Daha önce Türkçe yayımlanmış bir yazının İngilizcesi. Geçen yıl bu aralar yazılmış olan Türkçe versiyonu buradan okunabilir. Bu yazı aynı zamanda Gazete Duvar'da da yayımlanmıştı. Çeviriyi Çanco'daki bir dergi için yaptım. Editörün düzeltmelerinden sonra yazıda yapılan değişiklikleri uygulayacağım.
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The fools enjoy their careless pleasure,
But their way is dark and leads to danger.
I have no fear for the peril of my own person,
But only lest the chariot of my lord should be dashed.
I hurried about your chariot in attendance,
Leading you in the tracks of the kings of old.
But the Fragrant One refused to examine my true feelings:
He lent ear, instead, to slander, and raged against me.
What do you think about these verses? I wrote this poem. Did you find my words too grumpy, too morbid or too melancholic? What else do you expect from a man who has been treated unfairly, dismissed from the palace and excommunicated from his beloved city? I was a civil servant who could not make his advice heard by the emperor, could not stop his country’s fall into the pieces despite all his sincere efforts; tell me if I have no right to complain, who has? All I can do now is whine and shine in the dusty pages of the ancient books, with the voice which flows over the thousands of years of history like the water falling down the dark cliff and creates cloudy rainbows once in a while. Read my story and agree with me, read and see the injustice fell upon my feeble shoulders, read and witness the misery I had to bear because of the shortsightedness of my contemporary scholars.
I couldn’t do it, couldn’t achieve what I had to. Neither I convinced the emperor about the enemy’s real intentions nor did I die before I had seen that I was right. The latter one was a wishful demand as if not knowing would mitigate my suffering. 2,296 years passed since I gave my last breath but the history of humankind taught me one important lesson over so many years of waiting. History doesn’t have a choice other than repeating itself. Humans are the same, their strengths and weaknesses are the same, their ambitions and lusts are the same, their desire to be free and the fear of freedom are the same. On top of that, they easily forget what destroyed their fathers, their fathers’ fathers… Then why should someone expect to see a different course of history which is made and written by the same humans?
Who am I? Didn’t you recognize me from my bemoaning voice? I am the poet Qu Yuan, the one whom you know as loyal and sincere. I lived in the Chu State of Zhou Dynasty. I wrote poems while I also did my counseling duties in the palace. I had no teacher other than truth and beauty. I spent all my energy not for selfish interests of the powerful merchants, not for the flatters of lackeys walking in the dim corridors of the palace, not for gossipers of emperor’s red chamber; but only and only for the happiness of our emperor Huai and the people who live in the lands that he rules.
But what happened? They haven’t listened to my words. I told them not to trust Qin Dynasty. I told them their evil intention is as clear as the rainwater accumulated in the rice paddies. All they wanted was to weaken our country and invade it, to swallow all the small dynasties around and create the biggest empire ever. No one paid attention to my warnings. Instead of me, the emperor gave his ears to the toadies of the palace, opened all the gates to the Qin Dynasty, sent messages of peace and love via his messengers, let the pillars of the Chu State rotten slowly in the hands of foreign diplomats and envoys.
Then what happened? The emperor Huai passed away, without witnessing how his wrong decisions brought his empire to its collapse. Qingxiang replaced him and appointed Zilan as the prime minister. However, Zilan wasn’t better than the previous one. The emperor believed everything that Zilan said and eventually got convinced that I am the one who betrayed the country. According to his malicious lies; I was against the peace treaties with Qin Dynasty and I didn’t really care for the national security. Such a big slander, such an ugly attempt of defamation; only the righteous ones can be exposed to these kinds of accusations and only time could be the judge to acquit me. After these false accusations, my exile years began. I was sent to the village where I was born and raised, the village located at the south of the river Yangtze.
Once you return your childhood home, you also return your inner self; the self that you have been neglecting for a long time due to the quasi-important affairs of the outer world. As a man who got treated unfairly, accused of betrayal and stripped of all his authority; I did what I could do the best as a man of letters: I dedicated my time to poetry, to the words and the magical aura created by the verses. Because I knew that in the bosom of literature, injustice and immortality emerge at the same time. This is why I searched for the loyalty in the caring hands of the poems, the very same loyalty which is made unavailable to me in the dark rooms of the emperor’s palace.
I wrote for many years; with pain, with ambition, with passion, with melancholy and impatience, with love and envy. Sometimes I felt ashamed of myself. Sometimes I daydreamed that time would reveal the accuracy of my warnings and how I would be feeling if all come true at the end. I felt the guilt in the deepest ends of my nerves, felt sadness in the smallest drops of my blood. The desire of getting acquitted and the desire of not being right for the sake of my country clashed inside the darkest tissues of my brain millions of times. Yes, I truly wanted them to recognize me as a man of truth but at the same time, I did not want my predictions came true. This burning paradox permeated into my words, bit my conscience like a poisonous snake. I was aware, yes, the poison was in the wound and the wound would never be healed. History, in the past, present and future, was never more than the sum of the recurring wounds. The contradictions gnawed the tissues of my brain, left me breathless most of the time. I was like the dark water well in Xiangluping. I had the power to swallow the sun but I did not have the strength to retain it in my heart. As a poet who bends to the water to see both the melting silhouette of his face and the scorpions fed by the inner conflict behind that disfigured image, I knew my destiny quite well. This is why I called my poem Li Sao (Encountering Sorrow) and I dedicated all my days and nights to this epic work. I poured my sorrow into the pages. The sizzling sound made by the brush on paper became my unheard voice, then my flesh, then my consciousness.
Unfortunately, I lived long enough to see that I was right. As if it wasn’t enough that I have been suffering all this time, I also had to witness how my people had been massacred. Twenty-eight years after the beginning of my exile, Qin Dynasty attacked us. They destroyed the villages, demolished the houses, burned the harvests. The state of Chu and the charlatans residing in the palace were sent to the oblivion of the history, only not to return again. And I, with no other choice, realized how much I was right to worry about the future of my country. Feeling overburdened and depressed under the red blood of the innocent victims of my country, I released my despaired and weakened body into the cool waters of the river Milou.
While I was sinking deep into the muddy waters, the villagers in their boats rushed to save my life, which was already ruined with despair a long time ago. They ripped the glimmering surface of the river with their hands, their arms, their bodies but it was too late. Their love and respect for the poet were not sufficient to keep the body of the poet with them. I let my soul flow with the current, race with the fish, thus I liberated it by leaving thousands of verses behind. I gave my last lesson to the humanity by my death. I lived a life loyal to his people and his country, I finished it without deviating an inch from the same noble line.
After my death, new traditions sprouted among the villages. In order to save my corpse from being food to the fish, they threw small balls of glutinous rice into the river. Some declared me as the God of Water and some added my name to the list of immortals. At the anniversary of my death, on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, they drank realgar wine (雄黃酒). They made zongzi (粽子) by stuffing glutinous rice with red beans, minced meat, sugar, and nuts, wrapping it with the leaves of the bamboo tree and cooking it on the steam for a long time. The wealthy and influential residents of the cities distributed zongzi to people on the streets. On the days when the coolness of spring turns into the heat of summer, young people living near the rivers got on the colorful boats with dragon heads and competed against each other. Every year they tried once more to save the poet and every year once more they failed. They mentioned my name less and less as the metaphors created to commemorate my life overcame the sorrowful experiences behind. I might sound a bit disgruntled but actually, I am not. I am now living in the colorful decorations of those dragon boats, in the realgar wine that you pour into the glass. I live in the soft texture and the sweet taste of the zongzi that you are about to take a bite soon. I live in the crowds of people who take the opportunity of three days holiday* and fill the parks of the cities. I live in the minds of the children who learn how to respect their parents and show it on important days.
As I have started with verses, let me also finish by verses. Agree or not, everything in this life turns into the ashes when they are exposed to the fire of time. Imagine how a piece of paper put next to a fire curls and gets smaller. Our lives and our experiences are the same, they too get creased, curls and turns into insignificant bits once they become part of the orbit of time. But poetry; the broken souls which turned into letters, the dreams which were pinned on the clouds, the desires that melted between the words like the sugar in a watermelon, the eyes that resemble the windows of abandoned houses; they are permanent in the mind of humanity. Am I not the living proof of this? Therefore, I should say my last words. Do not be like the emperor who does not value loyalty and wisdom, learn something from my forever-young words and give a lesson to those who will come after you.
How well I know that loyalty brings disaster;
Yet I will endure: I cannot give it up.
I called on the ninefold heaven to be my witness,
And all for the sake of the Fair One, and no other.
There once was a time when he spoke with me in frankness;
But then he repented and was of another mind.
I do not care, on my own count, about this divorcement,
But it grieves me to find the Fair One so inconstant.**
* In 2018, Dragon Boat Festival will be celebrated for three days from June 16th to June 18th.
** The verses used in the article belongs to the poet Qu Yuan (340 BC - 278 BC), taken from his epic poem “Encountering Sorrow” (離騷), translated by David Hawkes. Source: Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volume I: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, edited by Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press, 1965)
Ali Rıza Arıcan – 20. 05. 2018
