Murathan Mungan
trans. by Aron Aji and David Gramling
Dreams of a Princess Awake
serpents nested in a jug
dreams of a princess awake—
longships, palaces
O glass mansions, speak of sultans,
which of the mountains tell the oldest tales,
which trail do the White Riders forge?
Did the peshmergas’ tawny sorrow
bring the evenings
so that Farhads, tamping for hidden waters,
might unhorse their hearts?
—
Spring weighs on the boughs!”
Bandits weigh on the villages!
O times unforeseen,
heroes sacrificed to custom
in times unforeseen;
which heart has room for you
that the snow-capped sagas might preserve you?
—
Death prowls the veiled mountains,
hair-trigger relations,
black whiskers shade the rocks.
Handkerchiefs, corners knotted still, release
the scent of carnations with its embroidered longing
(and a fistful of prayer beads).
Across the evening, the thyme
mountain fires and burnt-edged cantos
flood the plains’ outcast breath.
In the seasons of waylaid ghazals,
the unwearied assassins spell suicide
in reverse, its steps as wary
as prey in the dense forest.
And so the needlework remained undone
on the beloved’s stitch-frame.
—
Winds speak low at dusk,
bodies sway like black willows,
ajem sashes around their waist.
At the back of every mountain,
the land is changing hands;
fugitives of the mountains,
roguish and grim
with cliff-hearted vengeance,
sentinels of darkness,
put on that armor
of zephyr solitude
which they share with outlying stars.
—
O daughters of Beys! Princess dreams!
Tales of Keloğlan stealing into thick-walled rose-gardens,
o bloody arrows striking the heart in epic nights,
the chieftain’s posts, clans, encampments.
Shepherds—childhoods rattled through with bullets—
which reed-song carries their echoes,
who fathoms rivers that change course at night,
how moons stiffen the rims of this abyss,
who can fathom?
—
Black longships sailing the atlas mantle,
history, tracking its polestar,
those long-drowned longships
sketched on seas that
swallowed them.
The battle-weary Marshal with his shoulders slumped,
The Conquest of Istanbul, a Rose on the Conqueror’s Collar,
Zuleyha the World’s Most Beautiful, Noah’s Ark, The Victory at Preveza,
a bridge, a hut, a windmill pictured far off,
Crescent-and-Star Teams for the Nation, the Republic Radio Choir,
Shahmarans, serpent queens of the orient, thickening scale by scale,
Pehlivan wrestlers muscling down the World,
and faded panoramas from Hayat’s centerfolds.
They uplift none of you anymore,
these fancied walls of gloomy coffee houses.
—
Those princesses who dreamt
all those dreams from start to end,
when did they wake,
when did the mountains wake,
when, the tales . . .
—
When will they come streaming,
the serpents crammed inside the jug,
the Phoenix down from the Never-Mountain,
utopias snatching for keys
in the earth’s worn-down oracle!
When were they hung out to dry, these
kohl-eyed fairy-tales,
potions with broken spells,
heirless padishahs,
palaces with three heirs in-waiting,
these wells of no return,
the pools with dove-shirted princes,
fluttering their wings?
—
O late-century empires,
your cautious rebellions
—all subdermal, personal—
each quandary pregnant with its own reversal,
one face black, the other entrenched.
O our stolen dreams:
princesses asleep for centuries.
Murathan Mungan, an icon of the Turkish gay movement, published his first collection of poems, Stories about Ottomans, in 1980, and has been prolific since. Other works include his books of poetry, Summer Passes and Metal; his four successful stage plays; and his screenplay for the 1986 Atif Yilmaz film Messy Bed. His short stories have been anthologized in volumes such as Forty Rooms and Genies of Money.
Aron Aji directs the MFA program in literary translation at Iowa. A native of Turkey, his translations include three book-length works by Bilge Karasu: Death in Troy, The Garden of Departed Cats (National Translation Award, 2004), and A Long Day’s Evening (NEA Literature Fellowship; short-listed for the 2013 PEN Translation Prize). He teaches courses on retranslation, poetry in translation, theory, and contemporary Turkish literature. He is the current president of the American Literary Translators Association.
David Gramling is associate professor of German Studies at Arizona. He is a member of the American Literary Translators Association and of the Researching Multilingually at Borders project (funded by the AHRC through the Translating Cultures Theme), and he is the translation editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke). His co-translation with Aron Aji of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish-Kurdish poetry book In My Heart’s East is under review with City Lights. He is currently translating Mungan’s Shahmeran novella, Tales of Battle.