Poem BY EFE DUYAN
EFE DUYAN (b. 1981, İstanbul, Turkey) He has been invited to several workshops, poetry readings and international organizations since 2009, including Turkish Poetry Evenings in Copenhagen, Word-Express Project (series of poetry readings in several Balkan Countries), Edinburgh Book Festival, London Book Fair, Berlin Poetry Festival, Lodeve Poetry Festival, Riga Poetry Days, Malta İnizjamed Poetry Festival, Transylvania Poetry Poetry Festival, Palabra En El Mundo in Venice, Sofia Poetics Festival, Chisinau Poetry Festival, Enemies Project & European Poetry Night in Britain, Shaar Poetry Festival in Israel, Sidi Bou Said Poetry Festival in Tunisi, Venice Dropping Seeds Project, European Poetry Biennale in Brasov, Swiss PEN's Day of Writers in Prison Meeting in Geneva, Goran's Spring Festival in Croatia, Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp, Writer’s Month Reading Series in Slovakia, Czechia, Poland and Ukraine, Mexico City Poetry Festival, Divan: Berlin-İstanbul Project, Eurovision Poetry Series in Berlin, İzmir Literature Festival, Iowa University International Writers Residency, and Hurst Visiting Professorship at St. Louis University. He gave guest lectures on poetry at Ca-Foscari University, Atlanta University, and George Washington University, affiliated to Boston Massachusetts University as a short-term scholar. Some of his poems have been translated into Bosnian, Czech, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, Greek, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Rumanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Occitan, Polish, Slovenian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Welsh. His translation works in poetry includes poetry collections of Radu Vancu (Romania), Matthias Göritz (Germany), Lloyd Schwartz (USA), and Madara Gruntmane (Latvia). He co-created poetry workshops with British, French, Italian, Israeli, Bulgarian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, Hungarian poets and the Istanbul Offline International Poetry Festival, Turkish American Poetry Days and Gaziantep International Poetry Festival. He acts as the Turkish co-editor of Rotterdam Poetry Foundations’s Poetry International Archives and advisor to Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival in North Carolina. He has been included in the anthology of Turkish Poetry PAPER SHIP (Great Britain, 2013), European Poetry Anthology GRAND TOUR (Germany, 2019), and EUROPOESIE – 21st Century Poetry Anthology (Great Britain, 2019). He worked in the editorial committees of literature magazines Nikbinlik (2000-2005) and Sanat Cephesi (2006-2010) and Istanbul Offline Magazine (2016-2019). His critical essay The Construction of Characters in Nâzım Hikmet’s Poetry has been published in 2008. He edited a contemporary poetry anthology Bir Benden Bir O’ndan (2010) and is a member of the editorial board of the acclaimed literature magazine Offline Istanbul. His poetry collections are Sıkça Sorulan Sorular (Frequently Asked Questions, 2016), Tek Şiirlik Aşklar (One Poem Stands, 2012) and Takas (Swap, 2006). He is currently teaching history of architecture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul.
PHILOSOPHICAL THESES ON LOVE
Efe Duyan
Translated by : Aron Aji
Everything started around a beat-up table
when one of us, as if giving away a secret, said
according to schopenhauer
only the reproductive urge draws people together
yet love is etched in my mind like a tattoo
or a sketch drawn on a napkin
the finer details yet to be determined
love is an idea
a choice
we give secrets in shiny gift packages
we ride the air bubbles rising in the water
eager to reach the surface
before popping
it’s dangerous
sartre says
worse still for him, attachment inhibits freedom
I had noticed when we held hands
at a certain angle
our hands
perfectly fit together
your wrist-bone in my palm’s hollow
my fingers wrapped around your fist-bones
I call it the angle of freedom
like that perfect angle
caught by an upwind sail
if you listen to wittgenstein
you can love someone only as much as you can express it
I have no objection
because in that small, even rather ugly park
where nouns, breaking off the objects they signify
fell to the world
like rain drops
and our love suddenly rekindled itself
hurry, we said, we have little time
let us also go to where language ends
carrying in our bags rich, creamy beginnings
spread on sandwich bread
we reclined on camping chairs
and watched love’s clouds relieved of secrets
till the names reevaporated.
ARON AJI He translated the poem from original Turkish Language. Aron Aji is the Director of MFA in Literary Translation. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers, including three book-length works by Karasu: Death in Troy; The Garden of Departed Cats, (2004 National Translation Award); and A Long Day’s Evening, (NEA Literature Fellowship, and short-listed for the 2013 PEN Translation Prize). He also edited, Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction. Aji leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature. He is also the president of The American Literary Translators Association.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE By Aron Aji Some poems, built like houses with architectural intention, draw us in through their overall design, clean fine lines breaking at striking angles, guiding our eyes through carefully defined spaces opening to hallways that irresistibly lead us to unexpected enclosures where natural light plays among the walls breathe life into the lives for which they are intended. Where form and function are inseparable, the space is not merely for dwelling. It asks to be experienced. Physically, materially. This is how I first experienced the work of Efe Duyan the Turkish poet who is also, unsurprisingly, a scholar of architectural history at Mimar Sinan University, named after the greatest Ottoman architect whose breathtaking structures lend Istanbul an unrivaled beauty. Efe Duyan’s verses are composed so patiently, meticulously that they may as well have been drawn rather than written. The lean interlacing of the words, the considered sparseness of the stanzas, the slow accretion of meaning along these afford the reader a striking transparency: we almost feel as if experiencing the poems taking shape as we read them. In these translations, based on Duyan’s own drafts in English, my principal aim was to strip the English text to its leanest and foreground as optimally as possible the formal ingenuity of both verse and poem. Given the infamous incommensurabiltity of English and Turkish grammar, the process often required forcing the natural Turkish syntactical order on the English in order to foreground the physical direction of the verse and the gradual accretion of meaning. In the Turkish originals, individual verses bring the reader to surprising semantic shifts and reversals; the movement through the poem, too, deftly builds on these surprise turns. To follow Duyan’s meaning means to follow the physical lines as if on an architect’s blueprint. Duyan’s initial drafts were principally, and justifiably, concerned with getting the meaning across as fully as possible. After all, I am a native reader of Turkish and would then be able to concentrate on recreating their formal elegance, their seemingly effortless flow in the Turkish. At best, I tried to create poetry written in English inside intrinsically Turkish forms, resonant with sounds and shades of the original language.
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