Two Poems by Selîm Temo

Translator’s Note:

My first experience of Temo’s poetry was auditory rather than textual. Long before I ever sought to translate him, I heard him recite “Keştiya Bayê” (The Airship) in a track on Soundcloud. Even without the text before me, his voice carried a rhythm and music that stayed with me.

The first poem I decided to translate was “i have a friend.” In Kurdish, “heval” means friend, but, in a political context, it also means comrade. Kurdish fighters and militants have long used this term for one another; the word conveys solidarity, shared risk, and a bond built through common struggle. This poem circles around one unnamed friend, who continually outgrows and transcends individual personhood; in translating it, I had to decide how much of that political and historical charge the poem was leaning on. The friend shifts from bird to stone to valley to mountain to tree. Those images reflect Kurdish values, where land isn’t something a person owns. One is inseparable from land; it’s something that holds them the way they hold it.

In the third stanza, “Peyman” is the Rojhelati singer and YPJ fighter Viyan Peyman who was martyred in 2014 while defending Kobanî against ISIS. The regret implied in the line “I did not fight in Kobanî, the voice of Peyman never rose to my ears,” reflects the speaker’s admission to never having had to confront what Peyman herself confronted.

The second poem, “Dilo,” demanded something different from me. Here, the narrator is a horse and the imagery is intensely physical: the horse’s bit “sends out flames through” the rider’s teeth,” and the fog that the rider, Reşîd Axa, dissolves into is described as “a palm.” The voices of horse and rider intertwine until their identities blur. In the line “he tells me or perhaps himself,” Reşîd Axa openly acknowledges that merging. My task, as translator, was to preserve this synergy, while maintaining clarity of purpose. The closing line, “no one has kept the memory of a pennyroyal,” distills the poem’s essence: as something delicate, nearly lost beneath everything else clamoring to be remembered.

—Rojin Shekh Hamo

i have a friend
For the martyrs of Qaladiza

i have a friend, resembling a crane’s shadow harboring dead serpents inside his chest
he halts his car by the road
and greets the canyons
when April’s name is uttered by chance
a few quills shudder in his stead
then you come upon him welcoming fleeting cascades
in the Bilîs Valley, on the way to Pilur.

i have a friend, resembling icy pebbles
his gaze burns crimson upon meeting the amber seas of grain
is he a breeze since his voice rings on
disguised as a grasshopper, he passes through the checkpoints
as though a sanctuary dwelling in its soil
kneeling whenever a mountain looms in sight
“hello and a hundred more hellos, to you,” he salutes.

i have a friend, resembling turtle doves
free yet captive
pure yet defiled
when he holds the slender stem of the glass,
“what purpose do i bear, what am i?” he asks
“i did not fight in Kobanî
the voice of Peyman never rose to my ears,”
then he rises taking the ashes into his arms.

i have a friend, in the likeness of willows
toes dipped in water, leaves forever bowing down
no one dares to utter mourning out of fear
suddenly, he bursts into tears
“what haunts you, why is solace beyond you?” i ask
he answers, “i was nurtured at the hands of keeners,
inside their boundless skirts.”

*

Dilo

i was not found in many a dwelling, yet saw myself in all traces
the apocalypse has arrived and every instrument pleads with the violin
the deep caves swelled with the echo, the rain withered along with the wind

at the mouth of a deep canyon we stand naked like a rose half-sprung
he tells me or perhaps himself, “children perish before death ever does
at the casket made of a cradle you look for a merciful god.”

Reşîd Axa dissolves into fog at a turning moment, his mouthpiece beholding itself
a spring is born between his eyebrows, salt in his hands
underneath his skin is another face; the bit sends out flames through my teeth
across plains resembling a palm, he has now a homeland of grief.

at the crossroads all four directions are called future
i knew only the first steps, so i strayed into the winding bazaars
in the windswept meadows, i entwined my heart with the mare of secrets
so here i am, the hill is my voice and the void, a heart wrought in trails
now i know, no one has kept the memory of a pennyroyal.