This article is based on this dutch article of Martinus Benders
The Silver Chimney of Yücel
Today we continue with the great Turkish poet Can Yücel:
To the Beautiful One
Last night we lay alone
alone with your tiny hand
alone with your tiny hand and solitude
as bustling as Kandilli’s primary school
when the bells ring in your dreams
all the classroom doors swing wide open
the just classrooms
of air, sea, earth, dream, and labor.
Perhaps he’d learned — for fear of a raid, faithless, thrown into the current —
about Marx, about silver fish
from just those books
and maybe that’s why everything,
yes, that’s why it’s so full of light here…
You, my beautiful one who does not pluck flowers,
but gives them water —
and I, lean and shriveled,
I’m an old man by now
but with you, I was beautiful,
more beautiful even than flowers.
And I understood, I understood:
Even in its dreams,
labor cannot see the labor of dreams.
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Kandilli Primary School (Kandilli İlkokulu) refers to a primary school in the district of Kandilli in Istanbul. Kandilli is a historic, charming, and culturally rich part of the city, located on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. It is known for its old houses, narrow streets, sea vistas and — crucial in the context of the poem — an almost village-like atmosphere in the middle of the metropolis.
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Letter to My Friend Samaripa
Look, Samaripa,
that silver chimney!
How beautifully it has turned tin into lace!
And the sun shines upon it…
Its beard hangs in dangling tufts,
the smoke fans out like the edge of a roof in the wind,
and behind it, it blankets the pines
of the Seminary.
Not a chimney—
a censer!
And below, in the water warmed by that smoke,
bathes a girl, supple as chewing gum,
her buttocks rolling away in the foam
like the island of Chios…
Dear friend,
I so longed to see you again,
your scent lingers in my nose…
Oh yes, I wanted to ask you:
have you ever eaten lohuk?
I don’t even like sweets,
but that stuff—
divine!
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Lohuk is a traditional Turkish delicacy, soft and jellylike, often containing nuts or sweet syrup.
Chios is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, famous for its mastic trees, but in the imagination of Antiquity also tied to clarity, light, seafoam, and sensuality. According to certain mythological sources, Chios owes its name to Chione (the snow), daughter of the North Wind Boreas, evoking freshness and purity of skin. In another myth, Chios is the place where Dionysus was worshipped with wild festivals — Bacchanals bursting with wine, music, and bodily ecstasy.
When Yücel writes that the buttocks “roll away in the foam like Chios,” he conjures an image both of an island basking in the surf and of the female body as a landscape — undulating, soft, inviting. The foam here is not merely a realistic bathing detail but echoes the foam from which, as Hesiod tells us, Aphrodite was born. In doing so, Yücel imbues the image — whether consciously or not — with mythical eroticism: the birth of beauty itself.
The imagery is lightly erotic but never vulgar. It balances humor, longing, and admiration. Precisely through the metaphor of an island — something simultaneously untouchable and physically malleable — Yücel achieves a subtle depth in which desire and poetic imagination merge.
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My daughter Mavi is becoming quite the prodigy, and not because I’ve pressured her in any way. She gets nines and tens in school, but not because she’s overly studious — and the schooling there is genuinely much tougher than here. At thirteen, they were already reading Kafka, imagine trying that here. My theory has always been that if you as a parent don’t constantly project all sorts of things onto your children, they retain energy they’d otherwise have to spend fighting off those strange projections. From time to time, I try to stimulate her intellect by talking about poetry, philosophy, or politics. Now that I publish my weblog in Turkish too, she said, wow, you really got me thinking about what it means to ‘demonstrate’. She’s going to join a protest this Saturday in the small town where she lives — hopefully, things will remain calm there.
I have, occasionally, given her some Lion’s Mane, a fascinating mushroom known for its benefits to the brain. Not saying that’s why she’s brilliant, but perhaps it played a small role. The principal role, however, is very much her own.
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Selling a house turns out to be a more complicated process than I’d imagined. That’s partly because I had to file two separate declarations of inheritance with the land registry, and then register myself, which cost me €750 at the notary.
So these past few months we’ve been scraping by somewhat.
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If you enjoy reading my own poetry, I recommend subscribing to my translation substack, where I post my own poems daily in groups of six:
I use this substack to translate my work. It can have a high traffic volume. If you don’t like that, don’t sub.
By Martinus Benders Diary
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This bronze sculpture was invented by Leonardo Flowstate to accompany today’s post.