Poems by ​Tozan Alkan

Fate Tablets 
 
For Jean Rostand
   “D’où venons nous, que sommes ous, où allons nous?” 
 
We have read and recited texts in all languages We turned over and over rolls of paper
We felt tired after long poems
As we sipped our wines with divinities
There were no theories discussed
We were surrounded by frogs 
 
Melodies were our shelter
For nature hated inaction
The skies were in motion
Not without reason
Gauguin had asked his oft quoted sentence
In the street of Judas trees
The latitude of our hearts was far from being empty 
 
Each of us was the image of a shade 
We were rags suspended on azeroles 
Or say that we were suspended corpses 
 
This was quite natural wasn’t it?
Far from those who had donned the treason sheets 
To encounter the dawn stark naked  
A misty morning trying to find what existed 
Instead positing that inexistence does exist 
 
Hereafter our study shall be learning what life is 
For we know that as we learn and go on learning 
Another life is possible
What rests behind us is but frogs
Theories are transitional 

​
 
Springtime in Limbo 
 
I’m looking for a perennial springtime 
To snatch a few hours of sleep  
Under a mulberry tree  
 
It’s true that the firmament lean against the world
It’s true that history continued throughout the recorded time 
Everything exists by itself, a deathly silence hangs on us
I’m listening to the rain pattering against window, it was lovely 
Yet rain is hardly a remedy to ease my loneliness
 
I have had overwhelming defeats in life
Right beside me has been a grave looking at me aghast
I was exhausted from gazing at the perennial blue of the sky 
The evening which was on its way back from understanding  
The mystery of waters and the dead dark.
 
Here where I had been keeping silent everything began to echo 
Water is impatient to join the stream, love the exile
And I the summer 
While death the winter. 



 
Tangent to love 
 
                          Insomnis veritas 
 
 
We were in deep mourning
Before we came here
Our faces still bearing
The traces of lamentations
The words we heard  
Are shed all over the place
Covering the floor like a thick blanket 
While the crimson evening enshrouds us 
 
We vowed sacrifices to gods; our attention 
Was directed to the sky, and deliberated; 
Having watered with our tears  
A spleen tangent to a love
We extended our life’s stream. 
 
A woman in front of a looking-glass
Is looking for a grave for herself
In the dead of darkness
The air smells of algae and salt
It is said that dreams are Gospel  truth
Our eyelids are closing: here are earth and water.
 
 
Translated by Ender Gürol

Born in 1963, Tozan Alkan studied at Galatasaray High School before graduating from the Faculty of Business Administration of Boğaziçi University. At present, he is an instructor at Istanbul University, School of Foreign Languages. He is a member of Turkish Writers’ Union and of the Translators Association. He is one of the founders of Intercultural Poetry and Translation Academy. He has translated world famous authors like Anatole France, Charles Baudelaire, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, D.H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Antoni Machado and Alfonsina Storni. He was awarded “Behçet Aysan” and “Metin Altıok” prizes in poetry.  

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