Flowering Sky

By Arif Ay

 Poems Translated by Mevlut Ceylan

Arif Ay  born in 1952. One of the most influential poets of his generation published nine collections. Revolutionary themes lie at the heart of his inspiration. Also written short stories, and articles on literature and politics. Graduated from Ankara University where he read Turkish Literature and Islamic Theology. The author of numerous short stories, he graphically describes the poverty of the common man in Turkey. His prose is informed by the same lyrical fervour as marks his verse.

Introduction

Arif Ay's first book bears the title HIRA. The name is significant; Hira is the name of the cave where The Prophet Muhammad first received a revelation. Ay sees the poetic role as closely paralleling the prophetic: both prophet and poet exemplify the vates. This essentially religious vision of the poet's place in society pervades all his work and helps explain the unpoetic title of his second collection: Dosyalar (dossiers). A dossier is a file the secret police keeps on a person, particularly if he be a dissident.

Ay dissents from the received view of Turkish history as imparted by state organs and institutions; he views with dismay the collapse of national institutions following the first World War, when they were replaced with institutions on the western model. In his verse he laments the passing of a culture and its replacement with a wasteland of the spirit; but his work with its appeal to the youth who flock to his readings in Ankara, makes Yevtushenko seem a closer analogue than Eliot. The secret of his appeal lies not only in his scorn for the conventional hypocrisy (as seen in Ramp included in the present selection) but in the directness of his voice, sometimes compared to a clenched fist in its relentless ambiguity.

He writes in vers libre which became fashionable in Turkey from the '40s onward, using modern methods to indite modernism. His most recent collection iirin Kandilleri (Candles of Poetry) uses the same metric form as the previous collections. Critics hailed it as his most mature work, establishing him as a major figure amongst contemporary poets.

His voice cries aloud, the tone bitter. He stigmatises the hypocrisy that is so much a part of the social scene, ironically counsels himself to sleep:

The cash nexus, with its all-pervasive materialism, is seen as having sapped the moral values underpinning the Turkish spirit. A nation cut off from its spiritual roots (the forgotten alphabet refers to Arabic, the language of the Qur'an) ultimately faces extinction, this long sleep which the somnolent system state education anticipates.

Time, a haiku, expresses the poet's sense of futility. Another haikuesque piece, Horses, conveys with epigrammatic concision a meaning not immediately apparent to a non-Turk. The Turks were a race of hardy horsemen out of Central Asia: the horse is for them a symbol of what they were when they formed the vanguard of Islam. Such a horse, divinely appointed or assigned, is riderless because he is the vehicle of faith itself, of the supernatural truth of Islam. Horses amount to a repetitive, almost obsessive image. In Ostlers the nostalgia for a remote Turko-Islamic past causes the poet to imagine himself dead:

His poetry is affirmative as well as destructive. And Labour, with its echoes of Horace, replaces the Latin poet's faith in the poetic faculty with a religious faith in the eternal edifice of supernatural, religious truth. In the Qur'an the believer is referred to as a labourer, who labours in the vineyard of the Lord. God said:

Ay's popularity rests in part on his skill in love poetry. Asking is included here as an example of this genre, showing another side of Ay's inspiration.

A gentler mood suffuses his verse at these moments.

*   *   *   *   *