Oktay Rifat Translation by Halman

Mavi Boncuk |


Oktay Rifat (Horozcu) (1914 - 1988)

Born in 1914, Oktay Rifat spent much of his childhood and early youth in Ankara, where he finished the Ankara Lycée and later obtained a degree in law at Ankara University. In 1937 he went to Paris to do his doctorate on a government grant. He lived in Paris for three years and, when the War broke out, he was forced to return to Turkey without completing his degree. He worked as a lawyer at the Directorate General of Press and Information in Ankara, later for the State Railways Administration until his retirement in 1973. He died in 1998.

In a poetic career that spanned half a century until his death in April 1988, Oktay Rifat stood in the vanguard of modern Turkish poetry – first as an audacious, almost obstreperous rebel, together with his friend Orhan Veli Kanık (1914-1950) and Melih Cevdet Anday (1915-), then as an eclectic transformer of styles and language, writing from a self-enforced privacy, and finally as a reclusive elder statesman creating a unique synthesis. One could say that these stages correspond roughly to movements going on elsewhere in world literature – to the Socialist-Surrealism of the 1930s and 1940s, followed by Obscurantism in which Oktay seemed to evoke echoes of some prominent French poets, and ending with what could be called “Pure Poetry”.

Here is an English translation.

ÇOCUK

İhtiyarın yanındaki çocuk
Oyuncak bir güneşe benziyor.
Anasına uzayan dağlarda,
İnsanla balık arası, kaygan
Bulutların içine düşünce,
Kolundan yakalamış sıkıca
Sarı boncuk gizli ayısını.

Oktay Rıfat

THE CHILD

The child next to the old man
Resembles a toy sun.
On mountains reaching out to his mother.
A cross between man and fish, when
He falls into the slippery clouds,
He firmly clutches the arm
Of his bear with yellow beady eyes.

Translated By T.S.Halman


CHILD
Next to the old man a child
Like a game playing sun.
Stretching over the mountains to his mother,
Almost a human and a fish, slippery
When tumbling into a cloud,
Firmly clutching the arm
Of his hidden bear with yellow beaded eyes

April 2006 translation by MAM


Mavi Boncuk |

Here are two challenges waiting for an English translation.

KADEH

Burası dalyan kahvesi
Ortalık süt mavisi
Apostol bu ne biçim meyhane
Tabağımda bir bulut
Kadehimde gökyüzü

Oktay Rifat

BENİM YÂRİM

Benim yârim iki dirhem bir çekirdek
Hoppa mı hoppa
Rakı içer
Kadeh kırar
Benim yârim sırasında benden hovarda
Kavuniçi mendil
Markalı çanta
Benim yârim çıtkırıldım
Benim yârim alafranga

Oktay RIFAT