It Turns Out I Love - NAZIM HİKMET

Turns Out I Love

it's the year 62, March 28
i'm on the train from Prague to Berlin, sitting by the window

evening’s approaching

it turns out I love how the evening descends on the wet smoky plains like a weary bird

i don’t like comparing the descent of the evening to a weary bird

it turns out I love the earth

can one say I love the earth without ever attempting to plow it?

i didn’t plow the earth

it turns out this is the only Platonic love i've had

it turns out I love the river

whether it flows placidly like this, meandering between the slopes of European hills adorned with castles

or as it stretches straight as far as the eye can see

i know you cannot bathe in the same river even once

i know the river will bring new shimmers that you won’t see

i know our lives are slightly longer than a horse’s but much shorter than a crow’s

i know someone has been this blue before me

and I know someone else will be

someone has said all of these before a thousand times

and they will be said by someone else.
it turns out I love the sky

whether it’s sunny or cloudy

the same sky that Andrey gazed at on the Borodino battle field

i translated two volumes of War and Peace in jail

i hear voices

not from the sky but the courtyard

the guardians are beating someone up again
it turns out I love the trees

naked beeches near Moscow at Peredelkino in winter

i come by them, humble and kind

Russians regard beeches theirs as we regard poplars ours

poplars of İzmir

shedding their leaves

i am known as Çakıcı

whose lover is willowy

and I burn mansions of lords

i tied an embroidered linen hanky to a pine branch in the Ilgaz forest

in the year 920
it turns out I love the roads

asphalt

Vera at the wheel as we are traveling from Moscow to Crimea, Koktebel

Göktepe province, its real name

two of us in a small box

the world flowing on two sides, mute and distant

i've never been so close to anybody ever since

bandits stopped me climbing down from Bolu to Gerede on the red packed road
i was eighteen

nothing on the buckboard for them to take other than my life

and at eighteen life is the least valuable thing we have

i’d written this before

i’m trudging to Karagöz in a dark muddy street on a Ramadan night

a collapsible paper lantern in front

maybe nothing like this ever happened

i think of flowers for no reason

poppies, cacti and daffodils

i’d kissed Marika in İstanbul, Kadıköy, in a daffodil field

her mouth smelled of bitter almonds, i was seventeen

my heart fluttered so hard it flew into the clouds and out

it turns out i love flowers

comrades sent three red carnations to me in prison in 1948

that reminded me of stars

it turns out I love
i imagine snowfall

slow and mute flakes or a blizzard wave after wave

it turns out I love snowfall

and the sun as well

as it sets right now blurred in a jam of sour cherry

the sun sets in İstanbul like a colour postcard sometimes

but that’s not the way you paint it

it turns out I love the sea

and, oh, so deeply

but Aywazovski’s seas aside

it turns out I love the clouds

whether I’m under them or on top

whether they look like behemoths or white fluffy animals

i am reminded of moonlight, most languid, most deceitful, petit bourgeoise

it turns out i love

it turns out I love the rain

whether it falls on me like a net or my heart splatters on my windows

leaves me where I am, tangled in its nets

or cooped in a drop and goes on to travel to an unmapped land

it turns out I love the rain

but why did I discover all these loves on the train from Prague to Berlin

by the window

is it because I lit my sixth cigarette

it’s an old death for me

when I think in throes, of someone I left in Moscow

sandy of hair and blue of eyelash

in pitch dark rolls the train

it turns out I love pitch dark

sparks fly from the engine

it turns out I love the sparks

it turns out I love so many, I just realize as I turn sixty

on the train from Prague to Berlin, by the window

watching the world as if on a voyage of no return

Nazım Hikmet
Translation: Niran Elçi