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ABOUT DEATH
Come please, be seated friends,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
I know, as I was asleep
you came into my cell through the window.
You neither overturned the slender-necked medicine bottle
nor the red box.
With your star-bright faces,
you stand hand in hand over my bed.
Come please, be seated friends,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
Why do you look so strange at my face?
Haşim son of Osman.
Isn't that funny
you were dead my brother.
In the port of Istanbul
loading coal on an English cargo ship
with the coal basket on your back
down to the bottom of the hold...
The winch of the cargo ship pulled out your corpse
and before the break time your quite red blood washed
your dark black head...
Who knows how you suffered...
Don't stand please, be seated,
I thought you were dead,
you came into my cell through the window.
With your star-bright faces,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
Yakup of Walker's Village
my dear, my both eyes,
hello to you.
Didn't you die too?
Leaving to your children malaria and hunger
on a very hot summer day
weren't you buried in the barren cemetery?
So you are not dead?
And you?
Ahmet Cemil, the writer?
I saw with my own eyes
your coffin
lowered into the grave.
And very likely
the coffin was a little short for you.
Leave it Ahmet Cemil,
you didn't give up your old habit,
it's a medicine bottle
it's not raki.
Just to make fifty cents a day
all alone
to forget the world
how much you used to drink...
I thought you were dead.
You stand hand in hand over my bed,
come please, be seated friends,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
An old Persian poet :
"Death is just" - he says, -
"with the same grandeur it kills the Shah and the pauper."
Haşim,
why are you so bewildered?
Haven't you ever heard, my brother,
a Shah dying in a ship's hold
with a coal basket on his back?
An old Persian poet :
"Death is just" - he says.
Yakup,
how beautifully you laugh, my dear, my both eyes.
Not even once you laughed this way in your life...
But wait, let me finish my word.
An old Persian poet :
"Death is just..."
Leave that bottle Ahmet Cemil.
You get angry in vain.
I know,
death can be just
if the life is just, you say...
An old Persian poet...
Friends, leaving me alone,
friends, so furiously
where are you going?
tr. by Fuat Engin