Turgut Uyar was of the same generation of İkinci Yeni (Second New) poets as Sezai Karakoç, whom I previously mistranslated. Their movement’s voices functioned like a kind of mini-modernist revolution in Turkish poetry beginning in the 1950s or so, introducing imagism, more vernacular language and a kind of domestic intimacy to the tradition.
Uyar himself was from an Ankara military family and grew up in a suburb of Istanbul. He attended military school as his father had, and joined the army again in his father’s footsteps. His family suffered somewhat because his father had refused to join in the War of Independence in Ankara, choosing instead to stay with his family. Uyar claimed to see both sides of the argument.
As a public servant, he spent his early adult life moving around from post to post, serving both in the far east near Georgia and on the Black Sea coast, locations which inform and appear in his earliest work. He married young and had three daughters with his first wife Yezdan Şener, before divorcing her to remarry Tomris Uyar (nee Gedik), a prominent and influential writer and translator from Istanbul.
For Tomris it was also a second marriage, the first having ended soon after the tragic death of a child. She was admired by a number of other writers in their social circle, which caused quite a lot of insecurity and anxiety for Turgut at times. Yet they had a son and remained together until his death from cirrhosis in 1985.
In one of his better-known poems, this sense of anxiety in love comes to the fore. The self-knowledge that his attachment is ‘broken’ in no way lessens his attachment. If anything it reinforces his resolve – not to change how he feels or attempt to fix it – but to live within his flaws, perhaps out of habit, perhaps stubbornly, but mostly out of fear that fixing it would serve only to break it further.
Uyar accepts his brokenness, even revels in it, and at the same time accepts that perhaps he ought not to. Yet within this cracked exterior is a very pure emotion which he frantically wishes to preserve, that of the love he bears for his wife. She functions as the operating centre of his existence, wherein even time is silenced. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a relationship, but Tomris seems mostly to have tolerated it.
My Heart is a Broken Clock
Everyone thinks you are you
without even knowing that you aren’t really yourself,
aren’t really you.
As I pass by,
I would say,
when they ask me the time;
it is “her past her” o’clock.
No one understands what I mean.
They say, you never fixed that clock of yours.
They never ask whether I want to have it fixed.
My heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.
I can stop time in my heart,
because without you it passes,
and the hour hand resents the minute hand.
If this broken clock ever started working,
it would be the death of me.
You should know that if the hour hand passed the minute hand
my heart would give out.
So at least let’s leave it broken.
Because my heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.