The Sage of Istanbul...Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu

Sultanahmet Camii, İstanbul

The Sage of Istanbul

Say Istanbul and a seagull comes to mind
Half silver and half foam, half fish and half bird.
Say Istanbul and a fable comes to mind,
The old wives' tale that we have all heard.

Say Istanbul and a mighty steamship comes to mind
Whose songs are sung in the mudbaked huts of Anatolia:
Milk flows from her tap, roses bloom on her masts;
Dreamy kinds in Anatolia's mudbaked huts
Sail to Istanbul and back on that migthy steamship.

Say Istanbul and mottled grapes come to mind
With three candles burning bright on the basket-
Suddenly comes along a girl so ruthlessly female,
With a figure so lovely that you bask in it
And lips ripe with grape honey,
A girl luscious and willow branch and the dance of joy-
Hailing from a wine cellar, she makes you tipsy:
As the song goes, like a ship at sea
My heart is tossed and wrecked again.

Say Istanbul and the Grand Bazaar comes to mind:
Beethoven's Ninth, hand in hand with the Algerian March;
And an immaculate bridal bedroom set
Is auctioned off Without the brids and groom.
A chubby lute inlaid with mother of pearl
Recalls the famous lutaniet on old records.
Brandish candlesticks and hookshe and rusty Persian swords,
American cowboys prop up:
"Hands up!"
American sailors wear lily-white uniforms
Plucked from a huge daisy, clear as milk, clean as a cloud;
Beath looks ugly on so pure a white,
But when they fight
They put their combat uniforms on
-Color of blood and gunpowder and smoke-
Which gather hate but no dirt.
Say Istanbul and huge fishery come to mind
Like a rusty cobweb over the Bosphorus, sprawling off the Marmara coast.
Forty tunnies toss in the fishery, like forty millstones.
The tunny, after all is the king of the sea:
You must shoot it in the eye with a rifle and fell it like a tree,
Then suddenly the face of the fishery gets bloodshot
And the emerald waters become muddled in the turmoil.
With forty tunnies at a clip, the skipper is spellbound for joy.
A seagull perched on the cast catches a mackerel in mid-air and gobbles it,
Then it flies away without waiting for one more;
The fisherman smiles, sweet and kind:
"That gull's Maria," he says,
"That's the way she comes and goes, always."

Say Istanbul and the Princes Islands come to mind
Where the French language is murdered
By sixtyish matrons who sit around puffed up as hell;
If only the lonely pinetrees there could tell
All abouth the hankypanky of the boy with the god.

Say Istanbul and towers come to mind:
If one of them is painted, the other one grumbles.
The Tower of Leander ought to know that's way the cookie crumbles:

She should marry the Galata Tower and have lots kids.
Say Istanbul and a waterfront comes to mind:
Anatolia's poor godforsaken huddled masses land
In its coffee houses, day after day.
Some must go begining to survive, but shame keeps them away; A few manage to find a broom and brcome stret cleanners-no less,
Their faces smeared with a filty fusty grin:
Others shoulder a pannier or an ornate back saddle,
And the all get lost in the city's hubbub and fiddle-faddle.

Tied to a greasy girth, some carry a piano on their backs
Their legs wobbly under the weight, melting like max,
They pant and heave, drenched in sweat.
A gentle porter is a must for a fragile item.
Do the tender hands value piano the way the porter does?
Suddenly a mushy voice blares on the radio across the street:
The most popular crooner of them all,
Yelping and yawning, smudged with the greasy perfumes of Arabia:

"Life is lull of joy and sorrows,"
"Some stay and some go."

Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind
Where twenty-five thousand voices under the sun
Sing our national anthem in unison
And the clouds are fired like canonball.
Dazzled by the sight of twenty-five thousand strong
We rejoies in theire joyful song
And offer to pluck our hearts for them like red poppies.

Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind
Hher our blood flows into the veins of our fellew men.
Rubbing shoulders, we holler together
Till our throats are sore:
Lefter's kick is a sure score.

Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind
Where multitutes join in the same joy
And share the same love and agony.
Then a line aut of a poem flutters in the air:
"Blessed are those who embrace their loved ones."

Say Istanbul and Yahya Kemal once came to mind;
Nowadays it's Orhan Veli whose name is on the tip of every tongue:
His flair and flamboyance, his poems and his face
Hover overhead like a wounded pigeon
Which descende quietly to perch on this poem.

This city just drives you out of your mind;
Good thing Orhan Veli's chuckles remain behind.

Say Istanbul and Sait Faik comes to mind:
Pebbles twitter on the shore of Burgaz Island,
While a blue-syed boy grow up in circles of joy
A blue-syed old fischerman grows younger and tinier,
When they reach the same height they turn into Sait

And they roam the city hand in hand,
Cursing beast and bird, friend and foe alike;
On Sharp Island they gather gulls' eggs,
By midnight they're in the redlight district.
In the morning they go through Galata:
At the café they kid around with a harmless lunatic,
"Whaddya know," they say, "You're holding your paper upside down."
Then they set the poor guy's newspaper on fire,
Then they sit and weep quietly.

Say Istanbul and Sait Faik comes to mind
All over this town's rock and soil and water,
A friend of the poor and the sick,
Whose pencil is as sharp as is heart is wounded,
Bleeding for the lonely and yearning for the pure and the good.

Say Istanbul and Sait's last years come to mind:
At his best age he's told he has just a few years to live;
How could Sait bear the thouht of it?
The blue-eyed boy doesn't give a hang,
But the old fisherman broods like hell;
And a green venom bursts out of the sea
Piercing the heart that feels, revaging the mind that knows.

The little blue-eyed boy
And the old fisherman
And that green venom smeared all over our lips...
So long as Istanbul throbs alive in the sea,
So long as language lives, so will Sait's poetry.

Say Istanbul and a gipsy woman comes to mind
With a bunch of flowers taller than herself,
Wherever the spring comes from, so does she
She is the sun and the soil from top to toe,
And a mother matchless among mothers:
One kid on her back, one at her breast, one in her tummy.
A gypsy women always bulges with a baby.

Devil may care, her life has flair:
She roams the city from one end to the other
Making no bones about selling tongs or doing the bellydance.
She is humble, she sells tongs, she bellydances.
"How about a quarter, dear?" she says,
"You want me to tell your fortune, love?
Till the day she dies, she tells nothing but lies.
Then comes the dream she had the night before:
"I see a yellow snake. Son-of-a-bitch keeps bugging me.
"I wake up and what do I see?
"My little oner are on the edge of the bed sucking my toes"

Say Istanbul and a textile factory comes to mind:
High walls, long counters, tall stoves...
Tender slender girls toil all day long on their feet,
In blood an sweet, weary and sad,
Their faces long their hands long their days long
In the factory where the windows are near the ceiling
Red-heeled fair-skinned girls– "No loitering, girls!"
Rows and rows of trees stretch out there,

But the endless walls cur the girls off from them,
From the amber fields an the purple streets
Where the fair season rumbles and tumbles.
A nineteen-year-old working mother,
Dizzy with the white foamy flow of silk
Which whets her appetite no end, gets ideas;
But silk is no good to make pants for her sons.
Now if she could get a roll of ivory-white calico:
She can do so much with it: drapes and sheets and underwear.

The very thought of ivory-white calico dazzles her.
When she dies giving birth to a third son,
She is still longrs for a roll of calico for the kids and all.
Young mothers like her are dime a dozen:
At the factory some body else takes her place of this one
That's the way it is: If one goes, another comes.
Damn you death.

Say Istanbul and a barge comes to mind
Brimful of onion, green as poison on coral red,
Sailing in from the Black Sea ports winter and summer
With one more patch on its filthy sail each time
And the rust of its iron rods on our tongues
And its motors speeding along our pulseboat right into our hearts
A mermaid with scale-covered huge buttocks.

Say Istanbul and barge come to mind
Demure and hadless
Called the Sea Tiger or the Triumphant Sword.

Say Istanbul and Sinan the Great Architect comes to mind
His ten fingers soaring like ten mighty plane trees.
Than the monster of the chacks and shanties rears its head

Where smoke filth and blight ruthlessly spread.
Our city suckles dwarfs at her giant's breasts.

Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu


Çeviren: Talat Sait Halman

Derleyen: Ayhan Görür