Ülkü Tamer'in Teşekkürü
I thank you, for you have kissed me,
The poem is
BEN SANA TEŞEKKÜR EDERİMBen sana teşekkür ederim, beni sen öptün,
Ben uyurken benim alnımdan beni sen öptün;
Serinlik vurdu korulara, canlandı serçelerim;
Sen mavi bir tilkiydin, binmiştin mavi ata,
Ben belki dün ölmüştüm, belki de geçen hafta.
Sen bana çok güzeldin, senin ayakların da.
by Ülkü Tamer.
Tamer’s poetic career is associated with the İkinci Yeni (Second New) movement. İkinci Yeni poems divorced themselves from the conventions of language and society. Poetry was not to convey political sentiment. It was not to teach virtue. Instead, the reader was to focus on the inner musicality of a poem, arising from a confluence of opaque impressions, of sounds and subliminal relations between words.
In his book İkinci Yeni Olayı (The Second New Happening), Asım Bezirci lists [1] the principles of the movement as
Değiştirim, Karıştırım, Özgür Çağrışım, Soyutlama, Anlamsızlık, İmgeleme, Us dışına Çıkma, Güç Anlaşılma, Okurdan Uzaklaşma, Çevreden Ayrılma ve Kaçış,descriptively translated:
alteration [of grammar and convention], interconversion [of the senses and sensed information], free association, abstraction, meaninglessness, heavy use of metaphor, divestment from the thinking mind, obscurity, manufactured distance from the reader, manufactured separation from the surroundings, and Escape.Bezirci also considers arguments that İkinci Yeni was derived from Western influences such as surrealism, Dadaism and symbolism. If so, the derivation was implicit; İkinci Yeni did not originate from a definite point, and had no manifesto. Instead, it was the name ultimately given to a smattering of poems written after the Second World War. Famed İkinci Yeni poet Cemal Süreya confirms [2]:
The Second New was not born as a conscious movement. It issued no program or collective proclamation. Most [Second New] poets had never met. Nor did they write to each other.İkinci Yeni poems were supposed to free themselves of folklore, despising it as contrary to poetry. In a 1956 article, Süreya writes:
Folklore has no ability to carry the intellectual qualities of contemporary poetry... The words in a folk saying are sutured to the meaning of the saying. No further power, no further function than that of the saying can be sought in those words, for they are frozen. They have collapsed to a single dimension. Their functions, their powers, the associations they can evoke are all predetermined...
Now we ourselves can whittle words. We are able to dislodge them by halves from their familiar locations, to reform and deviate them from their familiar meanings, load them with new burdens. In this we desire to obtain new images and impressions of a known concept. All young poets desire this. The attitude described, which constitutes the opposite pole to folklore and to cliche, was an evolution of our poetry.
Like all evolution, it was correct and necessary.However syntactically different İkinci Yeni poems may have been from Turkish folk poetry, they could not part wholly from folkloric symbols and themes. References to folk literature are easily found in Tamer’s Ben Sana Teşekkür Ederim (I thank you), even and especially with its obscure and fanciful imagery.
A literal translation reads:
I thank youI thank you, you were the one who kissed me; [a]
while I was sleeping, on my forehead you kissed me;
A coolness struck the forests, my sparrows revived; [b]
You were a blue fox, riding a blue horse; [c]
I had perhaps died yesterday, perhaps the week before. [d]
You were very beautiful to me, as were your feet. [e]This translation has certain complications.
I thank you, you were the one who kissed me; [a]could be taken as "I thank you, who have kissed me," or "I thank you because you kissed me". Yet particular importance rests on the kisser being "you". The causal relationship between kissing and thanking is secondary.
A coolness struck the forests, my sparrows revived; [b]The word "koru" means little forest, or grove. The sparrows are "coming [back] to life." Again this process begins with the kiss. Perhaps its coolness recovers the sparrows from some fever or stupor, or even from death. "To receive life", the literal meaning of "canlan[mak]", does not imply that the recipient is dead. However, it does admit to some need for life, a state from which one must be retrieved if not resurrected.
The possessive "my sparrows" affixes them to his inner landscape. Such language describes possession as belonging and association rather than a relation of mastery or property. It makes the sparrows part of the self.
You were a blue fox, riding a blue horse; [c]Other possibilities are "you had mounted a blue horse," or "you had once ridden a blue horse.” That the blue fox is gently borne on the horse still is a more likely narrative chronology.
I had perhaps died yesterday, perhaps the week before. [d]The ambiguous time of death lends everything a dreamlike quality, and brings alternate, soporific meanings to the death and dying in the poem. The forehead kiss now rouses him from mystical sleep, waking him first in the sparrows.
You were very beautiful to me, as were your feet. [e]Being beautiful "to me" is not a valid Turkish construct. Perhaps he finds the kisser very beautiful, or both the kisser and her feet treat him very well: in Turkish, "beautiful" is often used in place of "good"; what is done "beautifully" is done well.
The speaker as trees and sparrows, the kisser as fox on horse sets us in the dream world of a Franz Marc painting, its serene and muscular heroes straining in noble labor. Marc’s bodies, set in “severe and spiritual blue”, achieve in his words “a pantheistic penetration into the pulsating flow of blood in nature, in trees, and in animals.”
In the tree and sparrow lives the speaker; in the fox and her steady horse lives a kind of God. Yet would be a failure to accuse Tamer of Marc’s pantheism on account of his waking-up of nature. Marc’s animals preserve what he calls a “chaste majesty”; it is the “[pure] animal’s unadulterated awareness of life [that allows him] to respond with everything that was good.”
The kissing spirit does not achieve its lifegiving power through purity. Her power is not schematically Christian; she needs not take after Christ to act with his abilities. A Catholic priest divests from life to animate the Eucharist. A healing saint dies to life to draw out death from the sick body. But Tamer, like many other Turks, would not have heard or thought much of the Resurrection. Negotiation with death is not reserved for those who share in Christ’s divinity, and triumph over death is not reserved for God.
So the godhead of the horse is its own. Turkish mythology is Turkic mythology, tales from old Central Asia, where the empires of the steppes revered the grave and glorious warrior. The warring Turk was patron and dependent of horse, woman and weapon — the three sacred bonds which could not be interfered with.
These bonds were tightly interwoven: Turkic peoples were the first to domesticate the horse, and built entire societies around its service. [3] Nomadic Turks relied on hunting, herding and raiding, all of which were done on horseback. [4] Both men and women commonly played elaborate sports while riding. [5] Turks were rumored to eat, drink, trade, talk and sleep on their horses; to be born to riding women and so never learn to walk. Therefore the steppe-dwelling Turk found horses sacred, buried them ceremonially, and considered them clever, godly animals with the secret ability to speak. [6]
Horses were a special sacrifice to the Sky God, Kök Tengri (modern Turkish: Gök Tanrı). [7] Kök Tengri was the world-spirit above all spirits, the one and greatest God who had created the heavens and the earth, and who presided above the clouds. [8] He had set man on earth above the earth’s deep waters, with a vast sky to protect him. [9] This sky was held sacred, as were all its colors. [10] To prefix a word with “kök”, or to present its form colored in “kök”, in blue, was to explicitly associate it with God. [11]
Turks by and large believed horses to be descended from the sky, and therefore to be holy, exalted above other creation. Horses from the Fergana Region in modern-day Uzbekistan were called “Horses of Heaven”, because the souls of dead warriors rose to heaven reformed as noble horses. Mahmut of Kashgar describes winged horses in his writings, while scripts from the Turfan region depict certain horse figures in blue. [12]
But Tamer’s blue fox and horse are not merely holy. Gods may take the shape of animals; some souls live in animal form. In the creation myth of the Hitay Empire (Anglicized Cathay), the first emperor T’ai-Ting is hunting deep in the mountains. An unknown man rides past him, chasing down a fox. Once he shoots the fox dead, the man disappears. The emperor returns to Lu’an and dies the same day. On the door of his tomb is painted a scene of the emperor himself hunting the fox on horseback. Folk belief holds that the fox was the emperor’s embodied soul. [13]
In the Kyrgyz epic to his name, the hero Manas and his companions hunt down “wolves, foxes, blue foxes” on their horses. [14] The blueness of the fox here may intend some enhancement of its high symbolic value. In Kutadgu Bilig, an Islamic text meant to convey sacred knowledge to rulers, the good commander is instructed in part to be like foxes; as “clever” and as “graceful; delicate”. Thus an especially fine and strange fox-spirit, with all its sharp beauty, can fall to a great man on horseback; and perhaps this makes him great beyond men.
For horses are steeds of the gods. Yol Tengri, considered a god of journeying and of happiness, introduces himself with the words “I am the horseriding god of the road. I ride my horse morning and night.“ [15] Shamans ascend to heaven on their horses; they may only enter the underworld on horseback. The horse therefore functions as symbol and bringer of deathly knowledge; only with its labor is retrieval possible from the world beyond.
In Tamer’s poem, the holy horse is retrieving from sleep what its companion desires. Tamer’s speaker is saved by a god-descended fox which is the kisser. It is her unusual beauty, her kiss as the pure substance of beauty, which pulls the wandering man from his trance. And so he says,
I thank youI thank you, for you have kissed me,
You kissed me on my forehead as I was sleeping;
A cool wind swept the trees, my sparrows came alive;
You were a blue fox, on a blue horse,
I had died perhaps a day, perhaps a week before.
You were beautiful to me, as were your feet.
And we understand what he says because folk literature is the fundament and the filament of modern poetry. The reality of the good poem is the reality of the old one. What once was can never die; it lives in language that is well used.
The continuum between modern myth and folklore is proof of the enduring origin, the central truth which unfolds itself to all who have its sense.
[1] Bezirci, A. 2. yeni olayı. İstanbul: Tel Yayınları, 1974. pp. 7-29.
[2] Süreya, C. Şiirin labirentinde. İstanbul: YKY, 2002. pp. 99.
II. Yeni bir akım olarak doğmadı. Bir programı, ortak bir bildirisi olmadı. Şairlerin çoğu birbirini tanımıyordu bile. Yazışmıyorlardı da.[3] Durmuş, İ. “Türk Kültür Çevresinde At”. Asya Araştırmaları Uluslararası Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi. 5 (1), 1-12.
[4] Durmuş, İ. Türk Kültürüne Giriş. Ankara: Akçağ Yayınları, 2016. pp. 61.
[5] Kelepircioğlu, K. Türkler’de Spor. İstanbul: Akşam Matbaası. pp. 15.
[6] Kafesoğlu, İ. Türk Milli Kültürü. İstanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1989. pp. 209.
[7] Roux, J.P. Eski Türk Mitolojisi. Found on the Internet Archive.
[8] Ögel, B. Türk Mitolojisi, 1. Cilt. Found on the Internet Archive.
[9] Ergin, M. Orhun Abideleri. İstanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1998.
[10] Işık, R. İslam Öncesi Türklerde Tabiatla İlgili İnanışlar. Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 1994.
[11] From Ögel:
Kök, yani gök, göğün rengi olan mavilik idi. Aslında Türkler göğe Kök-Tengri, yani mavi gök derlerdi. Bugünkü türkçemizde kullandığımız “gök” sözü, göğün renginden başka bir şey değildi. Gök renk, kutsal göğün olduğu kadar, Tanrının da bir sembolü idi. Bir şeyi gök rengine büründürmek, veya gök sözü ile beraber söylemek, o şeyi kutsal saymak veya aralarında Tanrı ile ilgili bir bağ kurmak isteğinden ileri gelmeli idi.[12] From Roux:
At eski Türk dünyasında özellikle insanın ayrılmaz dostu
(ki bu sıfatıyla özel bir kişiliğe sahiptir) ve özellikle gök tan-
rı (— »Tengri) için —»Kurban hayvanı olarak kabul ediliyor-
du. Ah başka merasimlerde de görmek mümkündür, özel-
likle at yarışlarında veya bir merkezin "etrafı dolanıldığın-
da". Bütün bu örneklerde, at ile gök arasında şüphesiz bir
bağlantı olduğu anlaşılmaktadır. Bu hayvanın gök kökenli
olduğu veya göğe benzediği yolundaki düşünce, henüz mi-
lâttan önceki dönemde bile bozkırlarda yaygın olan bir
inanç olsa gerek. Dolayısıyla, bu inancın Türklerde var ol-
ması gayet muhtemeldir. 12 —»Hayvanlı Takvimde at ayı
haziran ayına, başka bir deyişle yaz gündönumunun ol-
duğu aya, yani güneşin en yüksek noktada bulunduğu za-
mana karşılık gelir. Kutadgu Bilig' de, at —»Zamanın simgesi-
dir. Turfan metinlerinde, at resimleri bazen —»Maviye, yani
göğün rengine boyanmıştı. Nihayet Kâşgarlı Mahmud'un
sözlüğünde, şüphesiz uçan at simgesine yapılmış bazı anış-
tırmaları bulmak mümkün. [13] From Ögel:
Imparator T’ai-tınng dağlık bir bölgede, on atlın ile beraber avlanıyordu. Bu sırada, beyaz bir ata binmiş olarak tilki kovalayan bir adam gördü. Adam tilkiye bir ok attı ve tilki vurularak yere düştü. Fakat aynı anda, adam da ortadan kayboldu. İmparator aynı günde Luan şehrinde öldü. Sonradan buraya bir mabet yapıldı ve şehrin Cennet Kuşu adı verilen kapısında bir mabed ve mabedde de ölen imparatorun bir resmi yapıldı. Bu resimde imparator, at üstünde bir tilkiyi kovalıyordu. Öyle anlaşılıyor ki halk inançlarına göre imparatorun ruhunu taşıyan sembolik tilki ölünce, ruhun kendisi de ölmüş oluyordu.[14]
Manas ve arkadaşları Çarkastan’ın çukuruna çadır dikip keçe evi kurdular, boz oğlanlar atlarını oynatıp yarış düzenlediler. Köpeklerini bıraktılar, yay çektiler, kuşlarını salıverdiler, sungur kuşu oyunu oynadılar, kurt, tilki, mavi tilki avladılar. Güreş düzenlediler, ip çekme oyunu düzenleyip yarıştılar.[15] From Roux:
Yol Tengri. Irk Bitig'de yalnızca iki metinde sözü edilen bu
tanrı, yol sözcüğüne atfedilen anlama bağlı olarak bir mut-
luluk tanrısı ya da bir yol tanrısı olabilir. Her ne kadar bu
sözcüğe ilişkin niteleme sıfatları ikinci anlama işaret edi-
yorsa da, soru cevapsız kalmaktadır. Yol Tengri kendini şu
sözlerle tanıtmaktadır: "Ben, alaca — »At üstündeki yol tanrı-
sıyım. Sabah akşam at sürerim."
i thank you