait, cleaning boats ...

To evoke the prickly fish of the sea

Her hands touched my hands

That night I saw, I saw in her eyes

How beautiful, after all, the day

Is born upon the open sea

Her hair taught me waves

I rolled and rolled in dreams

**

EASE

You say if only the struggle would end

You say if only I didn't get hungry

You say if only I didn't get tired

You say if only I didn't need to pee

You say if only I didn't get sleepy

Why don't you say it: if only I were dead?

**

IN THE STREET

Going in the street

When I realize I'm smiling

To myself

I imagine people

Will think I’m crazy

And I smile

**

POEMS ON ASPHALT

I.

How beautiful

When a building along the road has been demolished

To see a new horizon

II.

I envy the children

Who get lined up along the sidewalk

To watch the way the steamroller walks

III.

Its voice reminds a friend of mine

Of motorboats

That pass on the sea

IV.

I wonder if looking at the broken paving stones

And dreaming of asphalt all lit up

Is reserved only for poets?

**

QUANTITATIVE

I love beautiful women

I love working women

But beautiful working women

I love even more

**

SUNDAY NIGHTS

I’m shabby now

But once I pay my debts

Most likely 

I will have a new set of clothes

And most likely, on top of this

You still won’t love me

And Sunday nights

While passing through your neighborhood

Dressed to kill

Do you think that I will think of you

As much as I do now?

**

DESPAIRING

I could get angry

At the people I love

If loving had not taught me

Despair

**

FINCH

Pretty girl, you

When I was little

In our gardens

The bird snare I strung

On the plum tree's highest branch 

The finch that hopped upon it

You are not as cute as that

**

THE SEA

I in my room

Overlooking the seashore

Without looking out the window at all

I know the rowboats passing outside

Go loaded with watermelons

The sea, as I used to do

Likes to make me mad

By moving its mirror 

On the ceiling of my room

The smell of seaweed 

And the fishing net poles

Set up on the shore

Remind the children living by the sea

Of nothing

**

OUTSIDE THE CITY

The buds that are about to pop

Promise the good days

And a lady, outside the city

On the grass under the sun

Lying face down

Feels the spring

On her breast

And tummy

**

MY LOVE

My love who doesn’t come to the fancy bistro

Never comes to the fish shack beer garden

**

THANK GOODNESS

There’s another person

Thank goodness

In the house

There's breathing

Footsteps

Thank goodness

Thank goodness

***

Orhan Veli portrait from Mizah & Cizgi.

Defne and I are supposed to publish our translations, Some Days Just Loony: The Collected Poems o Orhan Veli. We even have a nibble from a university press. But we are both lame at the business of publishing, and Defne is back in Istanbul and scarcely communicado. For now, you can download the text for free at that there link, so long as you don't publish it without permission.