A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies Ece Ayhan

A Blind Cat Black Ece Ayhan

and Orthodoxies
Translated from the Turkish, with an Afterword by Murat Nemet-Nejat

Born in 1931, the important Turkish poet Ece Ayhan worked

from 1962 to 1966 as head officer in different districts of the
provincial administration. In 1996 he quit his position, return-
ing to Istanbul, where he worked as translator for the Turkish
edition of the French dictionary Larousse (Meydan Larousse)
and the archives section of the Turkish Cinematèque Associa-
tion.
During all this period Ayhan continued also to write poetry,
publishing major works such as Miss Kinar’s Waters (1959),
A Blind Cat Black (1965), and Orthodoxies (1968). In the last
two works, published here, Ayhan takes the reader through the
dark streets of the Galata district of Istanbul, an area where
European minorities lived historically side by side with red light
sexual activities. Like a modern-day Rimbaud, Ayhan, in this
remarkable translation, explores linguistically and thematically
what Turkish culture and authorities have forbidden.
Writing in The Nation upon the occasion of this book’s
original publication in 1997, critic Chris King observed: “This
is more than another journal of disintegration in a gay-baiting
world. It is a virtuosic study of what you can do with lyricism
denied, besides choke on it. Like brilliant musicians who crave
A Blind Cat Black v v
GREEN INTEGER 202
simple emotion, yet love dissonance and the technical com-
plexities of their instruments, Ayhan and Nemet-Nejat play
endlessly on our heartstrings and bow—worry, even break Ece Ayhan
v v v v Orthodoxies
them.”

GREEN INTEGER 202 $11.95

Translated from the Turkish
with an Afterword by Murat Nemet-Nejat

POETRY/TURKISH LITERATURE
GREEN INTEGER 202

Blind (cover) 33.indd 1 6/9/2015 3:09:29 PM

 A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies Ece Ayhan
A Blind Cat Black Ece Ayhan
and Orthodoxies
Translated from the Turkish, with an Afterword by Murat Nemet-Nejat

Born in 1931, the important Turkish poet Ece Ayhan worked

from 1962 to 1966 as head officer in different districts of the
provincial administration. In 1996 he quit his position, return-
ing to Istanbul, where he worked as translator for the Turkish
edition of the French dictionary Larousse (Meydan Larousse)
and the archives section of the Turkish Cinematèque Associa-
tion.
During all this period Ayhan continued also to write poetry,
publishing major works such as Miss Kinar’s Waters (1959),
A Blind Cat Black (1965), and Orthodoxies (1968). In the last
two works, published here, Ayhan takes the reader through the
dark streets of the Galata district of Istanbul, an area where
European minorities lived historically side by side with red light
sexual activities. Like a modern-day Rimbaud, Ayhan, in this
remarkable translation, explores linguistically and thematically
what Turkish culture and authorities have forbidden.
Writing in The Nation upon the occasion of this book’s
original publication in 1997, critic Chris King observed: “This
is more than another journal of disintegration in a gay-baiting
world. It is a virtuosic study of what you can do with lyricism
denied, besides choke on it. Like brilliant musicians who crave
A Blind Cat Black v v
GREEN INTEGER 202
simple emotion, yet love dissonance and the technical com-
plexities of their instruments, Ayhan and Nemet-Nejat play
endlessly on our heartstrings and bow—worry, even break Ece Ayhan
v v v v Orthodoxies
them.”

GREEN INTEGER 202 $11.95

Translated from the Turkish
with an Afterword by Murat Nemet-Nejat

POETRY/TURKISH LITERATURE
GREEN INTEGER 202

Blind (cover) 33.indd 1 6/9/2015 3:09:29 PM

THE BLIND CAT BLACK
and ORTHODOXIES
The Blind Cat Black
and Orthodoxies

Ece Ayhan

Translated from the Turkish

with an Afterword
by Murat Nemet-Nejat

green integer
københavn & los angeles
2015
 GREEN INTEGER
Edited by Per Bregne
København / Los Angeles
Distributed in the United States by Consortium Book Sales
and Distribution/Perseus
Distributed in England and throughout Europe by
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Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate
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ON NET available through Green Integer
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Green Integer
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Los Angeles, California 90036 USA

First Green Integer Edition 2015

First published as The Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Los
Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997)
English-language translation copyright ©1997 and 2015 by Murat
Nemet-Nejat
Published in English by agreement with Ece Ayhan
Back cover material ©2015 by Green Integer
All rights reserved

Series Design: Per Bregne

Book Design and Typography: Pablo Capra
Cover photograph: Ece Ayhan

library of congress in publication data

Ayhan, Ece (1931-2002)
The Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies
ISBN: 978-1-933382-36-4
p. cm – Green Integer 202
I. Title II. Series III. Translator: Murat Nemet-Nejat
Green Integer books are published for Douglas Messerli
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
 CONTENTS

the blind cat black

I. The Nigger in the Photograph
The Nigger in the Photograph...................11
Epitafio..................................................... 13
Geranium and the Child........................... 14
The Secret Jew.......................................... 16
A Flood of First Summer.......................... 18
The Blue Bead, Against the Evil Eye........ 19
II. The Blind Cat Black
The Blind Cat Black..................................23
Pharaoh....................................................24
Sword........................................................25
Mitsrayim.................................................26
Babyleaves that Kill the Raven................ 27
The Horse with Two Wheels....................28
Without Wings.........................................29
Orthodoxy—Orthodoxy............................30
Ipecacuanha, the Emetic.......................... 31

orthodoxies.....................................................33

Notes���������������������������������������������������������������������63
Afterword��������������������������������������������������������������71
THE BLIND CAT BLACK
I. The Nigger in the Photograph
 the nigger in the photograph

Accursed. The curse which with its curving un-

sheathed letter will never leave me alone, which I
take everywhere, my invisible dog, the curse. Who
can be friends with me? Who? It is rumored I carry
that monk’s blood, and with a relentless agitation I
run here and there, barefoot, and on my tiny chin a
big beauty spot, I am known with my covered beau-
ty still. Like the stain in the curve of the letter U.
Flower. I began my adventures as a flower ven-
dor. Flowers and children bedecking a string, dry
petals. But how I was under a spell those days. Be-
cause of a little fairy’s curse, I couldn’t be looked at.
Light Maltese fe­vers run in empty lots in summer
evenings. And endless hallucinations full of clowns
run in ruins. Then a stone arched passage. I am liv-
ing in the drawer of a 50-year-old witch, nailed. Am
I really? One cannot tell what season it is, and I am
cold. Curved like the letter U.
…I went to Jerusalem in that exile of the flower
ven­dors and got settled in the town clock…. But to
remem­ber these things, I don’t want to remember
them…. It had run out, the money I had saved sell-

11
ing flowers…. This far away from Smyrna, I was
pawned. Let this be the nigger in the negative of a
photograph from me, will you receive it one day? I
had it taken while learning Hebrew, with my invis-
ible dog inside a Jewess. Lonely and ter­rible. Under
a huge tree which had shed its leaves, barely touch-
ing a chair.
It is not out of pity, but I am worried it won’t
pass. The curve of the letter U.

12
 epitafio

They came drowned in the afternoon to the

blue house on the wharf of brown broadcloth cafés.
Her fate was in Spanish.
They are bending their heads again, for their
sister, as in the morning. She promised. She will
comb their hair and part it in the middle. The dead-
tangle.
And it is calling them, screaming, screaming,
from an alley of card players, a children’s game with
thousands. The jack is up.
They see it and how they laugh with their en-
during chuckles. But they can’t join the game. What
can one do? Their bundles are being wrapped. They
are in a hurry. Rotten….
Will she appear again before them, the fat
woman who wants the hooks and eyes of her win-
ter coat to be clasped, and their sister, also, on the
mossy rocky road to Africa?

13
 geranium and the child

Inside those caves, grottos of shame, full of

mud, a child is still taking shelter, hopping. A Sa-
lonica bundle, a mat­ted hat, a plover. The rain bird.
Condemned, on his right cheek his birthmark flow-
er is the size of a hand. And there were next to his
aunt’s geranium gardens, along the length…. Ap-
parently during autumnal dreams with the march-
ing band of his friend and of death a child going to
the island streets full of water.
The wind is dragging outside: a moldy-eyed
tin dragon and a rusting corpse; because, during
the vows of silence, an underwater ogre always lin-
gers. Sailors, tars are wear­ing silk frocks. Disguised
as his timid uncle who’ll fetch him home from Sa-
lonica. But, then, in kegs with nails, in kegs with
nails. Later, towards morning, an after-quiet. Navy
blue. And one returns, on unshod pale and cough­
ing horses, descending the ladder of saints, to the
dark tanneries and poppy stores.
In Salonica the gates of childhood are huge, lav-
ender and without door knobs. He will go and sleep
in an el­ementary school, among all those shallow

14
waters, starfish. Lake the open forgotten shutters
of his aunt. With the marching band of his friend
and of death, the child telling, alone, the story of the
cart of geraniums put out on sale on earth at night.

15
 the secret jew

Lidless, one of the devils, he is pulling out

with my street­car money. From time to time, go-
ing downtown like this, I feel sad and shaky. In the
hotel I sleep in his (my Corpse’s) bed. When his hair
keeps growing jet black like that what is it that my
live body begrudges and I try to give to him. With
my large beefy hands. A sharp spur. Odor of sul­
phur. A scarred copper-branded ass. In the sew-
ers of my veins, there, a rat. It nibbles at the town
and the hanging tree in me. Crazies, rats, male rats,
share (you must share, children) a charred corpse.
In the cellar. There were no little words of loving
him, these keys on his belt (war­den, lover!) couldn’t
be little cooing words of loving him. I ran away,
scared, not to meet the porcelain doll. To meet him.
That would be my going back to the Lexicon of Tor-
ture. The widow plant of the idiot forests eating up
joy, the poppy hatred of seven years, the silk hand
with cow­ hide gloves doling out inheritance. He
doesn’t want to be buried, he says. He is cold. On
the back platform of the streetcar the young devil
on fire disappearing. I am picking out my spectacles

16
from the swamps of my envy. After the arsonist’s
fire the brother of my Ex-Mistress (my Corpse) who
disappeared. He can be recognized by the delicate
insect-eyed family mask covering his coarse face.
That guy. Why should I sob anyway? He loves eas-
ily, passes his hand below the belt of my vault, for-
gets easily what a secret Jew I am.

17
 a flood of first summer

Moon. It has torn its net, the algae-green mon-

ster. Night has advanced. Bats without wings; wet
guns. The street­car capsized on the road. These, the
emblems of the flood of first summer. They stole my
kite in my madness, a violet, child-dead Sunday. I
cannot find it.

18
 the blue bead, against the evil eye

Madness put on a porkpie hat. He ran to the

regions where sellers of guns go bankrupt. Found-
ed the empire of tru­ants. And, then, found a golden
cannonball in the town of Monastery.
Pinned on his collar a forest in September. No
one should know of the secret treasure full of trin-
kets. The hyena was there, too, with the face of a
rotten apple. He fought madly to grab the dagger.
There was talk one Saturday of the Crimea.
Wars. The sorcery stores were closed. They hanged
him inside a li­quor bottle, heavy silver boots on his
feet, smiling. Against all sorts of jinx. This little,
vagabond imp.

19
II. The Blind Cat Black
 the blind cat black

An absent-minded tightrope walker comes.

From the sea of late hours. Blows out a lamp. Lies
down next to my weeping side, for the sake of the
prophet. A blind woman downstairs. Family. She
raves in a language I don’t know. On her chest a
heavy butterfly, broken drawers in it. My Aunt Sad-
ness drinks alcohol in the attic, embroiders. Ex­
pelled from many schools. A blind cat passes in the
black street. In its sack a child just dead. His wings
don’t fit, too big. The Old Hawker cries. A pirate
ship. Has en­tered the port.

23
 pharaoh

…grown. And you used to go to bed with a pha-

raoh till the mornings. The rainy months of exile.
Hairpins in your mouth. A bird, it liked to land;
stood on his arm tattooed with monsters.
And your brother used to hold your hair, black
coal. A town is visible when you smile.
Then you ran to a gun, “I love you” etched on
its muzzle. Ready to bear this monstrous traveler
in hashish.

24
 sword

The vagabondary of the sea. The octopus

beached on the seashore of ill-luck. My son is a
queen. Has spread his wings. A cape of fine taffeta.
The gradual burning is for­gotten. His father is a
sorcerer. He is in Salonica this win­ter.
Here, talks to a woman. Of Mitsrayim. An in-
digo horse, his tiredness without fault. Left asleep
on the rocks. Why the sea rises, no one knows. Oh,
the sunken ships. Oh the black shimmers of exile. I
am a weeping half breed.
It is an untellable sword I carry, bedecked.
Round my waist a sea of thoughts.

25
 mitsrayim

A country of the sultan of jinns where he se-

cretly es­caped, a new self-sufficiency. He altered his
name, shaved his hair. A cold gun under his pillow,
he could barely sleep. He wore a velvet vest, dare-
devil; he studies bird knowl­edge; a nightingale on
his shoulder, it used to sing.
He steps on danger; he flies a kite, his face-
guard fallen. Ming soldiers catch him, his wrist thin
and delicate. They cut with a sword his eyelashes,
long; break his joints, strip­ ping his pants wrap
them over a silver chandelier, drown him with pitch
in the vat, stamp him.
He is in the eternal arms of his barbarian moth-
er, a new self-sufficiency. He faces death also with
a wide brow, faces it applauding it. He is on a small
boat the color of forget-me-nots. Winds of Vernal
Equinox blow from Mitsrayim. Forty days. He has
grown his hair. He likes his loneliness.

26
 babyleaves that kill the raven
or the poison tree

He ran away on a steamboat, a jalopy but quick.

Playing, unknowable, the muddy music of the ink
squid.
He shelters his violet eyes in bursts of laughter.
He has no bad friends. Blond. Overwrought, drunk.
He tattooed another pharaoh on his biceps. The
fall when children and school openings collide. In
Mitsrayim.

27
 the horse with two wheels

My son and his friend Benjamin. Couldn’t fly

for years. Oh, unused garden gates. Ivies.
Ruins brought to the empire. Arsons. You roar
in win­ters, oh, women who shed their leaves.

28
 without wings

A sunk streetcar…. An octopus, lean and very

long bar­barians. Loneliness turns the emperor to
an old nigger friend.
And the bird is on the lap of the emperor. It
doesn’t want the charm to end. The adventure in a
pass. Chasm. We don’t talk at all.
You don’t understand. Being without wings.
And it gets dark, weeping in the sea of a sea. A child
waiting. The sailboat.

29
 orthodoxy—orthodoxy

A heretic dropped in a lake in Holland. His

clipped wings, beeswax, in the swaddling fever. I
saw 30 step­brothers jump me. Death’s not thought
in good taste. At the water mill. Its crude incongru-
ity, massive, a harlot’s orthodoxy.

30
 ipecacuanha, the emetic

The tryst in the labyrinth is slaked and duped

by the divi­nations in sand. He was my age and a
veiled queen. How the horses, how the chugboats
rotted in that depth.
Hysterical, he hides himself in dust with apo-
plectic kicks. His sword in the sheath, his lust an ab-
solute prob­ability. I stop caring. But no one should
look for each other. Passing one inevitable sea.

31
ORTHODOXIES
 orthodoxies i

His only side—his face—to be talked about:

the space between his legs. And he has grown a
moustache and a beard. An inveterate. A pervert.
Such talk about him. He doesn’t go near women as
he should. He whets suspi­cion. An erect plume on
his head. A barber’s piece. A pornographic master-
piece. He is buried alive in the ground. Head first.
Ouch! A few sailboats, startled, shine at a distance.
Why couldn’t I understand?
Modesty, a mood. Shame is held delicately by
the hand. A girl, blighted. Walks under the eaves
of her man. The door locks have given in by them-
selves. A shroud moves. She has grown pregnant by
leaning over the corpse. Which pretends impotence
in a church. Before it tends. She has reared the
foundling in the marshes. I was burning a blank let-
ter by pouring gasoline on it. A con man’s envelope
on the sidewalk. Shining beeswax. Melts.
Now, a leftover. Know. The bend in a child’s
heart. His crafty, elegant wrist. And how he holds
a hawk, stuffed, whole, trying to preen its feathers.
He has writ­ings etched over his breast in saffron

35
repeating, embroi­dering one word from the lexicon
endlessly: hermaph­rodite. A hermetic woman. A
thief woman. A thief of she. He makes love biting
her own lip. He plays the hand-me-down tune on
the lute. Of the scared. I was reading The Jew of
Malta. I took shelter in a coffin.

36
 orthodoxies ii

He is spreading the lilies of jealousy on the

ground, a young man.
He is singing a madrigal by Gesualdo of Veno-
sa,* the wife killer. The hunchback of regrets.
On a woman with a beaver’s belly, another un-
expected madness is capped.

37
 orthodoxies iii

What is it saying, I wonder, the purl and stitch

scarf of the boy, dancing, the silk embroidery? A
bird with four legs and the face of a flower.
And a wooden pestle, dipping, dipping into
his sleep of cistern rain waters. By dint of precious
habit.
Let them whistle the warped tune. His soapy
earrings, a lewd bathroom ditty. And, now, a tam-
bourine and its cymbals—his music tools—dropped,
lie by the side.
Altered horses are raced in every neighbor-
hood. The face painting* of a virgin bride melts
away to the depths of a metamorphosis.

38
 orthodoxies iv

Pops out of a box, the beardless major-domo of

harems, Köse Kahya*, the comic hero of operettas.
His skeleton out of the closet at last. Liveried, with
golden threads. He haunts. A stuttering patriarch
with a mincing slang.
He suckles a boy doll, its indigo fate of shame.
How did it get stuck to him, this wedding gift and
the bride’s golden threads in his hair all over the
place? A silver hair pin. The play pay. Cheers.

39
 orthodoxies v

It is an axiom. She made the wrong life choice.

The city builder Kirmastorya.* Sodomitas sashay
around break­ing down in attic salons with French
windows. Fall off terebinth bushes.
She crosses the sea love-making. Her fingers
groping around lock on a private part. Joins the city
of Gomorrah—minus ten.
One in a trillion coincidence maybe. They hide
the disaster in a plush empty villa always. The he-
aunt who embroiders.

40
 orthodoxies vi

The most regal of long speeches. Standing face

to face with a woman, we are arguing.
The place is adorned with gold dust leaves. Not
only the tides of the sea, even the explanations were
useless.

41
 orthodoxies vii

for Filiz Lenger

The right hand of Bardugomeos*, the holy relic,

helps him on a horse. Beware of Michael, the pa-
tron saint of the ignorant. The lad rides the ugly red
horse Ruzukan to an exile of worries galloping. His
female look-alike is hid­den in one of his sleeves.
And he closes his eyes in a redemptive sleep on
the way.
He arrives at the shore with a siren. Michael’s
regal corpse clamped on his back. A few colors
explain every­thing: a crystal ball breeding a pure
black, a bird singing with a swollen throat. Hoot
hoot.

42
 orthodoxies viii

She could outsmart a fox, loaded with experi-

ence. In a bankrupt usurer’s house they met.
Saying, “Is this a labor to be remembered?”
she dic­tated a tattoo to the coaxing warden of a nut
house.
She straightened the elusive floors constantly.
A cir­cumcised Christ, who mingled with the crowd.
Whom? What did he convert?

43
 orthodoxies ix

With the flight of her brothers she could not

match wings, a bird in a priory. A mistiness ham-
mered with pain.
The harmonies of a proud major scale are
heard. Gregorian variations written in thick tabla-
tura letters.
When they arrive at the stream, she will stop
for days at the bank. Couldn’t help herself, both
child and a widow.

44
 orthodoxies x

The last fast day in a leap year. Beginning night

hours. Abstinence. Vows of silence. The suckerand-
gusher black pump fell quiet. Now a gray whisper,
asked, “who is it?”

45
 orthodoxies xi

She used to flog her girls, a madam, in a half-

assed way. It is sacred and untouched with cum the
guild of the red light district.
She is kicking back with both legs, a girlhood
plucked to pieces. To delay the stripping of her silk
stambouline.*
The law of corruption will keep circulating. Out
of the embrace of a girl and a customer bear.

46
 orthodoxies xii

His name goes back. He tried to find them, Fin-

duktar.* A species of bird of paradise. About to be
extinct. He tracked down the leads of deacons.
Master of three-dimensional chess-moves, his
fear is drawing spades. He was famous for his dis-
respect for his ancestors; but is punished.

47
 orthodoxies xiii

An untraceable red bird, grave-digging, corpse-

picking fairy tale freak. Telling peerlessly near the
groves of the monastery of Akneri-Vank, center of
Armenian revolt. A diamond in its mouth telling.
He invents plots, a prince kept in the house. His
ar­mor has grown weak, delicate. His seal is of rust-
ing iron, but his chest a flag of insurrection.
His tambour describes the accents of fear. His
neck doesn’t bend, bedecked with tales of one thou-
sand and one days.
His chained arms brush his kept mistress. What
a randy dandy monster! He etches out with a gim-
let. He has laid paint on his face as best as he could.
Gradually the speech of the red bird is like a
scream. Under the Hult tree, of eternal life, Varda-
pet the Ortho­dox saint trembles in rags.

48
 orthodoxies xiv

A pederast’s boy under thumb was giving birth

to him­self, prettily bleeding. He owes his harelip to
a disease.
He lowers the bolt of his padlock obediently,
the fuzzy mustached Aleko.* Was it genuine back-
stitch, the cox­comb on his head?

49
 orthodoxies xv

A crack of lilacs. A mask chipped off their wood.

It is impenetrably wide, he understands.
Kneeling, he groans, one Benjamin. Weaned
off the smell of armpits. A cup of hemlock not left
around against the possibility of drink.
And there is a majolica on the mat. A fortress
tower rings, of the harem’s eunuchs, washed in the
flood.
Screaming, under a parasol, he adorns the por-
table throne. In a blackout. In his birthday suit.
And a slut is giving him a broken-tipped sword.
Re­veals herself on the rung of a ladder. Oh, Benja-
min!
Two snakes entwined, trajectories melting
away at an inn. Turned around by so many bends.
In the guise of an eagle owl, bubo-bubo, the
fallen Christ* goes out to paint the town red. And
he won’t come back.

50
 orthodoxies xvi

A Byzantine trompe l’œil. A dance. A game.

The Karabitsi.* Played on, slave boys with title
deeds on, all taxes paid, play the Rubap, the three-
stringed violin. The peasant reed, the lute with a
leather top from Azerbaijan, the tambur. They kiss
their handles.
Father Hamparsum, first inventor of musical
notations among the Ottomans. Due to his true
faith, his notes go straight. Believing like an Ortho-
dox, Armenian, he sang like an Ottoman. Hey!

51
 orthodoxies xvii

A vertical drum, beaten on the side with a stick

and a mallet. On ass hide. Left stick, right mallet.
Hanging from the neck. A march. The gay drum-
mer.* Large and quite wide wooden hoop. A crib
death of bulrushes left in the courtyard. Armenian
painter Ayvazovski,* liveried ser­vant at the court.
As a child he used to wrestle a lot.
If turned upside down, there is a bigger boil on
his back. An excommunicate priest’s head and the
by-laws of whoredom.

52
 orthodoxies xviii

“I’m the king,” a spoiled child was shouting

with his little and boastless cock.
He will play the king at Gomorrah. There they
spin children at a bottle game. Then mount them
at full tilt.

53
 orthodoxies xix

He entered houses from the back doors, a

chained pris­oner with a proud mustache. Kneeling
he did his own daughter.
And with an axe he let loose on merry pipes.
Lifted the crinoline skirt of a lady.
Reaching a chain of rosary on her neck, he
reared. When groin to groin, a sea of imploration,
a street singer.
He had such a nonsense talking mouth.
Incomprehen­sible bad taste. Hungry, he ate the
private parts of a colt and a mare.
Making arches, yells continued in the cathe-
dral. Be­cause of a tight underpinning of dress, in
her pride, she couldn’t confess.
He was indifferent. The chopped fingers of his
right hand had made the signal necessary by his by-
laws.*

54
 orthodoxies xx

The eerie Sea of Maidos. Jonah has become a

dolphin. A sight. Cruising. Bedecked with holsters,
stirrup, harness.
He is combing his hair in cum water. Then
treated to flowers. A garland of braids. From time
to time blinking, with vast hanging earrings.
What is an Orthodox lad doing at Maidos?
Banged about by an agitation which is after the
knowledge of knives.

55
 orthodoxies xxi

Davut* sports a mane. He is a dark-skinned

child like my hand. Face downwards, he is dissolv-
ing in the bird sanc­tuaries of Tirnova.
This deformity is fairly new. Lift your skirt—he
scrambles. He has written his name on the exercise
slate, and he plays monte without a slip.
Davut with the eternal mane. Obese. The Cyril-
lic, fucktual bullets of truth first know the schools
of the land.

56
 orthodoxies xxii

The encounter between an elder of the church

and a saint of the sea. At the nightclub. Sweet No-
votni.*
They put their bread and fish faces on each oth-
ers’ shoulders. The sawdust Lala.
During the World War I equinox dreadnoughts
hit the flour factories at Gallipoli.

57
 orthodoxies xxiii

Was he now? Was he a Levantine,* the nephew

of that coquette? Vocabularies multiply out of the
booze, enter a klarnita* player’s book of poems.
A translucent inner sonority is achieved at ev-
ery se­cret street festival. O sole mio! And rises to
the lips of a well, a meeting of wild bells and strings.
A deacon, still thinking of the boy he couldn’t
forget, will stoke an engraved figure out of the ash-
es. Poems will lead him by the hand.

58
 orthodoxies xxiv

At the chapel of the Three Angels, a ritual. The

scarlet priest Madamango is turning the pages of
the sultan’s private book woven with naked black
slaves. Time is whipped to shreds.
He calms down his nerves. He has given his
tremblings a shape. Every Theodoros* can call
himself Pasha Theodoros, the commander with the
black dimple.

59
 orthodoxies xxv

He brooded, a crooked spell. A diagonal, so-so

paradise. Oh, he should have built! He stares and
stares, the dot­ ing asshole. With projects full of
holes.
His brother’s gold epaulets are ripped off. He is
after events that can’t be stopped. He leafs through
pages.
They must have torn to shreds, during the riot-
ous or­gies, the pages of the Orthodoxal.* When he
revealed his daydreams. But they say they suit him.

60
 orthodoxies xxvi

She cannot cover the sadness of her silver

wings, the Greek hag, the seaweed lips of her Ar-
chegonos.* Muddy attractions.
When they were parted, she was drunk. Ha ha!
Boots in her hand and parasol on her feet. But she
does know how to cross herself efficiently with in-
dex and third fingers.

61
 orthodoxies xxvii

A golden hag, a groupie of the dead, boygirlboy,

oh Santa Pera!* In a jerry-built portable throne
they ship her around, perhaps. Her ghost soldiers.
A worthless student of lust, she was. The old
hag won’t melt away. Her footprints of fate, over a
whole conti­nent, can be traced in the Polish* plains
of Tirnova. I could tell.
Sword in scabbard, caught with her bearded
one. In­verted-cone gaps, deep funnels, asymmetri-
cal short cuts, her hair being dragged on the ground
pleated.
The avenues of Santa Pera involved in their self
expi­ration. Expiated. Only the snows of the city are
left be­hind. The raid’s relics.
Target practice bull’s eye sticks are left behind.
Bloody Syrian songs, out of translucent leaves….
Hear! The old Armenian hag is bellowing. Oh
dear Pera! My main drag! No one can console her,
how can one! Her mouth is receding, her azure eyes.
With a bazooka she is shooting at the pictures
of deso­lation. And these poems. One. Two. Three.
The centerfold of an underground magazine.

62
Notes
 Orthodoxies II:

Gesualdo of Venosa: Renaissance composer.

He was the prince of Venosa and a hunchback. It
seems he had his wife poisoned out of jealousy,
and the rest of his life wrote madrigals regret­ting it
while he married a number of other women.

Orthodoxies III:

In villages the paint on the bride’s face is a sym-

bol of her vir­ginity.

Orthodoxies IV:

Köse Kahya was a comic figure in the Turkish

theater. His gay mannerisms were a source of com-
edy without being openly named as gay. When ho-
mosexuality is taboo, theater may be a place where
it projects, traces its existence as comedy.

Orthodoxies V:

Kirmastorya: Greek woman who was the

builder of the prov­ince later called Mustapha Ke-
mal Pasha. She is the first of a series of Orthodox
characters, Greeks, Armenians, Russians, etc., who
populate Orthodoxies.
Orthodox is a key concept in the poem. It re-

65
fers primarily to eastern Christian minority groups
in Turkish society; by asso­ ciation it also means
“holy, pious, virtuous.” But orthodox has a slang
usage, pulling it in the opposite direction. As slang
it means “whore, homosexual, pederast, betrayer,
etc.”; that is to say, it refers to the whole underbelly
of Turkish society, the entire group of outsiders of
which Greeks, Armenians and Jews are the more
acceptable parts.
The apparent contradiction between official
use and slang reflects a radical ambiguity in Turk-
ish culture. The society ac­cepts, officially, minority
groups; Christian piety is as respected as Moslem
piety. Sexual perversion, officially, does not exist.
On the other hand, the slang usage suggests the
very oppo­site: the pervasive presence of a sexual
sub-culture, and the visceral awareness and suspi-
cion by the populace of the out­sider (orthodox) as
an alien other.

Orthodoxies VII:

Bardugomeos: An Armenian saint whose right

hand is believed to have survived as a relic. Many
monasteries claim its posses­sion.

Orthodoxies XI:

Stambouline: A Turkish blouse, a coat.

66
 Orthodoxies XII:

Finduktar: A figure in Armenian history. His

life was spent searching for his daughters who were
kidnapped as slaves.

Orthodoxies XIV:

Aleko: Greek Orthodox version of Alex. An ac-

tor who died on stage.

Orthodoxies XV:

Russian belief that, in the shape of a beggar,

Christ will cross Russia one day. The Russians wait
for him. He wanders now in the cities at night dis-
guised as a large owl, bubo-bubo.

Orthodoxies XVI:

The Karabitsi: A theatrical spectacle which sur-

vived from Byz­antine times.

Orthodoxies XVII:

Drummer as slang means queer, as does wheel.

The precise trans­lation of the first three lines of the
poem is: “Drummers are marching, a crib death of
bulrushes left in the courtyard,” hinting at a sexual

67
coming out. Expanding a three-word phrase into
two lines is the translator’s attempt to render the
“ideo­gram” of the slang, the fact that “queerness”
is seen consistently as an overwhelming roundness,
acted upon, touched with in­timations of death.
In the ghost of a joke, the connection between
roundness and mortality is hinted at also in the
second stanza, through the Freudian assertion that
women see the vagina as an ab­sence, a wound. The
“bigger boil” is the asshole.
Ayvazovski: Armenian painter (1817-1900),
who was born and died in the Crimea. A painter at
the tsar’s court, he was particularly famous for his
seascapes. There is a word play on his name. The
word ayvaz means liveried footman, which, like
Haydn, he probably was. Ayvaz is also a beautiful
youth in the Turkish popular story Koroglu. Once
again, the suggestion of homosexuality.

Orthodoxies XIX:

Chopped fingers are both a sign of punishment

and a sign of an initiation ritual to enter the society
of criminals; therefore, a code, a secret sign with a
social cover.

Orthodoxies XXI:

Davut: Turkish version of David.

68
 Orthodoxies XXII:

Novotni and the Lala were nightspots in Istan-

bul during World War II. Novotni was visible from
the back window of the apart­ment where the trans-
lator lived.

Orthodoxies XXIII:

Levantine: People of European origin living in

Eastern Medi­terranean countries, the region once
belonging to the Otto­man Empire; an outsider.
Klarnita: A word not in the Turkish dictionary,
probably part of the slang of European minorities.
Therefore, an “invented” word, essentially existing
through its “levantine” associations.

Orthodoxies XXIV:

Theodoros: Greek version of Theodore.

Orthodoxies XXV:

The Orthodoxal: The holy book of the Russian

Orthodox church.

Orthodoxies XXVI:

Archegonos: Greek word meaning “of ancient

69
descent,” origi­
nal, primal; the root of the word
archegonium: a multicellular female sex organ of
mosses and related plants producing a single egg.
Once again, the connection of orthodox to banned
sexuality.

Orthodoxies XXVII:

Pera: Main entertainment, nightclub and red

light district at one time in Istanbul. The word
Pera is used by the Levantine, rather than Beyoğlu,
which is its more Turkish, main street name. The
expression Santa Pera (Ayapera) echoes Santa
Sophia (Ayasofya), the central church of Eastern
Orthodox Christian­ity located in Istanbul.
Polish: The Ottoman Empire and its armies
had extended as far as Poland at one time.

70
 Ece Ayhan Çağlar: An Afterword

The poet Ece Ayhan Çağlar was born in 1931

in the west­ern province of Turkey, Muğla, on the
Aegean Sea. He attended elementary and second-
ary schools and the Atatürk Lycée in Istanbul; he
then attended the School of Political Sciences in
the capital city of Ankara, graduat­ing in 1959. From
1962 to 1966, Ece Ayhan was a civil servant, a head
district administrator (kaymakam) in the Anato-
lian districts of Gurun, Alaca and Çardak. In 1966
Ece Ayhan quit his position. Returning to Istan-
bul, he worked as a translator for the Turkish edi-
tion of the French dictionary Larousse (Meydan
Larousse) and the archives sec­tion of the Turkish
Cinematèque Association. Since 1966 Ece Ayhan
has held no other job.
By 1966, his poetry known very little, Ece Ayhan
had already written two of his three major works,
Miss Kinar’s Waters (published in 1959) and The
Blind Cat Black (1965). To write his third, Ortho-
doxies (1968), this most histori­cal, satirical, fact-
and Istanbul-obsessed work—a pun-filled, vertical
serialism—Ece Ayhan moved to the streets of Is-
tanbul. The poem delves into the underbelly of the
city, Galata, historically both its red light district—

71
of transvestites, girl and boy prostitutes, tattooed
roughs, heroin merchants, that is, the unnamed
or “euphemized” outcasts of Turkish culture—and
the district where minorities—Armenians, Greeks,
Jews, Russians, etc.—lived. Turkish Cinematèque
Association had offices in Galata.
Ece Ayhan wrote Miss Kinar’s Waters when
he was a university student and wrote The Blind
Cat Black as a head district administrator in the
provinces. Along with Or­thodoxies, each of his
three works redefines a genre, a lit­erary language,
the works becoming progressively less focused on
the individual psyche and more on the myths and
history of a society. But, during this process, one
factor remains constant: a schism between the lan-
guage of the mainstream culture and the victims,
outcasts, invisibles of that culture. Each work is a
poetic, stylistic taking over by the peripheral of a
mainstream vehicle. In the United States the image
which projects best Ece Ayhan’s poetic process is
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, the parable of
what happens to the appearance of the ship of state
when subversively taken over by its slaves.
Miss Kinar’s Waters is a lyric poem with no
unifying I, but atomized appearances of he’s, she’s,
it’s; proper and common names merging, weaving
themselves into a mournful, raging, elusive melody
of the suppressed. The melody of the poem is the
music of the Turkish syntacti­cal cadence respond-

72
ing, bending, being distorted by this pronoun dis-
solution. The assumed interiority of the lyric I is
shifted to an experience of other; fragments of bod-
ies, of gestures weave a counter melody in the space
emptied by I.
The very name in the title, Kinar, points to
this pe­ripheral movement, vacuuming up the cen-
ter. Kinar is a nonexistent—zero—word or name
in Turkish: it echoes pinar, which means “river”;
echoes kin, which means “ha­tred”; kin itself means
“sheath, scabbard, torment, pain, slave born in the
family”; echoes kanar, which means “it bleeds, it
is duped by.” The way Kinar is decentered—itself
means nothing, but casts shadows—the lyric I is de-
centered, a tantra, weaving, tracing a subversive,
opaque, thin victim melody:

She cried the smile of pebble stones with

the raki from the carafe
from Miss Kinar now who became water to
steep wells
with her straight hair what can she do in
the theater houses of Shehzadebashi
she could not have enough hats….
(Miss Kinar’s Waters, 1957)

…
No way, no how, crying, this way and how
in this corner here, without a streetcar, to

73
 be a child is to be a bitter orange

Boss? the singer Peruz, did he really live?

(“Elegy for a Handwrought God,” 1956)

My legs are long

they are long wherever I go
wherever I go they find me
my sister in a blind alley

To trace a dove for this town

to trace the eyes of the dove
one dove
in the middle ages one dove with chalk

Along the whole wall trees cool

I am tracing a sound
I want everybody everybody to have a
sound
in the dove a sound in the middle ages in
my sister a sound

Wherever I go they are long

they find me from my legs always
as I trace a different voice
and a holiday full of flags in a city
in Hebrew
(“To Trace from Hebrew,” 1956)

74
 The last poem belongs to a genre of slave lyr-
ics—invis­ibility blues.

The Blind Cat Black is a story of exile—of an

abortive coming of age—masquerading as an ad-
venture sea ro­mance; it is written by a poet in ex-
ile—from Istanbul—masquerading as a head dis­
trict administrator to do government service.
It is a fairy tale with pirates, treasures, à la Pe-
ter Pan, whose child hero does not fly home at the
end; instead he joins the secret and street society
of homosexuals: a fairy tale, a misadventure of
trauma, shame, torture and rape in the deep sea.
The Blind Cat Black is the tale of the seduc­tion and
coming of age of a boy prostitute. An initial read­ing
of the poem may find such a take startling; but one
must listen to the allusions in the poem, the space
between words, particularly the delicate, coded web
woven around the images of water. The last two
lines of The Blind Cat Black refer to his position
and the disguise he has to assume in society:

His sword in the sheath his lust an abso-

lute prob­ability. I stop caring. But no one
should look for each other. Passing one in-
evitable sea.
(“Ipecacuanha, The Emetic”)

This fate is already alluded to in “Epitafio,”

75
a poem of an elegiac return home: “They came
drowned in the after­noon to the blue house on the
wharf…. Her fate was in Spanish.” The fate is in
code, epitafio, in the language of the Spanish-Jew-
ish minorities in Turkey, as the entire The Blind Cat
Black is written in a narrative of outsiders’ code.
To make it a vehicle for the dispossessed, Ece
Ayhan’s The Blind Cat Black splits the narrative
from the telling of it. What that means is that the
essence of the narrative ceases to be the chain of
events which constitutes the tale, but the coded
and stylistic images which constitute its heart. The
images allude to a social narrative, which remains
sepa­rate—pre-poem, so to speak—and is pointed
to, redefined. A distinction is created between the
narrative and its reading, enabling the narrative to
be attacked as an entity. In these narrative images
the writing escapes, even takes over the master nar-
rative, which for the out­cast is a trap, an erasure.
This new space can be called a negative narrative.
In an interview he gave to Onay Sözer in 1966, Ece
Ayhan makes his redefinition/subversion of narra-
tive very clear:

Imagine a person one meets in a tavern

starts tell­ing us about his entire life. This
narrative leaves zero impression. But the
same person’s allusion in a phrase to his
life, maybe a detail he invents, dis­places

76
 the narrative he is telling us at length. In­
stead of obeying stupidly the world order,
the or­der of words is jolted by the finger of
the imagina­tion from its set arrangement
and left in this new place.

The salient points of a person’s life are erased,

leave zero impression, by being trapped in the
machinery of a stupid world order. The poem un-
couples these saliencies from the narrative, its set
arrangement, into a series of jolted, non-chron-
ological, elusive images or scenes, many of them
associated with water. The total poem is soaked,
awash in water. Water is also the subversive link be-
tween two narratives: the children’s sea adventure
romance (pi­rates, secret treasures, octopi, etc.) and
the myth of ex­ile (Mitsrayim, Jews, Pharaoh, etc.),
which involves a trip across the sea—not the desert.
In water, as the site of trauma, these two narratives
cross, and a romance of innocence, wonder, middle
class reintegration is taken over to become a veiled
fairy tale of violation, melancholy, rage, a vehicle of
truant consciousness:

…grown. And you used to go to bed with

a pharaoh till the mornings. The rainy
months of exile.
(“Pharaoh”)

77
 …Sailors, tars are wearing silk frocks. Dis-
guised as his timid uncle who’ll fetch him
home from Salonica. But, then, in kegs
with nails, in kegs with nails. Later, to-
wards morning, an after-quiet. Navy blue.
(“Geranium and the Child”)

He steps on danger; he flies a kite, his face-

guard fallen. Ming soldiers catch him, his
wrist thin and delicate. They cut with a
sword his eyelashes, long; break his joints,
stripping his pants wrap them over a silver
chandelier, drown him with pitch in the
vat, stamp him.
(“Mitsrayim”)

It is an untellable sword I carry, bedecked.

Round my waist a sea of thoughts.
(“Sword”)

In Orthodoxies the focus of attention is the

word. The poem, as I have suggested, is a discon-
tinuous chain of elusive images, moving vertically
among the secondary, tertiary and unofficial mean-
ings of words or their echoes. There is little hori­
zontal movement from one sentence or phrase to
the next. The evocative image is often replaced by
reticent code (usually a slang pun on the public us-
age of a word), mainstream vocabulary by obscure,

78
often Greek-sound­ing references, myth by history
(a plethora of Greek, Ar­menian, Russian histori-
cal figures), narrative by tableau. On first view, the
poem is a series of opaque images which implode
against each other, like impacted teeth.
Orthodoxies has no center. Ece Ayhan sees the
word, particularly the pun—the conflict between
the official and slang meanings of a word—as the
place where the schism between the insider and
outcast in society mani­fests itself. The focus on the
verticalized word is a conse­quence of the intensely
social focus of the poem.
For Ece Ayhan language, part of history, is a
trap/tomb, a cribdeath, where the peripheral is
buried. Orthodoxies is an obsessive, accumulative
unburying process, allowing the buried ghosts—re-
jects screaming their pain—a shadow history. So-
cially innocent words are taken over for sub­versive,
alienating purposes: “An erect plume on his head.
A barber’s piece. A pornographic masterpiece. He is
buried alive in the ground. Head first. Ouch!” (Or-
thodoxies I).
History being a trap, Orthodoxies has no pro-
gression, but a continuous confrontation between
the style and content of the poem and the reader.
To a Turkish reader, also, Orthodoxies is the most
alienating, radical work of Ece Ayhan. Though
alienation is integral to it, a few con­cepts may serve
as keys to enter its structure:

79
 a) Levantine (or Orthodox): A levantine is any
non-muslim, Jew, Greek, Armenian, etc., who lives
in an Eastern Mediterranean country. Levantine is
a 19th-century concept, alluding to the period when
the Otto­man Empire dominated the Middle East
and a part of Europe. In Ece Ayhan, levantine is any
national, cultural or sexual presence repressed by
the mainstream power, each subculture with its pe-
culiar flavor of names, its slang, its mixture of Turk-
ish and ancestral words.
These linguistic quirks are unknown or objects
of de­rision to the mainstream culture. Ece Ayhan’s
work in­troduces the levantine texture into Turk-
ish poetry. Here lies its alienating, political power.
A social decorum—a tacit contract of exclusion—is
broken. The reader is asked to leap across a gap,
accept the alien, think the unimag­inable. Even a
Turkish reader must learn an unfamiliar vocabu-
lary, acknowledge a previously dismissed universe
of names, hear the invisible in the vertical move-
ment of words. Such learning—such reading—is a
political act.
b) Puns: Street slang (often a pun on the straight
meaning of a word) is the way the secret, the for-
bidden gets com­municated in Turkish culture. To
the outsider innocuous non sequiturs, among the
levantine puns may function as codes. For instance,
as street slang, a bird seller, a bird fancier means
“young girl chaser, pimp, sex maniac, man with an

80
erection, etc.” Slang puns constitute a main way in
which words are verticalized in Orthodoxies.

In 1972 and 1974 respectively two books—a

500-page encyclopedia, Contemporary Turkish
Poetry (1908-1972) in 100 Questions, and a poetry
anthology, Those the Poets Chose—do not mention
Ece Ayhan.
The history of Turkish criticism of Ece Ayhan
is the critics begging him to make his poetry more
accessible. After Orthodoxies, in State and Nature
(1973), not in theme but in vocabulary and poetic
style, he started doing so; and, gratefully, relieved,
critics accepted him into the pantheon of Turk-
ish poetry. Disperse and Move Out of the Way, a
collection of his work until 1976, accompanied by
critical essays on him, came out in 1977. Curiously,
this book opens with his accessible State and Na-
ture and goes chronologically backwards, revealing
many critics’ con­tinuing ambivalence towards Ece
Ayhan. His work, in my opinion, can be understood
better if read the other way around.

Ece Ayhan’s work from Miss Kinar’s Waters to

Orthodoxies is a widening exploration of a state of
social alienation. In a period of 15 years, more than
30 years ago, carv­ing out the linguistic landscape

81
of this progression, he defines a poetic vocabulary
very relevant at the turn of the 20th century.

murat nemet-nejat
1997

82
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mr. Douglas Messerli for

his instant recognition of the quality of Ece Ayhan’s
work, while for more than 10 years many editors
found it either incom­prehensible or ordinary.
I am lovingly grateful to my wife, Karen, who
encour­aged me to continue with these translations
when the task appeared very daunting, if not im-
possible, to me.
Finally, I must acknowledge my mother who
was di­agnosed with cancer in 1980 and died a year
later; her illness led me in an enigmatic jump to
tackle Ece Ayhan’s text seriously—not in individual
poems, which I had done before, but in its totality,
as a mystery, resulting in a three-year obsession
and the present translations.

83
84
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Paul Snoek Hercules Richelieu and Nostradamus [1-892295-42-3]
$10.95
The Song of Songs: Shir Hashirim [1-931243-05-0] $9.95
Adriano Spatola The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-
1992 [978-1-933382-45-6] $15.95
Takamura Kōtarō The Chieko Poems [978-1-933382-75-3] $12.95
Tomas Tranströmer The Sorrow Gondola [978-1-933382-44-9]
$11.95
Paul van Ostaijen The First Book of Schmoll [978-1933382-21-0]
$12.95
Xue Di Across Borders [978-1-55713-423-3] $12.95
Yang Lian Yi [1-892295-68-7] $14.95
Visar Zhiti The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry [978-1-931243-
72-8] $10.95
 THE AMERICA AWARDS
for a lifetime contribution to international writing
Awarded by the Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc.
in loving memory of Anna Fahrni
The 2015 Award winner is:

EDWARD ALBEE [USA] 1928

Previous winners:
1994 Aimé Cesaire 2004 José Saramago
[Martinique] 1913–2008 [Portugal] 1922-2010
1995 Harold Pinter 2005 Andrea Zanzotto [Italy]
[England] 1930–2008 1921-2011
1996 José Donoso [Chile] 1924- 2006 Julien Gracq (Louis
1996 (awarded prior to his death) Poirier) [France] 1910-2007
1997 Friederike Mayröcker 2007 Paavo Haavikko
[Austria] 1924 [Finland] 1931
1998 Rafael Alberti 2008 John Ashbery [USA] 1927
[Spain] 1902-1999
2009 Günter Kunert
1999 Jacques Roubaud [GDR/Germany] 1929
[France] 1932
2010 Javier Marías [Spain] 1951
2000 Eudora Welty
[USA] 1909-2001 2011 Ko Un [South Korea] 1933
2001 Inger Christensen 2012 Ivo Michiels [Belgium] 1923
[Denmark] 1935–2009 2013 Reiner Kunze
2002 Peter Handke [Austria] 1942 [GDR/Germany] 1933

2003 Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) 2014 László Krasznahorkai

[Syria/Lebanon] 1930 [Hungary] 1954