Derick Mattern
Photo courtesy of Derick Mattern
Bio
Derick Mattern graduated from the Iowa Translation Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. His translations of Ergülen's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and many others. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his poems have appeared in Subtropics, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lived and taught in Istanbul from 2008 to 2013.
Considered by many to be the most prominent Turkish poet of his generation, Haydar Ergülen has published extensive collections of poetry, essays, and criticism since the 1980s. I first met him while reading Zarf (Envelope), one of more than six books of poems he’s produced in the two decades since his collected poems were first published. The poem here, “Open Sentence,” appeared on the back cover and it was the first Ergülen poem I encountered: simple yet cryptic, slyly political while ostensibly mundane, philosophical but in language simple enough for my budding Turkish to grasp. Envelope proved an excellent primer to the long list of Ergülen’s themes and obsessions: correspondence, cats, the sea, rain, pomegranates, death, childhood, non-existence, the color blue, Sufism, socialism, punctuation, hands, pseudo-translation, ghazals, paper, and roses, among many others. I hope that Ergülen can serve as an equally intriguing introduction to a rich and complex world of contemporary Turkish poetry, a landscape largely unknown to the English-language reading public. A writer of seeming contradictions—literary heir of the Second New as well as of traditional Turkish forms, ardent secularist and observant Alevi, a poet as inspired by loss as by love—Ergülen is a superlative stand-in for the complexities of modern Turkey. Ergülen’s poetry welcomes and perpetuates a long conversation between friends, and I hope to accomplish in English what his work has done in Turkish for the last four decades.
"Open Sentence" by Haydar Ergülen
[translated from the Turkish]
sometimes nothing much comes out of an envelope
not a letter or even a single sentence
nothing seeps out, no daylight, no joy at long day’s end
such letters go about the day like covered wounds
whosoever opens them, whosoever touches them, their hands ignite
sometimes words come to nothing, letters to nothing
sometimes a sentence sets letters alight
(First appeared in English in Asymptote)
About Haydar Ergülen
Haydar Ergülen (b. 1956) is one of the most prominent poets of modern Turkey, respected for his prolific output of poems and literary criticism, as well as his many distinguished awards. His books maintain a steady popular appeal, enjoying multiple print runs and sales by the thousands. Through his subjects and references, his work often acts as an intimate primer to Turkish writers past and present, as well as to the mysticism of his Alevi heritage. His lyric voice traces the delights of love and authenticity, often going back to a nostalgic childhood when Turkey's diverse communities lived in relative harmony, only to return to the present to elegize the lost. Curated from poems that span his 40-year oeuvre, this 120-page collection will include more than 100 poems, as well as 30 pages of critical analysis.