As part of the Barcelona Poetry Festival, to which the IEMed contributes in its most international edition, we highlight the voice of Turkish poet Adnan Özer as part of our commitment to the poetic diversity of the Mediterranean.
On this occasion, we have selected a series of poems by Adnan Özer, one of the most outstanding names in contemporary Turkish poetry, which invite us to explore an intimate and overflowing Mediterranean. Born in European Turkey in 1957 and trained in journalism at Istanbul University, Özer is a poet, editor and translator. His work, celebrated with several national awards, is characterised by profound lyricism and a mystical sensibility that engages with the great poetic traditions of the Mediterranean.
Throughout this poetic journey, both spoken and written, the Mediterranean ceases to be a static myth and is revealed as a living space of transition, loss and transformation. In Adnan Özer’s poems, the sea, the cities, the rain, and the silences speak not of a fixed identity, but of a constant search: that of the body that remembers, of the exile that names, of the desire that refuses to resign itself. Guided by the voice of Adnan Özer − in his original language, Turkish − this personal and unbridled journey becomes a vehicle for a profound emotional and cultural experience. Thus, the Mediterranean myth overflows and is rewritten from intimate experience, manifesting as a question that traverses time, language and memory.
Diseases of autumn
We begin this poetic journey with a poem in which the body and the season merge, and the Mediterranean is portrayed as a landscape traversed by fragility, loss and memory. In this region, autumn not only marks the change of season, it also heralds an internal transformation, where memories and wounds mingle with the ailments of the body and soul.
I
The epidemic diseases of autumn
are caught through the lips;
in my bed of dry grass
I drink the poisons of burnt copper.
II
They pass without cries, without echoes,
the tubercular riders of autumn;
their horses with wild manes
do not neigh.
Leaves cover their tracks,
flowers swallow their dust.
III
The vintners come
letting their eyes fall;
they throw their hats to the ground,
now lamenting, now rejoicing.
IV
Autumn is a mirror of leaves in your eyes,
it sleeps and wakes,
it does not have enough of your sleep.
V
A broken branch
among the flowers.
I, brave and loving,
mocked by her love;
I, stubborn in whiteness.
Remember this,
it is not found in any poem.
Gardens mean nothing;
the real miracles
are the roses of the heart.
Do not forget it,
like the confession the suicide
writes on his flesh.
VI
Autumn is chance,
leaves fallen years ago;
the hospital is always white,
my face has no colour,
my heart is in the lime of the apple tree.
VII
My heart
is a heavy bell;
each word
is a cannonball;
my castle cannot be repaired,
its battlements are places to die,
places to make love.
A bloody conquest
ravaging its markets.
(From El caramillo ardiente, 1981)
Translated by Ertuğrul Önalp
Concealing love
From the melancholic back-and-forth of autumn, we now move toward the waters of the Bosphorus, that strait that simultaneously unites and separates, like an open wound between East and West. In the following poem, the landscape becomes a metaphor for unfulfilled desires and the distance between what was lived and what was lost. The kingfisher, a fleeting and luminous figure, appears as a silent witness to what time has erased.
In winter I count them, the days of cold fishes caught in my net.
Never will that summer come back!
That love which never begun,
which was lived out in its supposed middle,
is like an unlit candle in my mind.
Standing and looking at the straits
we spelled the name of a bird from there,
Kingfisher,
the one that bends the water with its split mouth,
like a white sailboat that slides to the water.
Winter carries a harsh and open stress, an unbound sound,
it blows without touching us, without taking from us anything,
it blows straight from places we have never been.
It flies with the vindictive voice of sexuality.
An admonition it hurls
a map of tides to faraway places.
What flow, what ebb!
We, in the middle of something supposed,
we, in two intertwined timelines,
we, two somnambule spots.
Now, for this poem even you
are only some closed fence, an isolated sound,
only a leaf that falls for the sake of itself
from the calendar of days of cold fishes.
The kingfisher will be flying to a new word now,
in a language we do not know.
Farewell to the country
After the murmur of the Bosphorus’ waters, the poetic journey continues along more arid and ancient routes. In the next poem, the salt caravans and the roads of the East evoke the nomadic memory of the Mediterranean, where migration is also a rite of purification and oblivion. Tears, like water and salt, mark the transition between loss and the possibility of renewal.
Tears used to have power;
we were men loaded with river, following trains of salt;
the dream would be revealed by the traces left by water drops in our shadow,
as the fetters of salt would come undone in water.
We would be ashamed, acquit ourselves of staying too long in the city;
we would consult the rain: how do we return home eastward bound?
how do we build a lantern out of our bones and fumigate
the purple bees of night when they come out of their hive?
If the night is barren: stars in our hair and rain once more in the eyes,
the lanterns burning like a yellow slice of time
(the candle burns, the oil wraps, the mud mummifies the soil),
the thorns hurt by the rose are as wounds in the blood…
a poor and native rumour behind us…
So we used to march out of range like fervent crops.
Wheat could become nothing but flour;
we were born by women cracking wheat,
those sages of crumb painting the sun gold on the stone,
our mothers with their cracked soles on roofs facing the moon,
our hot vineyard, smiling corn, pious onion shoots;
those soles, oh those soles and the way we deserted bricks…
Red earth and coarse hay, God’s mortar
used to offer a yellow intimacy to cool homes
with the power of tears;
the rain would pass through the windows like a prayer;
an orphan would survive on what the had to offer…
What I mean to say is that,
tears used to have power.
*Translated by Sehnaz Tahir
Travel song
From the desert trails we now reach the Balkans, where myth is embodied in landscapes and figures marked by exile. In this new poem, memory and nostalgia intertwine with the experience of a place that no longer exists as it once did, drawing an inner geography comprising loss, displacement and persistent echoes.
My Balkan days
pass like the thin skin of an apple.
The heart hurts too,
my song says in the frost,
bleeding each time I set out.
Nostalgia was a fruit bitten by death,
a bond with childhood,
rotten, stuck to the skin.
Oh, those gardens of whispering snow.
Could they bring back my grandfather and my uncle,
and above all my father?
Oh Thrace, how could I leave you behind,
leaving the whitewashed clay chimneys.
How could your weary looks remain
on the windowpanes,
that life of home?
Each journey, without rest,
makes my home disappear again.
Now I miss the house of the one who has no house,
its shadow on the threshold.
Ah, those stubborn, whispering oaks,
could they keep my root, my hearths,
my first love?
In the Balkans, the compact oaks.
Sadness is now a dry cough inside me.
I was your nightmare,
perhaps snow for tuberculosis.
I miss now the soul of my soul,
its frozen breath.
Istanbul, I do not want to return to you.
I do not want to return
to that dirty struggle for survival.
You took my mother from me,
made her suffer at the hospital gates.
There was a woman
with hair the colour of ripe barley.
You took her from me too.
My whistle now falls
into the river of frosts.
Ah Thrace, land of turtle-dove Fridays
and wood-pigeon Saturdays,
my body will return to you,
as the memory of my migration.
The rains
Rain comes as a new sign in this poetic journey. In the Mediterranean, more than a climatic phenomenon, rain takes on a symbolic value: it represents purification, return, and sometimes consolation. In the following poem, it acts as a metaphor for exile and for the memory that refuses to disappear, persisting even when everything seems to fade into oblivion.
I
Unease is the sand left by the rivers,
where insomnia wanders like dusty dogs.
Then the afternoon rains come, like the word of God;
the face of the drops
turns toward the heart of the earth.
I too heard those fabled rains
when new angels were flowering
beneath the cool roofs of the lands
my father came from.
There were swallows, learned and clerical,
carrying joy on their swift wings,
blessing new courtyards before the drizzle.
Now there are other roofs, other sounds,
reflected in my heart, abandoned by angels.
II
I think of the first rain:
its memory must still remain
in the bricks of the house where I was born.
Every freshness awakens my curiosity:
the disappearance of turtle doves,
leaping from one country to another, restless,
and the sound of rain,
like migrating clouds.
Poppies without soil seem to tremble,
once again from one homeland to the next…
And once again red falls
upon the great dream of life,
and the bricks reappear.
Everything dark is doubt to me;
before each rain the old shadows of the forest arrive.
I am afraid, and I ask them
about the forgotten songs of my ancestors.
Can one take all songs when migrating?
Can one take the sound of rain?
Can one take from the homeland
those last sounds
that once drove us mad on hearing them for the first time?
I think of the first rains,
and of the life
that began with the fury of the drops.
Paper boat
This last poem concludes the journey with a reflection on the physical, emotional and mythical journey that permeates the entire Mediterranean experience. The poet leads us through inner and outer cities, where each step is a form of encounter with the past and a confrontation with the unattainable. In this final journey, the Mediterranean is no longer a mere place, but a shared journey between memory, desire and loss.
The more you travel the more cities you will find within yourself
The markets you have hidden in your memory will reveal your shadow
From the dead hours off past summers
Your wandering mind will catch up with you
Your dreams will again try to convince you
That you have no choice but to pursue them
All you see appears old, all you touch ungraspable
Just as when you first longed for something
You who were not born for the sake of being born
When, like a letter from away, you arrive in any city
Don’t stop, keep seeking why people die of love
Go from one end of your solitude to the other
On the steppe, in cities crossed by rivers
See if there is a child who wants to flow into the open sea
Who wonders why God cannot even make a paper ship
You paid your dues,
You felt a pure melancholy in parks,
You asked if there was a right time to cry in the squares,
You arrived at their meeting place before the lovers.
As the cities inside you call you to the ports of memory
You know that you will die continually
That’s how this love of wandering starts, that’s how it ends
A non-existent ship sets sail on a non-existent sea
Maybe you understand at last, Adnan, it’s like staying silent,
One day in Şardağı, another in a Amazonia.
How much more emptiness you will find within yourself,
You who were not born for the sake of being born,
Shall write what no traveller has written before;
Let God decide whether He exists or not…
Man is a cloud of dust in his steppes.
Translated by Hakan Özkan
Far from establishing the myth, Adnan Özer interrogates it, transforms it, and returns it to the body and the landscape. In his verses, the sea becomes a wound, the city exile; and words, instead of building solid identities, fade with the rain or crack under the sun. What remains of the Mediterranean when the myth is stripped of its fixed form and becomes an open question?