Ilhan Berk (1918-2008)

The great Turkish poet Ilhan Berk died the day before yesterday. His poetry in English translation can be found in Selected Poems by Ilhan Berk, edited by Onder Otçu (Talisman Books, Jersey City, 2004) and in Eda: An Anthologyof Contemporary Turkish Poetry, edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat (TalismanBooks, Jersey City, 2004).

Here is a passage from my introduction to the *Eda* anthology discussing Ilhan Berk’s poetry and its relation to other Turkish poets. The passage ends with his poem “Garden”:

“Though associated with The Second New, Berk’s poetry has nothing to do with depth, everything to do with motion. Born before Süreya and Ayhan and still alive –that is to say, writing more than sixty years- his work assimilates the poetic movements from Hikmet and Veli on. The great pleasure of Berk’spoetry is to follow his agile mind weaving in and out of historical time periods, following the contours of crooked streets in Galata, naming names, or stopping at a now defunct whore house listening to the voices of women there. In “Garlic,” ostensibly a prose piece, time as a layered entity with past and present disappears and becomes a unified place of the spirit, of mind play.

In Berk, Süreya’s sense of unexpected connections and Ayhan’s awareness that Istanbul is a mongrel accumulation floating on a sea of history are unified into a flat tapestry of pure motion, an irreligious but still spiritual space where splits associated with time are abandoned. Berk’s poetry reveals no secrets but lights everything it touches with its inflections.

From the 1950’s on, everything Berk writes is associated with his “long poetic line.” To understand what that line is, one can go to a Hashim poem, the first poet in the anthology: “In a grieving perfection’s insomnia…”Why is perfection associated with insomnia? Insomnia is the most intense state of wakefulness (consciousness) because it is nearest sleep. This is a poetics of limits, a motion of the mind towards zero, the unreachable, the forbidden.

Berk’s long poetic line approaches the limit of prose, growing in intensity doing so. A lot of Berk’s best poems look like prose; they are continuous strips of poetic line moving towards and away from a limit. Here lies the essential paradox of Berk and Turkish poetry. He seems to be the most pagan, least religious of poets, as Turkish poetry rarely is about religion. But an irreducible spiritual essence runs through both of them, as it does in Veli or Hashim or Hikmet or Süreya or Iskender or Güntan…. It is buried in the agglutinative cadences of Turkish, a language of affections inflected by proximity to a movable, elusive verb –a dance towards and away from limits. The sensual, metaphysical and historical are unified in this movement –the eda- a continuum of earth, water and human habitation:

Wall
Door
Window
+_________________

HOME

“I am in the middle of a garden that looks like 444.”
Cansever

GARDEN

The house, ‘vertical creature’.
You enter the house through the garden.
But the garden does not know the house.
Nor perhaps the other way around…

How beautiful!
What’s more, the world of objects is like this.
They all gather to enjoy the unknown.
The garden’s choice has been freedom, from the very beginning.

It has the capacity of eclipsing the house,
however conspicuous the house might make itself to show off.

– I am in the garden, says the garden.

It has its own language, history, geography.

We have also come to realize that it has some peculiar thoughts of its own.
(Actually, it is through these peculiar thoughts that it takes shape.)

I SEE THE HOUSE AFTER I LEAVE THE GARDEN BEHIND.

To compare the garden and the house: the garden is wide open in the face of
the close-mouthed, conservative quality the house characterizes (permeated
with that despotism which wounded it long ago).

THE GARDEN DETESTS CALENDESTINE OPERATIONS.

Full of sound and voices.
Its face overflowing into the street.
Offering a female reading.

To compare them, it is sexual (what is not?)

THE HOUSE IS MORE AS IF TO DIE IN THAN TO LIVE IN.

Oh garden, the muddy singer of the street.

“Dirty Child.”

Hello gardens, here I am! (1997, trans. by Onder Otçu)”

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