Haydar Ergülen
Two stars that have risen from Arabic poetry into the sky of poetry, Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, are before us once again with their books translated for the first time: Atı Neden Yalnız Bıraktın (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?) and Belli Belirsiz Şeyler Anısına (In Memory of Vague Things; Arabic original: Ihtifa’an bi-l-Ashya’ al-Ghamida al-Wadiha).
Two stars that have risen from Arabic poetry into the sky of poetry, and that have raised the sky of poetry: Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis. I always remember the first together with Edward Said, and also with Jean-Luc Godard’s film Notre Musique (Our Music). Shot in 2004, the film tells of the savagery of war, and the sentence “Not for war with me… If there is even one person who wants to die for peace, I will feel great happiness” sums it up. The famous director was 74 that year and made the film after his journeys to Sarajevo. Among the real characters in Notre Musique is the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, whom I love dearly and had the chance to meet. In the film, telling an Israeli journalist about the drama and tragedy of his own country, Palestine, Darwish says words to be nailed into the heart: “There is more inspiration and human drama in defeat than in victory. If I belonged to the side of the victors, I would want to take part in the solidarity of the victims… You have given us defeat and awareness.” As the great poet son of Palestine, among the founders of its national identity, Darwish is also the pioneering poet of resistance poetry.
Pioneership – almost a concept synonymous with him. It also includes demolishing and rebuilding: leaving aside what is complete and turning towards the unknown or the new. Mahmoud Darwish is regarded as the Edward Said of Palestinian and Arabic poetry. Just as Said was a thinker who acted with an intellectual’s responsibility and conscience, Darwish is a great poet who brings together the poetic and the political and carries the political on within the poetic. Like a poet searching for his childhood, Darwish lived in other lands the exile Nâzım Hikmet lived in prisons, searching for and longing for his homeland.
With a unique poetic language influenced as much by world poetry, mythology and the holy books as by Arabic poetry, Darwish wrote a poetry rich in content and a pleasure to read – one that will find its meaning and its response, and keep its freshness, in whatever language it is spoken. I liken Darwish to a poet he loved, Lorca, for his rich, colourful, warm poetry. As Mehmet Hakkı Suçin – who has brought into Turkish, with a competence worthy of Darwish’s poetry, his first biographical book, Atı Neden Yalnız Bıraktın – puts it, Darwish’s “world of words is as rich as his world of feeling. He uses a fervent, lively language.” Referring to his famous poem “Identity Card”, which begins with the lines “Record! / I am an Arab”, Darwish would say that he resisted this “attractive prison” and went on writing more “difficult” poems. This, too, counts as continuing the poetry of resistance through resistance within difficult poetry.
Darwish’s Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, published in 1995, is a biography of houses, from the house where he was born in the homeland to the houses where he lived in exile. The book’s striking and chilling title comes from a father–son dialogue in the poem “The Eternity of the Cactus”:
“-Atı neden yalnız bıraktın?
-Eve yarenlik etsin diye evladım
Zira evler ölür terk ederse sakinleri…”
You are often saddened that you cannot read a poet known to be great in his own language, or the translations you read do not make you feel his greatness. Like his earlier translation of Darwish, Bu Şiirin Bitmesini İstemiyorum (I Don’t Want This Poem to End, YKY, 2015), the new translation by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin – who has also translated Arab poets such as Gibran, Bennis and Qabbani – introduces me, in a sense for the first time, to Mahmoud Darwish’s magnificent poetry.
So does Suçin’s translation of Adonis that I read, Belli Belirsiz Şeyler Anısına. Ironically, Edward Said too calls Adonis – said to mark “year zero of Arabic poetry” – “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet”. The strong presence of “eroticism” in the poems of Darwish and Adonis makes itself felt as a “secular” spirit taking over the body of the poem. Adonis’s “secular” view of the sacred, of the world and of Sufism is daring and provocative enough. I think this would be understood even better if his book on secularism, part of which was published in L’Express, were also translated into Turkish.
Adonis’s Belli Belirsiz Şeyler Anısına, written between 1988 and 2014, contains poems written to the human being, nature, life, death, reality, three Arab poets and Beirut. Brief things. Flashes. Lightning. Incomplete quatrains. Things already said. Wisdom and anti-wisdom. Experiences. Discoveries. Memories of the past and of the future. Stamps. Wings. Earrings. Doubts. Uncertainties. Dreams. Thoughts. Banalities. Sublimities. Miniatures. Foamy things. Calms. In “Letters”, both the longest poem in the book and the very reason for poetry, Adonis says: “Writing – the lust for death within it,” and continues: “Writing is to keep on asking questions: another form of death,” and asks: “Is that why you are always yourself and another at the same time?”
Tremendous poems. I didn’t know Adonis wrote in Turkish! Bravo to Mehmet Hakkı Suçin.
Atı Neden Yalnız Bıraktın
Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2017
160 pages.
Belli Belirsiz Şeyler Anısına
Adonis
Translated by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
Everest Yayınları, 2017
210 pages.
Source: Hürriyet KitapSanat, 1 December 2017, year 1, no. 44. Translated from the Turkish for this site.