PASSAGE TO EFSUS (EFSUS’A YOLCULUK)
Three excerpts
by Yücel Kayıran
translated from Turkish by Derick Mattern
The following excerpts are three passages from Yücel Kayıran’s book-length poem, Passage to Efsus. The book is a meditation set over the course of a single night’s journey from Kayıran’s current home in the capital of Ankara to his hometown, Afşin, in the eastern mountains. Rather than selecting a contiguous swath, I’ve opted to present here three discontinuous passages that share leitmotifs interwoven throughout the poem. In them, he contemplates his adolescent decision to leave his hometown, then ruminates on his imminent return.
§ I went to bed and slept
before coming to a decision
then I washed my face and hands
and brushed my teeth
taking a shower isn’t always possible in a stove-heated house
then I went out and walked around
walked out of town and up
through the dew-wet grass
the brown soil of the earth
wild pears and thornapple trees
scattered here and there
like memories of a time of drought in the world
I went right to the top
I always walk on my own
before coming to a decision
the scent of the earth going along with me
the air opening my veins
climbing up so high
I’d mull things over
could it be a new beginning
for example, a portrait of the new era
of what kind of person I would be
once a decision’s come to
up here so close to the sky
the descent is of no consequence
water is a memory composed of rain
melancholy is a being composed of all the decisions one has made
but the every-self is not one’s own smoke
a person’s personhood
should be defined by the “what” more than the “who”
and so when I turn to go back down
there’s nothing left here anymore besides myself
§ I wanted to be dry grass.. dry and grass
but not the kind of grass that’s dry
because it has been uprooted or weeded out
dry grass that’s of the very being of the soil
this image hasn’t stopped trailing me since the beginning
it’s possible to call these images an obsession
I loved and all things being equal I still love
digging down within myself like this to unearth the reasons behind an image
dry grass, I wanted to be dry grass over the earth
to sleep as though sleeping in the earth
to return again from sleep
cleansed from the inner current
imbued with the quick of the earth
the dry grass knows it will return in spring
as a sign of the imperative of eternity
in faithfulness to the earth
and to the recurrence of being
the dry grass lives in silence…in the soil of the earth
no one owns it
nor is it a superior creation
I wanted to be dry grass
dry grass has no interiority
no burden of memory
no road it must walk
no home it must eventually return to
it is what it is and is nothing but what it is
still, though the dry grass knows the recurrence of eternity
I have no spring of my own to return to
§ maybe a new light
coming from the depths I dig
a promise, an opening
it left me right as I grasped it
the repetition in my language
a raft of prayer in my flesh
water falling beyond the horizon
the trace of a thing, no, the thing itself
connected to its faded self
a color
a son perhaps
birth-scent
paper cotton hand
the wind blows if I take breath
rosewater herbs in the woodshed
I left my mother’s house for an illusion
maybe I left it
for the flesh
maybe for the spirit
I wouldn’t know
the images on the walls of my mind
are not made of flesh
but of marble
my inner voice
swells out
a house of possibilities’ possibilities
there is no code yet
for my language written in dried ink
a stain
a proclamation
maybe the map is on my face
dry grass returning again to green
Yücel Kayıran is one of the leading poets and critics writing in Turkish today. Born in 1964 in Adana, he has published six books of poems and four of criticism. In 2018 Passage to Efsus won the Yunus Nadi Prize. The judges lauded the book as an “individual journey in an epic narrative setting with a philosophical approach to social history.” A retired teacher of philosophy, lives in Ankara with his daughter. Kayıran’s work is only beginning to appear in English.
Derick Mattern is a poet and translator of contemporary Turkish poetry. He has received support from the British Centre for Literary Translation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. His translations can be found in Gulf Coast, The Common, Copper Nickel, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and Berlin Quarterly. He is a recent graduate of the PhD track for international writers in comparative literature at Washington University in St Louis.