Reply
by Orhan Veli Kanık | translated by Deniz Perin
––From the butcher’s cat to the street cat––
You speak of hunger,
So you must be communist.
So, it’s you who’s been burning down all those buildings:
The ones in Istanbul,
The ones in Ankara––
You pig, you!
Orhan Veli Kanık (born 1914, Bekoz, Constantinople—died Nov. 14, 1950, Istanbul) was a poet who was one of the most innovative poets in 20th-century Turkish literature.
Educated at the Faculty of Literature of Istanbul University, he worked briefly as a teaching assistant before joining the Turkish postal administration in Ankara (1936–42). From 1942 to 1945 he served as a reserve officer in the Turkish Army. Because he had a good command of French, he worked for the Ministry of Education in the translation office for two years and later translated the works of several major French poets and playwrights. In 1950 he was editor of the literary review Yaprak (“Folio”).
Kanık first wrote under the pen name Mehmed Ali Sel and published his early poems in the avant-garde literary review Varlǐk (“Existence”). He gradually turned away from traditional poetic forms. In 1941 he published a volume of poetry, Garip (“Strange”), in collaboration with two other well-known poets, Oktay Rifat and Melih Cevdet Anday. The work revolutionized Turkish literature, creating a break with everything associated with Turkish poetry to that time; conventional metre, rhyme, language style, and themes were discarded. The art of poetry was to be directed at the people. Introducing everyday spoken Turkish and making use of folk poems and popular song motifs, he encountered violent opposition, but by the time of his death his work and reputation were firmly established. Other works included Vazgecemediğim (1945; “I Cannot Give Up”); Destan Gibi (1946; “Like an Epic”); Yenisi (1947; “The New One”); and Karşǐ (1949; “Across”). English translations of poems selected from all his works appear in I Am Listening to Istanbul, translated by Talât Sait Halman (1971).
Deniz Perin has an MFA in Poetry from San Diego State University. Her work and translations from Turkish have appeared in various national and international literary journals, including the Atlanta Review, The New Review of Literature, Poetry International, Transcript, and Words Without Borders. In 2007, she was a recipient of the Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators. Her translations of Nazim Hikmet’s poetry can be found in the Ecco Book of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010). She taught literature and writing at the University of San Diego.