Translated from the Turkish by Richard Schwarzenberger and Grace Martin Smith
Published: Mon Apr 15 1991
Chitra Ganesh, To Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
For the Homeland
Translated from the Turkish by Richard Schwartzenberger and Grace Martin Smith
What we did not do
for the homeland.
Some of us died,
some of us made speeches.
Orhan Veli Kanık (1914–1950) described himself this way: “Two extremely thin legs, a rather short trench coat, a canary yellow scarf, a triangular face, a back that puffs out like a chest, a face of broken maturity.” He died in Istanbul at the age of thirty-six.
Richard Schwarzenberger is a poet living in San Francisco and the author of _The Mary Mardian Chronicles _(BookSurge, 2003). He earns his living as a gardener. (updated 2003)
Grace Martin Smith is a lecturer in Turkish and Ottoman at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published widely in the field of Turkish Studies and has translated (with Ann Stanford) the poems of Yunus Emre. (updated 1991)