Death of the Carpenter Fish∗

Sait Faik Abasıyanık (1906-1954)

All of them have beautiful eyes. All of them when alive, have scales that
are worth putting on a lady’s dress, ears or neck. Why the diamonds, rubies,
onyx, emeralds, and this and that?
If it were possible that ladies could attend the elegant balls dressed with
the capricious colors of their skins, the fishermen would earn millions, and
the fish would get the respect and honour they deserve. It’s so sad that it
fades away as soon as they die. As such, their glistening skin becomes like
a dried insect’s. The fish whose death I’ll tell you about does not have the
glistening skin, nor the shiny scales that others do. He doesn’t even have
the scales to start with. He is dark with an indistinguishable green colour.
He is the ugliest of all fish. He has a huge, white, translucent, nylon mouth
without teeth: Opens it very wide once pulled out of the water. Never shuts
it again.
Have I already told you that his body has a dark and dirty colour?
This fish which the Greek fishermen called hrisopsaros —the fish of
Christ—, was once a horrendous sea monster. Well before Christ was born,
it horrified all the Mediterranean people. Waiting for a Phoenician to fall
into the water!.. Countless Cartaginian ships, Israelite fishing boats were
capsized by him. He cut; reaped; hacked; spurred; attached; ripped; tore
off; pulled; chopped off. Bravest pirates of the Mediterranean who would
neither be intimidated by any fellow human being or beast, nor be afraid of
any storm, thunderbolt, trouble, or even torture would be pale upon hearing
his name, the carpenter fish.
One day, as he was strolling on the beach, Christ himself sees fishermen
leaving their boats and running away. On asking what the matter was, they
say to him ”Help us!”. ”Help us! Help us with this monster! He broke
our boats, chopped off our friends. Worst of all, we cannot catch any fish
anymore. We will starve!”
∗
This translation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 2.5 License.

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 Barefoot, Christ walks to the sea swarming with hundreds of carpenter
fish. He pulls the biggest one out of the sea with his long fingered hands,
holds him tightly with his two thumbs, bends over him and whispers some-
thing to his ears.
From that day on, the carpenter fish has been a rather poor, miserable
creature of the sea despite his intimidating look. His body has many notches
that look like nails, an adze, a chisel, pliers, a saw, a file, and thorns that
look like something in between a bone and a fishbone. It is quite possible
that the he was named the ’carpenter fish’ because of these features.
All this toolset is wrapped up by an embroidered membrane which one
can almost mistake for transparent nylon. Towards the tail, this filmy mem-
brane becomes slightly thicker and darker, and looks like the fishtail it is.
When he bites the hook, he becomes disgruntled. Who knows what type
of fear that he’s in? His world is a void now. Even if he gets off the hook
some way, he will float flat on the surface of the sea. He looks at you with
his big eyes filled with grief. When you pull him on the deck of the boat
you will hear his voice for minutes. Right, his voice! Only him and the
flying gurnard will produce such sounds like a cry or like a breath. He gets
disgruntled once he hits the fishing net.
Once I saw a carpenter fish hung over the branch of the red and white
acacia in front of the fishers’ inn. His colour was the same as the colour at
the time he was pulled out of the sea. The filmy, softer-than-silk membrane
embracing the toolbox was flickering. I haven’t seen such a frolic before.
Yes, that was a play, a frolic. The frolics of the invisible inner wind... There
was no visible flickering of the body. Only the membrane was flickering
sweetly with a slight quiver. This quiver which seemed to be a pleasant and
joyful thing at first sight was in fact the danse macabre. It was as if the
soul of the carpenter fish was leaving him in the form of a wind from the
membrane. It was as if there’ll be none of it left.
Sometimes in the summer, a moiré pattern occurs on the surface of sea
despite there’s no wind. It was a desirable quiver as such, filling one with
pleasure and contentment. When one thinks that the fish was just about to
die, this quiver might have been associated with pain. However, one usually
refrains from that kind of association. Maybe this was just a wonderfully
sweet death. Maybe he had a full belly and was very content of himself.
Maybe he thinks he’s still swimming in the depths of the sea. Maybe it’s in
the evening. The sand of the sea floor is teasing him. The eggs of the female
below, and the seeds of the male above are swinging, swinging, and swinging
endlessly. A moment of passion embraces his body... At a moment’s turn,
I’ve seen a horrible thing. The fish began to bleach, losing all his colour,

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becoming almost white. Before I was able to say ”Is it only my imagination?
Is it really discolouring?”, I understood that it was.
The frolics of the membrane started to get faster, and the fish started
to become paler and paler second by second. I felt the same fear that filled
the heart of the carpenter fish. It is essentially the same fear which we all
are familiar with: the fear of death.
He understood by then what was happening. The world of underwater
was no more... He would no longer leave his flat body to the flow again,
or be buried inside the green seaweed. He would not ever instantly wake
up in the cool brightness that was filtered down from the top of the sea to
the bottom, play with his tail in the blue and green antics of the day, or
produce bubbles to send high up to the surface of the sea. He would not
ever lie on the living seaweed, or wash his tools and himself in the wisp of
the sea. Everything was over:
The state of dying takes a long time for the carpenter fish. It was as if
he was trying to adjust to the gaseous water which we call the air. I felt as
it is almost like if he tried it just a bit harder, he would.
If we could manage to extend this state of dying which takes two hours,
to four hours, then from four hours to eight hours; then from eight hours to
twenty-four; we could as well see the carpenter fish doing his things amongst
us.
It will be a day to celebrate when we manage to get him to adjust to our
water. For the fact that we will then have a creature who is dreadful, hor-
rendous, and ugly but at the same time disgruntling, calm, timid, sensitive,
good mannered, sweet, and scared, we will do our best to make him sorry
for that. He will sure be surprised but will endure. We will make a poet
out of him, depressed and not understood. At first we will discredit his sen-
sitivity, the second day his love, the third his timidity, and his silence, and
we will make him tired of living all together. We will dismantle everything
good that he has. He will, with a bitter smile, rip out the fingerprints on
his waist held once by Christ, by using his file, saw and axe. He will once
again achieve his primordial monstrosity.
Once he gets used to our water, we will do everything that we can to
make him a monster.

Translated by Hüseyin Hacıhabiboğlu, Guildford, UK, July 2006

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Translator’s Note:
The original name of the short story is Dülger Balığının Ölümü. Dülger
balığı (Carpenter fish) is the name given to the fish known in the English-
speaking world as John Dory or St. Pierre. It is also called in southern coast
of Turkey as peygamber balığı (prophet’s fish) or İsa balığı (Christ fish). This
is an interesting allusion to the relation between Christ and carpentry which
was not directly mentioned in Abasıyanık’s original story.

Sait Faik Abasıyanık (1906-1954)

Sait Faik Abasıyanık was a short-story writer and a major figure in

modern Turkish literature. Abasıyanık’s stories were written in a style new
to Turkish literature. Despite their formlessness and lack of a conventional
story line, they convey in a single, compelling episode a wide range of human
emotion. Abasıyanık was born November 23, 1906 in Adapazarı, Turkey.
He was educated in İstanbul and Bursa, Abasıyanık was in France from
1931 to 1935, primarily in Grenoble. On his return to Turkey, he began to
publish his short stories in Varlık (Existence), the nation’s leading avant-
garde periodical. In 1936 he published his first volume of short stories,
Semaver (The Samovar). A dozen others followed, including Lüzumsuz adam
(1948; The Useless Man), Kumpanya (1951; The Company), and Alemdağda
var bir yılan (1953; There’s a Snake at Alem Mountain). He also wrote an
experimental novel, Bir takım insanlar (1952; A Group of People), which
was censored because it dealt strongly with class differences. He died on
May 11, 1954 in İstanbul. [Taken from Wikipedia]