This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders: https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/de-vloekplaten-van-de-prinsessenkast
**The Curse Panels of the Princess Wardrobe**
A major downside of translating your own work is being constantly confronted with your own traumas. Of course, in Piranha, I had already referred to the bulk of literary criminals by abbreviations (because I didn’t want to make the same mistake as Brouwers), but still. Time and again, memories of those unpleasant people. And each time in a different language. There has to be a more effective way. And yes, I have figured out how, and no, I’m not going to spill the beans.
A new piece of dub poetry:
People healing with moths. The moon moth monastery. Will it ever come to be? The house hunt exhausts me. Ever since Veer and I traveled for two years, I’ve become somewhat weary of the chase. That constant online search for the next place to stay.
We’ve been in Mierlo for several years now, yet that exhaustion remains.
**The Curse Panels.** From my mother’s princess wardrobe. They had been sitting in my office for two years because I refused to risk my back. Women are taught to sell their beauty dearly when they marry, so my mother, on high heels, demanded a wardrobe that was nothing less than regal. A monstrous piece of furniture with cut mirrors and panels weighing over fifty kilos each.
A grotesque wardrobe. And my father’s cursing as he dragged it upstairs and assembled that demanding behemoth is still vivid in my memory. He swore the stars from the sky, and with every screw he tightened, her princess dream crumbled a little more.
But yes, that was how things were supposed to be. Pretty blonde girls get their own particle board Versailles.
The first thing I wanted to dismantle after my father died was that ghastly wardrobe that took up half the room. I managed to remove it, but I refused to haul those incredibly heavy panels down the stairs. I’m getting on in years, and I know the wardrobe curse.
“He threw out his back yesterday,” said Pietje when he and his companion didn’t show up again. Thanks to, yes, those curse panels. I had suggested sawing them in half first, but they thought that unnecessary.
I found Pietje through the neighborhood app. People who don’t have much; I give them a lot of free stuff. But the curse of the wardrobe makes no distinction between rich and poor, between well-meaning and greedy.
It takes whoever it chooses to take.
Two monstrous wardrobes have now been vanquished: my mother’s Versailles wardrobe and my father’s bureaucratic colossus, which swallowed half of his office space. Downstairs, there are still two hand-built cabinets from my grandfather—Pietje wanted those.
But in the attic stands my grandmother’s wardrobe. Another cursed one. Even Pietje refused.
“Call the thrift store,” he said, clutching his back.
Anyone looking for a beautiful antique wardrobe?
*
Two translated poems by the poet Refik Durbaş and one by Can Yucel:
**TO A WOMAN’S FACE IN CAPITALS**
In old, handwritten books, I searched
for a woman with velvet hair who treats
every place she enters as a capital letter,
her face half-tilted toward summer cinemas:
the other half adjusted for single men.
Is this woman a whip-wielder with a voice of street sounds
does she carry a train, small as a hand, in her décolleté
and does everyone think she’s a thief—
in books they call her a vamp,
some even claim she married a marten.
Inside her dwells the rusted bicycle of love,
wherever she goes, a letter flies from her face,
on silent, secret calendars
she now holds only an artificial rose,
from days when she rode by on her wooden horse.
Refik Durbaş – translation: Martinus Benders
**SUMMER**
Blood spurts from the earth. The summer
has arrived, in the mountains.
My sources have dried up.
On my face, the carnations have withered.
The days are long, my lust fertile.
The history of my darkness is now over.
On my head, the wind
from days of renewed light.
Summer has arrived. My heart
lies on the snow-white faces of girls
and between their long, slender legs
now rages a bird deluge.
Refik Durbaş – translation: Martinus Benders
**A EYE STONE IN MY HANDS**
A eye stone in my hands, my eyes empty I walked on,
how could I know that one drop would be such a sea.
I stood amazed as it opened before me like a blue oracle,
apparently, a Cretan death awaited me; like a fisherman’s fuse
my youth of thirty sticks would explode in your hands.
Perhaps in three days, three heavens, three fathoms deep
I–the tree that blooms in the color of bottle glass
would shatter like unbreakable glass.
Every time I threatened to drown, the light smelled of seaweed,
in the morning cafés, dried fish screamed
and those sea chauffeurs slicing through my waves
slept aboard ships they sailed in their dreams,
dozing on marble tables.
Was I driftwood from an Ottoman disaster
floating on Captain İslâm’s wooden leg,
towards other planks, towards other people,
the republic was an octopus, I swam ink-black,
how could I know that fear could also be an epic,
I paled when April touched the darkness, and loneliness bore
or was Moby Dick the mountain where the first human was born and died.
Every time I took a breath, warships frothed from the water,
bells rang in my ears, dolphins competed
red blood cells, dolmuş buses, and wind mussels.
I said: like the world, there are no clouds in the world.
A eye stone in my hands, my eyes empty I walked on.
How could I know that a song would be such a Veysel?
I set course, a dead-end street closing in the sea.
Can Yücel – translation: Martinus Benders