In the translator’s note, Aron Aji — director of MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa — gives some insights on his methodology and experience as both a reader and translator of Efe Duyan’s The Behavior of Words (White Pine Press, 2023). “Given the infamous incommensurability of English and Turkish grammars, the process often required forcing the natural Turkish syntax … on the English in order to foreground the physical direction of the verse and the gradual accretion of meaning.”
I thought it would be cute, as an Armenian, to read and review the work of a Turkish poet who I know to be a gentleman in every respectable sense. Reading the introduction, learning about (and later delighting in) formal structures I’d never seen before, I felt my background come to foreground. If you are like me, do not despair: these poems delight in your existence.
Aji’s assessment of Duyan’s work makes me thirsty to see the originals — Duyan’s poems are rife with wordplay and nuance. He employs anaphora with precision within his stanzas, causing them to come together like kintsugi — gold, filling in cracks you didn’t realize he left in the narrative and making the poems stronger for it.
Ordinarily, I read poetry collections quickly. I let each poem sit on its own while consuming the collection as a single unit. I wasn’t able to do that with The Behavior of Words. Each poem required focus. The words within this book are in stronger and more complex relationships with one another than I think I’ve ever seen, each one leaning on another, reaching across a stanza, across a poem to link with a partner. It is a lacework of language that makes it difficult to excerpt.
Because the poems are hard to excerpt, I’ve taken some favorite lines out of context: From “To Each Other”: “The lactic acid collecting in our patience.” From “Morning Mythology”: “the gods / have planted their jaws at road ends / they drink our sweat at breakfast.” From “Away From The World”: “if asked as a child you would’ve said / all the decisions you’ll make / are the mouthfuls of bites / you take out of an apple.”
Duyan’s poems of falling in love twist with longing and delight and are documented so precisely, with unexpected sensory metaphor that his sadder love poems, his poems of the human condition and his poems of observation stand in relief against them. Here’s a moment from one of his love poems, “Maybe Except For Other Women,” “our proud silence / is a wild animal / holding its breath / as if pouncing upon a bird / it will pounce upon / everything crossing my mind / that is not you.”
Throughout this book there is repeated imagery of waves and seas, space and stars, and sand. Natural elements play heavily with an exploration of domesticity. Then, keeping the natural world in the imagery, the narrative shifts for the final quarter to more political tones which include jail, human rights activists and the military.
I can’t explain how it works, but the final poems add a weight to the collection that makes it close nicely and still stick in your head.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2023 issues.