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Mehmet Yashin

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Don't go to Kyrenia

“If you should come to Kyrenia
Don’t enter the walls.
If you should enter the walls
Don’t stay long.
If you should stay long
Don’t get married.
If you should get married
Don’t have children.”
                From an old Ottoman-Turkish song of Cyprus
                Translated by Lawrence Durrell

‘Don’t go to Kyrenia’, they said,
but if you do, have no children.
hundreds of times they said it,
your fault if you paid no attention.

It was the same boat that docked,
you thought the sail was satin, it was a shroud.
They unloaded the songs to the port
but they were not the songs of our love
the amphoras were filled with sea-blood
and those who drank from them were poisoned,
but if they didn’t drink, they’d die of the plague,
and if they didn’t die, they’d go to war.

The lights at the discotheque daze,
let them daze whether we die or not
we spin in slices of multicolour shadows,
let the lights daze, daze . . .

I don’t know what tremor of war
has petrified Kyrenia but left her eyes wide open,
in a confusion of who’s gone away
who’s come back,
the loved ones who have sailed away,
and the dead
and the dead have sent back.
Kyrenia will be machine-gunned if she moves,
and if she doesn’t, she will still be bombed by planes.

Love will move, even if we won’t
don’t water the garden they said
but if you do, don’t dig,
there’ll soon be a war, anyway.

If we’ll strip down to soldiers in the Fort,
whether the geraniums burst open or not, in a tumult of noises,
or not bloom at all, around the Loveterranean, our sea.
If we light a fire and dance,
if we dance in the submarine-caves
with LSD and videos and revolvers, we’ll dance,
whoever doesn’t dance will lose his mind
and who doesn’t lose his mind will drown in salt.

Don’t go to Kyrenia they said,
the lights at the discotheque, let them daze
there’ll soon be a war, anyway,
let the lights daze, daze...





Mehmet Yashin (Yasin) is considered one of the leading poets and writers in
contemporary Turkish literature. He lives between Nicosia, Istanbul and
London. His prize-winning poems and other literary works have been well
known to Cypriots as well as mainland Turks and Greeks since the early 1980s. He studied at the universities of Ankara, Istanbul, Birmingham and Middlesex. His books of poetry are: My Love The Dead Soldier (1984), Ladder of Light (1986), Pathos (1990), The ChairMan (1993), To Repair a Daydream(1998). He has published a novel, Your Kinsman Pisces (1994), and a collection of essays Poeturka (1995). He is also the editor and translator of Anthology of Early Cypriot Poetry: 9th century BC to 18th century AD (1999) and Anthology of Turkish-Cypriot Poetry: 18th to 20th centuries (1994) and Step-Mothertongue – From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (2000). His most recent publication is a volume of selected poems in English, Don’t Go Back To Kyrenia, (Middlesex University Press, 2001).
Taner Baybars is a British poet and translator of Turkish-Cypriot origin.
He worked for the British Council from the 1950s until his early retirement in 1988. He now lives in France and acts as Corresponding Editor for the avantgarde London magazine, Ambit. He is also recognized as the English translator of Nazim Hikmet. His translations of other Turkish poets have appeared in various magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Apart from his very first poetry collection (1954), his output has been entirely in English. His works include: To Catch a Falling Man (London, 1963), Susila in Autumn Woods (London, 1974), Narcissus in a Dry Pool (London, 1978), Pregnant Shadows (London, 1998). He has also written a novel, A Trap for the Burglar (London, 1965), and an autobiographical work, Plucked in a Far-Off Land: Images in Self-Biography (London, 1970).



 

Translated by Taner Baybars

Page(s) 221-222

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