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| Orhan Veli |
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| Kurt Vonnegut |
I have been invited to the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library to participate in the launch party of Issue No. 2 of its new(ish) literary journal So It Goes. The call was for funny work, befitting a namesake library for a hilarious writer, and the editor took from me a funny poem about poverty by the modern Turkish poet Orhan Veli, translated into English by Defne Halman and myself. I am hoping I can drag my family to Indianapolis so I can play esteemed Turkish co-translator for a day.
This invitation reminded me I had never properly celebrated all of the work Defne and I had in the inaugural issue of So It Goes, themed after war and armistice, befitting a namesake library for a writer of war and peace. So here it goes.
The editors published not one, not two, not three, not four, but five Orhan Veli poems that the Turkish actress Defne Halman and I translated in New York City punk rock dives thirteen years ago. The main editor, J.T. Whitehead, told me the five poems happened to fit his five mental divisions for all the work they published in that volume. So it goes. And here are those five poems.
***
GONE TO WAR
Blonde boy gone to war!
Come back as beautiful as you are
The smell of sea on your lips
Salt on your eyelashes
Blonde boy gone to war!
– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King
*
FOR THIS COUNTRY
What didn't we do for this country!
Some of us died
Some gave speeches
– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King
*
LIKE US
I wonder
When a tank dreams
Does it have desires
And what does an airplane think
When it's on its own?
Do gas masks enjoy
Singing songs in unison
In the moonlight?
And don't rifles even have as much compassion
As us humans?
– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King
*
CARNATION
You're right
Probably the death of 10,000 people in Warsaw
Is not as nice
As the art of exaggeration
And a military regiment
Isn't like a carnation
"Coming from a lover's lips"
– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King
*
GANGSTER
(Hitler Will Surrender Himself to Literature)
I wrote poems all these years
What did I find?
I'll be a bandit from now on
Let those guys who waylay you
On mountain roads know
There's no more work for them
I'm eating their lunch now
Let them know
There's a vacancy
In the literary trade
– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King
***
Looking only at the authors published on pages adjacent to one of these poems, this placed Orhan Veli and our voices immediately beside Marge Piercy, Robert Bly and Vonnegut himself. That was cool.
I also was humbled and honored to have one of my own poems published in the inaugural edition of this literary journal connected to the great, hilarious, compassionate Kurt Vonnegut.
***
WHORE’S HONOR
I beg your pardon, but how
can you honor the soldier and not the whore,
sailors and not streetwalkers,
the brave men fallen dead in battle and not
the courageous women whose
dirty duty and detail it is to blow
off soldiers’ heads and offer
to sailors the only port that feels like home?
– By Chris King
***
That's also my Veteran's Day poem, by the way -- soon to be translated into Russian by Kanat Omar. who is taking back to Kazakhstan one of my author copies of Issue No. 1.
So It Goes and Kurt Vonnegut's own books may be purchased at the online gift shop for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.
My co-translator Defne Halman, still doing the punk rock protest thing, in The Guardian.
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