"The Saga of Istanbul", Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu

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 adobe huts of Anatolia;
Milk flows out of her taps, roses bloom on her masts;
My childhood in Anatolia's adobe huts
Sail to Istanbul and back on that mighty steamship.

Say Istanbul and mottled grapes come to mind
With three candles burning bright on the basket-
Suddenly along comes a girl so ruthlessly female
With a figure so lovely that I'd give up my life for it,
Her lips ripe with grape honey,
A girl luscious and lustful from tip to toe-
Southern wind and willow branch and the dance of joy-
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:
Bethoven's Ninth hand in hand with the Algerian March;
And an immaculate bridal bedroom set
Is auctioned off without the bride and the groom.
A chubby lute inlaid with mother of pearl
Recalls the famous lutanist on old records.
Brandish candlesticks and hookahs and rusty Persian swords
American cowboys pop up:
"Hands up!'

American sailors wear lily-white uniforms
Plucked from a huge daisy, pure as milk, clean as a cloud;
Death looks ugly on so pure a white,
But when they fight
They put their combat uniforms on
- Colour of blood and gunpowder and smoke-
Which gather hate but no dirt.

Say Istanbul and a huge fishery comes to mind
Like a rusty cobweb over the Bosphorus
Or sprawling off the Marmara coast.
Forty tunnies toss in the fishery like forty millstones.
The tunny, after all, is the shah 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 mast catches a mackerel in mid-air and gobbles it,
Then it flies away without waiting for one more;
The fisherman smiles kindly;
‘That gull’s Marika,’he says,
‘That’s the way she comes and goes, always.’

Say Istanbul and the Princes’Island come to mind
Where the French language is murdered
By sixtyish matrons who sit around puffed up as hell;
If only the lonely pine trees there could tell
What tales they'd have to tell!

Say Istanbul and towers come to mind:
If I paint one, the other are jealous.
The Maiden Tower ought to know better:
She should marry the Galata Tower and breed little towerlets.

Say Istanbul and a waterfront comes to mind:
Anatolia's poor forsaken huddled masses land
In its coffee houses day after day.
Some must beg to survive but shame keeps them away;
Some manage a broom and sweep the streets,
Their faces smeared with a filthy fusty grin;
Others shoulder a pannier or an ornate back saddle,
And they get lost in the city's hubbub and fiddle-faddle.
Tied legs wobbly under the weight, melting like wax,
They pant and heave, drenched in sweat.
A gentle porter is a must for a fragile item.
Do tender hands value a piano the way the porter does?
Suddenly a mushy song blares on the radio across the street:
The most popular crooner of them all,
His voice smudged with the greasy perfumes of Arabia:
'Life is full of joys and sorrows,
Some stay and some go.'

Say Istanbul and a stadium comes tn mind
Where twenty-five thousand voices under the sun
Sing our national anthem in unison
And the clouds are fired like cannonballs.
Dazzled by the sight of twenty-five thousand strong,
I rejoice in their joyful song
And offer to pluck my heart for them like a red poppy.

Say Istanbul and a stadium comes to mind
Where my blood flows into the veins of my fellow 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 multitudes share the gradeur of the joy
Born at the same moment:
Myriads and millions
Bang together in my head.
Then a line out of a poem fearfully 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 my tongue:
His flair' and flamboyance, his poems and his face
Hover overhead like a wounded pigeon
Which descends quietly to perch on this poem.
Where?
Just look, you'll find it there.

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

Say Istanbul and Sait Faik comes to mind:
Pepples twitter on the shore of Burgaz Island,
While a blue-eyed boy grows up in circles of joy
A blue-eyed old fisherman 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 Sivriada they gather gulls' eggs,
By midnight they're in the red light district,
In the morning they go through Galata;
At the cafe they tease a harmless lunatic,
Hey, Hasan,' they say, 'you're holding your paper upside down.'
They set the poor chap's newspaper on fire,
Then they sit and weep quietly.

Say Istanbul and Sait Faik comes to mind
All over his town's rock and soil and water,
A friend of the poor and the sick,
Whose pencil is as sharp as his 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 thought of it?
The blue-eyed boy doesn't give a damn,
But the old fisherman broods like hell;
And a green venom bursts out of the sea.
Piercing the heart that feels, ravaging 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 child on her back, one at her breast, one in her belly.
Devil may care, her life has flair:
She roams the city from one end to the other,
She is humble, she sells tongs, she bellydances,
'What about two bob, dear?' she says,
'You want me to tell your fortune; love?'
Till the day she dies, she tells nothing but lies.
She tells you the dream she had the night before:
'I see a yellow snake, son-of a-bitch keeps pestering me,
I wake up and what do I see?
My little ones are on the edge of the bed sucking my toes.'

Say Istanhul and a textile factory comes to mind:
High walls, long counters, tall stoves...
Tender slender girls toil all day long on their feet,
Sweating blood and tears.
Their faces long their hands long their days long
In the factory the windows are near the ceiling
Red-heeled fair-skinned girls - 'No loitering, girls!'

Out there the trees stretch row on row
Walls, walls endless walls Why do you cut us off from the trees
From the amber fields and the purple streets
Where the fair season rumbles and tumbles.
A nineteen-year-old working mother
Is dazzled by the white foamy flow of silk.
But printed silk is no good for nappies
Now if she could get a roll of ivory-white calico
She could do so much with it: curtains, sheets, underwear.
The thought of ivory-white calico makes her eyes sparkle.
When she dies giving birth to a third son
She is still longing for a roll of calico.
Young mothers like her are sixpence a dozen
At the factory somebody else takes her place
That's the way it is: if one goes, another comes.
Azrael, may you get your just reward.

Say Istanbul and a barge comes to mind
Loaded with onions, painted poison-green 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 tongue
Its motors speeding along our pulsebeat into our hearts
A mermaid with huge scale-covered buttocks.

Say Istanbul and barges come to mind
Humble wanderers on the high seas
With names like The Sea Tiger or The Triumphant Sword.

Say Istanbul and Sinan the Great Architect comes to mind
His ten fingers soaring like mighty plane trees.
Then the monster of shacks and shanties rears its head
Where smoke and filth and blight rutlessly spread.
Our city suckles dwarfs at her giant's breasts - -