This article is based on this dutch article of Martinus Benders
O Kolle Tiktakörümcek
A literal-literal rendering such as saat örümceği or klokken-örümcek doesn’t work in Turkish for three key reasons:
- Sound and rhythm disappear
• Klokkenspin / Clockyspid owes its charm to the repeated explosive consonants (k-l-k / k-l-k) combined with the suddenly soft ending -spin / -spid.
• In Turkish, saat örümceği results in a flat, even somewhat prosaic rhythm. The playfulness of sound disappears, whereas the poem thrives on childlike sound play. - Compound formation clashes with Turkish word formation
• Dutch effortlessly combines two nouns into a new fantasy creature.
• Turkish rarely allows such direct compound nouns. The result is either a rather sober tamlama (saat örümceği) or an artificial textbook word (klokörümcek), which never captures the sparkling nonsense of the original. - Meaning overshadows the nonsensical layer
• In Dutch and English, the literal meaning (clock-spider) flirts with absurdity – it sounds both crazy and concrete.
• Saat örümceği in Turkish is immediately reduced to “a spider whose abdomen resembles a watch.” The comedic, swinging effect is gone; what remains is a zoological specimen.
That’s why a sound transposition becomes necessary – something like Tiktakörümcek so that:
- the funny clock rhythm (tik-tak) remains audible,
- the combination with örümcek still forms one playful word,
- the madness and musicality of the original title are preserved.
And so one goes through the entire collection again and again.
Yuhuu, the jewels are in the moss!
Yuhuu, the jewels are in the moss!
Yuhuu, the jewels are in place of worms!
The moon’s old memory, where root dew-storms rage
swoops sharply beneath the borage.
Yuhuu, the ruby has returned!
Sapphire, amethyst, and opals!
They lure you with a thousand satin groom-eyes
as bridal birch trees wink at the twinkling grains,
gathering winks
story boots from the forest, yuhuu
jewels in the moss! Yuhuu, no joke!
And wind keeps tempo on the diamond hem
inside the broken chair ring.
Tack! Tack! On the diamond hem.
A Crabby Tale, a Melancholy Fable
To float and think, to think and float!
A frog floats in its hat,
above the needled seas,
and then when the ground begins to ripple,
a giant frog moon kisses the treetops,
a brown sugar moon, full of warts,
a crater-bellied roaring beast.
Rübezahl awakens,
because of his giant nose,
tickled by too many trees,
he sneezes and upsets everything,
the frog shakes madly through the air
until peace is restored.
He blinks and says:
Dalıçal! Dalıçal!
Who will fish with the world, balıçal?
Mole took the blanket,
Crab crawled slow in his shell.
Dalıçal! Dalıçal!
Birds, Volcanoes
From cracks in the Cyclops walls,
carpenter bees return
to dead bamboo –
with a humming of resin.
As though birds were poured from sulfur,
boom boom –
they cry in secret code
paper-melody, flour-melody
under a giant dust sun.
When night lava fossilizes all pulses
in dreams with basalt leaves
a nightingale begins to sing
in grumpy oak quartz.
An egg made of fire.
O lava throne soaring in whiteness,
grant us the holy daggabrot!
Rewrite our zen
in swallow calligraphy!
Let happy seeds mix into our blood!
People forget what they do while asleep.
Each night they turn to stone.
They harden without anger.
Dreams echo gongs in the bed.
The Birth Guardian
Silence left me homeless.
But on Elba, Zerynthia Cassandra is waiting
for her guarda nascita –
the round birth guardian,
nickname: Pipe of the Dutchman –
a reference to meerschaum pipes,
a beauty once polished
with dead bones.
Consider:
After years of war exile,
a small creature sleeps here,
surrounded by little pipes,
beneath the wings of the majestic Zerynthia
who lives only in Italy.
And the birth guardian, a hermit figure,
passes silently with an oil lamp.
Black Magic
A few sullen old men, in the seventeenth century,
once decided we must name this thing ‘oxygen’;
because they thought this thing caused burning
(wish becomes cause for thinking),
but the substance was so powerful
that even this never-true word
gained an invisible weight
and came to sound fresh and inviting.
What if it had been pollen? The first matter?
Now it’s hard to think of this.
That’s how strong black magic is.
Eleme Dance! We Can Dance!
The Grand Silk Fiber Emperor,
as if childhood has returned and sticks again –
a free and happy forest wakes, exploring
among cinnamon trees.
Look at the hands: we can dance, we can dance,
red nougat, white steps,
if your friends don’t dance
they are no friends at all –
we pretend we left the world,
dancing from tree to tree
leaving your friends in human fog
looking at the hands again: we dance!
Eleme Dance! We can dance!
Everyone, look at your hands!
These are crowns, we can descend!
We flunked mimics class!
Eleme Dance! We can dance!
Zom zom. Door knocking.
These are crowns, we can descend!
We flunked mimics class!
And so it can be posted on my Turkish Substack, where I’ve gathered my Turkish friends. The downside of expatriating and re-expatriating is that you end up having to cater to widely scattered language collections.
Kind regards,
Martinus Benders