Sami Baydar’s Death
By Necmi Zekâ
Translated By Erik Mortenson
tree hollows taught him how to hide he learned to keep still from motherless turtles
suddenly you didn’t hear his cartoonish coughs any more suddenly it became real—that very first beginning
only a pale blue onionskin’s left—all the medicine in his heart is nullified let’s visit every single mausoleum, let’s recite every single prayer
burning moon, frozen time—both shattered eternally
sb'nin ölümü
ağaç kovuklarından öğrenmişti gizlenmeyi kıpırdamamayı
annesiz kalmış kaplumbağalardan
duyulmaz oldu bir anda - çizgi film öksürük gerçek
oldu bir anda - o ilk başlangıca çıkmak
uçuk mavi pelur kağıt - kalbinde sıfır ilaç
bütün türbeler gezilsin - okunsun bin tür dua
ay çok sıcak artık - paramparça - buz tutan zaman
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Necmi Zekâ is one of the foremost avant garde poets working in Turkey. After finishing Istanbul’s German High School, he graduated from the Department of Political Science at Boğaziçi University before completing his M. Phil degree at Leicester University and conducting doctoral work at Northwestern. He has published nine books of poetry over the last twenty years. Zekâ has also edited two books, and is a multi-media artist whose work has been showcased in six solo exhibitions. In 2003, he received the city of Antalya’s Golden Orange Poetry Award, which led to a symposium on his poetry, the proceedings of which were published in Turkish as The Poetry of Necmi Zekâ (2005). His work has appeared in translation in Turkish Poetry Today, Berlin Quarterly, and Two Lines: World Writing in Translation. Zekâ currently lives and works in Istanbul.
Erik Mortenson is a translator, literary scholar, and writer. After earning a PhD from Wayne State in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany and a decade at Koç University in Istanbul where he helped found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson is an avid translator who was invited to participate in the prestigious Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish and whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, The Adroit Journal, Berlin Quarterly, Two Lines, and Turkish Poetry Today. He is also the author of three books, all from Southern Illinois University Press: Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence, which was selected as a Choice outstanding academic title in 2011; Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016); and most recently, Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). He is currently working on a book-length translation of Zekâ’s selected poetry.
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