Attila Ilhan Translations

Ben Sana Mecburum by Attila Ilhan translation by Nurgul Yayman and Michael R. Burch You are indispensable; how can you not know that you’re like nails riveting my brain? I see your eyes as ever-expanding dimensions. You are indispensable; how can you not know that I burn within, at the thought of you? Trees prepare themselves for autumn; can this city be our lost Istanbul? Now clouds disintegrate in the darkness as the street lights flicker and the streets reek with rain. You are indispensable, and yet you are absent ... Love sometimes seems akin to terror: a man tires suddenly at nightfall, of living enslaved to the razor at his neck. Sometimes he wrings his hands, expunging other lives from his existence. Sometimes whichever door he knocks echoes back only heartache. A screechy phonograph is playing in Fatih ... a song about some Friday long ago. I stop to listen from a vacant corner, longing to bring you an untouched sky, but time disintegrates in my hands. Whatever I do, wherever I go, you are indispensable, and yet you are absent ... Are you the blue child of June? Ah, no one knows you! No one knows! Your deserted eyes are like distant freighters ... perhaps you are boarding in Yesilköy? Are you drenched there, shivering with the rain that leaves you blind, beset, broken, with wind-disheveled hair? Whenever I think of life seated at the wolves’ table, shameless, yet without soiling our hands ... Yes, whenever I think of life, I begin with your name, defying the silence, and your secret tides surge within me making this voyage inevitable. You are indispensable; how can you not know? Fragments by Attila Ilhan loose English translations by Michael R. Burch The night is a cloudy-feathered owl, its quills like fine-spun glass. It gazes out the window, perched on my right shoulder, its wings outspread and huge. If the encroaching darkness seems devastating at first glance, the sovereign of everything, its reach infinite ... Still somewhere within a kernel of light glows secretly creating an enlightened forest of dialectics. *** Bitter words crack like whips snapping across prison yards ... Then there are words like pomegranate trees in bloom, words like the sun igniting the sea beyond mountainous horizons, flashing like mysterious knives ... *** What I wrote and what you understood? Curious and curiouser!