Atölye

The Studio

The book says as much in two pages. This page is longer, because some of it can only be shown.

Yöntem The method

A poem begins before English — in something that happened. What I bring to the Turkish is the experience, the images, the shape the poem needs to have, and a spine of English lines I have no intention of keeping.

Several language models are involved, and the point is that they do not agree. One proposes a line. Another says it is fluent and dead. A third reads it back to me and hears something I did not intend. A fourth says a construction is correct and that nobody would say it.

I am not reading Turkish. I am reading mediated readings of Turkish, and the disagreement between them is the part I can use. Where they agree I learn nothing. Where they diverge, a decision is waiting.

Then I choose. I reject far more than I keep. I did not write every line in this book, and I was not a passenger in it either. I decided what the poem was for. After that I am the referee: I do not play, and nothing counts until I say it counts.

Bir sonun tarihi The history of one ending

Here is what the ending of Bent went through. Four materially different directions survive in the record. The full history does not, and I am not going to invent a number for it.

1	Belki de sevgi, birini bırakıp gitmek değildir. Çağrılmadığın halde gitmemeyi bilmektir.	Perhaps love is not leaving someone. It is knowing not to go when you were not called.	12
2	Suyun önüne duvar örülünce, akmaktan vazgeçmediğini öğrendim. Yalnızca başka bir yol bulduğunu.	When a wall went up before the water, I learned it does not stop flowing. It only finds another way.	11
3	Yolumu değiştirdim. Yönümü değil.	I changed my road. Not my direction.	5
4	Bent hâlâ duruyordu. Su da.	The dam was still standing. So was the water.	5

Twelve words to five.

Tutulan bir dize A line held back

The third candidate was refused. Six poems later it became the turn of Kıble:

Yolumu değiştirdim.
Yönümü değil.

It was not discarded. It was held until a poem could carry it — and it inverts a line from the first poem in the book. That is the argument for keeping the failures: they explain the authorship better than the finished poems do.

On altı deneme Sixteen takes

Some of the poems have become songs. The same thing happens there, and it is easier to count: Gümüş Çanlar took sixteen. I kept the fifteenth.

Almost none of them were bad. That is the part worth saying. Most were songs I would happily listen to, and the work was not finding a good one — it was saying no to good ones that were not this one.

What I was after was a song you could fall asleep to at low volume and still find intense at high. Both at once — which is the poem’s own problem. He wants to put her to sleep: sonra seni öylece uyutmak istiyorum, öyle derin, öyle huzurlu. Then her eyes will not let him: onlar uyutmuyor beni. The song had to do both of the things the poem does.

It also had to descend, and a descent needs steps. That is why the drums had to go without being replaced. A kit puts a floor under the volume — you cannot play one quietly enough to sleep through — but something still had to keep time. So the pulse comes from a place you would not call percussion: fingers on the body of the guitar, on two and four.

Every correction turned out to be a subtraction. What I sent back after the first round was this:

These are great but sound a little more Take That than Extreme. — from the working notes

So: no drums. Then no bass. Then harmonies only in the choruses. Then no harmonies at all until a minute in — I had gone and timed More Than Words to check, and that is when the second voice arrives in it. The last note I sent said too much music and drums; the vocals were great, and asked for one acoustic guitar, one or two acoustic basses, one cello. Keep the bells.

Here are three of the sixteen, in order. They are not failures and there is nothing wrong with them.

What survives is not a setting of the poem. The chorus lifts lines out of the middle, and one of them stops being a line at all — gümüş bir ses is its own line on the page, and in the song it becomes a second voice answering the first. The line it answers is karanlığın içinde birbirlerine cevap veriyorlar. Two voices answering each other in the dark, in a chorus about two bells doing the same.

At the end the second voice goes first. (Sesini duyuyorum) is sung before the lead reaches it — the answer arriving from the place the poem says he cannot go. I did not plan that. I recognised it and stopped.

The voice is not mine. Neither is the cello. The sixteen were.

Dönüşüm Transformation

The series is called Dönüşüm. I drew this in the manner of Escher, and building it taught me something I had not expected: the transformations only read if every shape is allowed to be completely itself first. Hurry between them and you get a handsome blur that is neither.

The two languages are held apart for the same reason.

There is a further problem the strip makes visible. It closes — the last shape returns to the ink the first was drawn in. Ask where Kuzgun begins and the method ends and you get the same shape: a circular reference.

I know how these poems were made.
I am less certain what that makes me.