Born in 1953, Şükrü Erbaş is a renowned Turkish poet whose poetry amalgamates social realist themes with an individual perspective on subject matters ranging from unconditional love to the “invisible god we call time” that forces us to shift shape, both physically and spiritually, for better or worse. His poetic register is characterized by questions he raises in his poems, meaning to evoke wonder in his readers as he delves into the depths of human existence.
The poem “Autumn Dialogues with Lady Vita,” originally titled “Ömür Hanımla Güz Konuşmaları” and translated by Hande Eagle, is from Erbaş’s poetry collection Bütün Şiirleri Vol.2 published in 2019 by Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi. ŞiirHikaye, a genre that compounds the features of short story and poetry, defines the poet’s narrative style that has been explored by many Turkish poets before Erbaş, including acclaimed poet Nazım Hikmet.
“Autumn Dialogues with Lady Vita” is a quintessential example of şiirhikaye where the themes of passing from the fervour of youth to the dawn of old age, dashed dreams and loneliness to which we circle back in life after periods of human connection and warmth, are treated with a well-measured dose of self-directed empathy and melancholia.Erbaş’s poetry in English translation has previously appeared in various magazines, such as The Common and Asymptote. And here is an interview with the poet from the Poet Magazine.
We would like to thank Hande Eagle for her meticulous translation and Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi for their permission to share the poet’s work on our website. To read the poem in Turkish, click here. Enjoy!
… And here comes autumn, Lady Vita. Ever so gently, earth is losing its bright mornings and in the blue of the sky there is a campaign of clouds bringing you down. Rain is about to fall. A vaporous drizzle combs through the void that is the human heart. The scene is set for sorrow. A sense of grief that is beyond me runs through my veins. Upon my heart thousands of blades… and my face an atlas of my existence; an atlas of reliefs where flatlands are occupied by my anxieties, highlands of my fears and cliffs of my wreckage. Lady Vita, is living a chore?
Who taught us to look at everything on the bright side? What can a human who doesn’t see pain, doesn’t experience hopelessness, a human that hasn’t been ground by grief down to the bones know about happiness, hope and joy? Isn’t it much like knowing the colour blue before seeing the sky and the sea? Think of an autumn, Lady Vita, without a spring, without a summer… Is the sorrow of such an autumn, sorrow? If beginnings have any meaning at all, isn’t it to take a chance on the ending, and an ending to envisage a beginning? Keeping life on a straight line is all-consuming. How can living be a novelty and not all consuming, if all these years we must live are not spent between extremes, and every now and then can surpass the limits of habit.
Rain is falling Lady Vita, and not from the sky but from the void of my heart to the desolate land of my existence… And I am melting away like a miniscule, meek dot on an infinite plateau. If I called out, who would hear my voice from this floor of solitude?
Let’s return… To return is to succumb, to leave half-lived our ascent, it is cowardice, it is to shelter in the mouldy and safe peel of habits. Nevertheless, let’s return. We have responsibilities that we have taken on unconsciously. Let’s return to houses, humps on our backs, the sublime shelters of our weakness, the castles of our solitude. Living without measure is not for us, Lady Vita. Growing up, we didn’t have broad horizons. As we wanted to expand our boundaries with our juvenile palms a thousand obstacles of life piled up in front of us. We got to know desperation; we learned defeat.
I have no grip on my lust for life, Lady Vita. For days now, I have been nailed to a peculiar void by my pupils. Really, what is the meaning of life? I keep turning back to search for an answer, to the deep seas of time where my heart left faint marks and took on heavy burdens. What else is hope other than pessimism taking a faint breath; what else is joy if not a brief respite from pain? And existence, a hopeless war between dream and reality; a huge illusion that absorbs everything. Or is it not?
I didn’t have those towering hopes, grand dreams, yearnings, great expectations. My conditions formed me, and I found my suffering. If I had lived like everyone else, if I could see life through their eyes, the shops would have been enough to console me. A shirt, a pair of shoes, a suit, a dinner out in a restaurant; a television set, a rug, a table, and other pieces of furniture would have been enough to cover up my solitude, to put myself forward, to exist, to climb up the ladder among the “closed circle of losers”.
Instead, one afternoon I would rather sit on the hemline of an orange fire and consume the world and myself with a faithful friend whose heart palpitates in my palm. To consume it so that it could result in me being delivered to a spanking new “I” upon every return from my dreary reverie. An “I” who saw the backstage of all relationships and silently laughed at the artificial intimacy of people. Lady Vita, who can understand anyone at all?
Lady Vita, the mother tongue, the poem of solitude, is silence. I implore you, don’t force me to speak. I have consumed the waters of speech, dried up its source. What remains is deep silence in my heart, as great as the crowds, the crowds. Lady Vita, I am lonely, darkness is esoteric like the rivers that run through the night, I am so lost, so sad, so alone. See how my water trickles into the soil. The night veils my face. A thousand stones hide inside me. Who can see anyone’s depth, and besides, with which eyes?
In their language there isn’t a single word that is their own, that’s how much they speak. From which part of the human would you say a word is born? From his tongue, his heart, or his mind? From his dreams or his reality? And through how many doors does it enter to find its place in another human? Does it really find its place? Words should be prohibited, Lady Vita, prohibited! In a world where no one understands one another what good is a word if not for punching the void? If it only were possible for humans to talk with their hearts instead of their tongues all would more true, more intimate. I reckon that the mind should be erased from human relationships. Am I wrong? Regardless… At least I know I could be wrong.
Tell me something new, please, something new. I’ve heard the same words and the same sounds so many times that my ears are filled with lead. Say for example, uncertainty is beautiful and certainty ugly. Silence is always better than – especially contemporary and hollow – noise; the power of imagination bestows inner wealth. Say; that’s why the gently dawning hazy morning and the still evening veiled in orange leaves us impressed and stunned. Fleeting impressions are always more powerful and perpetual than everlasting appearances. Habits slay our beauty and change defaces us.
No one can keep up with their dreams and no one can outrun their reality by even a single step; that is why time suffocates, remains short or becomes infinite in relation to human life, so minute. Say, desire knows no boundaries, requires no explanation, possesses no crime; desire is an instinctive consequence, it is neither right nor wrong, neither appropriate nor inappropriate…
Every one of us is wrapped in barbed wire, and in every relationship, we leave behind a part of ourselves and that’s how we perish, through division. Our greatest ability is to be up against ourselves, to live contrarily, by creating our sources of pain with our very own hands. Our shoreline is the height of our emotion, our depth the measure of our mind, our horizon beyond curtains of mist. How does that shoreless sky fit into our miniscule eyes, into a glass of water, into a barred window? How do we conceal it in a tongue-tied night? And what mystery it holds that it fills us with a feeling of amplitude wherever we are constricted. Yet, at every turn we fail to solve it… with this stunted conscience, this shallow heart, this memorised living.
Lady Vita, say, the world is a pitcher, life is water. It trickles from time’s pinhole pores for one stroke of coolness, one gulp of happiness. And from the gallery of death… a palm of water pours on to the soil. A few drops of dew, a palm of wetness on the ground. Say; how can a human live knowing about death, how can one die knowing a whole world will remain… knowing is the mother of all pains…
Jolt my mind’s puny feet, besiege me. Tell me something different, please, tell me something new. I am fed up with my existential cast. Hear and understand me.
The rain has slowed down, Lady Vita. Now the sky smiles blue once again. Nature plays the same game with us. She gently shows us a glimmer of hope and filters the light of optimism from its blue atlas. What deception! Is the colour of clouds blue-white or lead-ash?
I would have wanted to kiss the sky, Lady Vita, not with my eyes but with my lips. I am tired of carrying the clouds on my eyelashes. Did you say insanity? Who knows… Perhaps it is a response to grovelling, or who knows, an unconscious feeling of being contrary. I could have wanted to be the sky, no? Who could say anything?
Lady Vita, I walked this earth, no one saw me. With a trunk of hopes chained and locked forty-times, in my hand my heart of dead dreams – carrying our load, yours and mine – and on my face, a strange smile that is not mine, I walked this earth in the name of grace. I embroidered the fabric of my existence loop by loop into the frame of relationships as misplaced sincerity, erred respect, and a curve of sorrow. People should recall me with shards of glass… with the scatter and lament of blowing leaves… I unfastened my load at the wrong bazaar.
In my heart abides the sorrow of a crushed rose. I am about to unravel like a suspect who’s been beaten for hours. I shiver. A horse chestnut steadily loses leaf on the streets of solitude, it covers the first summer of my existence. Inside me a child runs bare footed towards old age, trampling dead hopes long defeated a thousand times. Oh Lady Vita! Might old age be just a deep sigh, an errant childhood?
translation attached 