Tehran, Iran, Oct. 8
By Milad Fashtami - Trend:
A collection of poems by Dalga Khatinoglu, the head of Trend Agency's Iran News Service, has recently been published in Baku. The collection titled "Mirror" in the Azerbaijani.
Khatinoglu told Trend Agency that the first and last poems of the collection are influenced by Platonic views.
"However, most of the poems that I wrote in the past decade are fit in the modernism category," he said.
According to Khatinoglu, the book's poems are arranged in the chronological order.
"The atmosphere of the poems moves from shout to moan, then a bitter humor. A humor that satires a world crated by greedy men based on Descartes' logic and Kant's subject," he explained.
"Heidegger says that we have reached a point in which everywhere is dark and we can't see the road anymore. In my opinion that's only one part of the real catastrophe, since the human race has reached a point that when looking back, instead of seeing the story of their lives clearly, people just see some confusing images and hear some feverish sounds," Khatinoglu said.
"After the World War II and especially after the Cold War, fear of revolutions and world's explosion decreased, but an even scarier nightmare was born: the world didn't explode like a balloon, but its air is being released slowly with a whining noise," he added.
"Modernism's extremist attitude wiped out the traditional hero-based legends. But the modern legends took their place, and after Nietzsche, especially after the World War II, these logic-based legends also lost their place. Now we know that logic is largely under the influence of our subconscious. Fortunately, we haven't had much control over our subconscious. It has been safe from our own harm and at least one aspect of our self remains natural," Khatinoglu said.
"We shouldn't have surrendered ourselves to our logic to this extent. Of course going back to traditions is also absurd. Traditions can nowadays only be used as a means to reach a goal. We shouldn't completely omit the traditions, but we should not turn them to a goal, either. Of course, if we still believe in any goal," he noted.
In regards to the process of creating a work of art, Khatinoglu believes that "Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the King manifests in the today's life just as much of Milan Kundera's Immortality or Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. So I don't believe that a work of art gets old. The actors of the world scene are still mostly like intellectual, but doubtful Hamlet or determined, but foolish Don Quixote".
To my son
You are so beautiful
That you leave my eyes no other choice
Wherever I turn my looks away from you
My eyes return to your face again
It's not a choice
My legs are beyond my control,
While you are the destination of all roads.
Just let go of them, love
Let go of the earth which is heavier than cannonball
And as hollow as a bubble.
Let go of the roads
Stretched on the back of the earth like whip marks.
Let go of the tunnels,
No light can you see even at their end.
Let go of the bridges, useless for traveling through the sky,
And connected to the land on each side.
Let go of the confused heavens
With bloody tears on the cheek of twilight.
Let go of that fortune star
That may have burned out a thousand light years ago
Though tonight, you still see its twinkling.
Lie beside me
Like roads stretched longer than man's life.
Hear my words -here you are-
Such sweet words that,
As they climb from my heart to into my mouth,
I just get tempted to swallow them back
Oh, your homesick eyes
Do not torment you, but they kill me.
Break your silence, say something
Speak endlessly
And do not stop the flow of dreams
Since one day - not so far way - you will find out
The life span of dreams as long as a bud's yawn,
Withers before reaching from heart to lips.
One day you will learn that
The heart is nothing, but a mass grave of untold cravings
You will learn that a lie is a truth in itself.
You are still a baby, and you forget
The dearest things that you lose
You will grow up- not so far away from now -
Then separating from even the most hated things will frighten you
With all of your tomorrows dedicated to the regret of your yesterdays.
Keep on flying above my head by dawn
Heaven be the roof of your room,
Peel the sun orange,
Squeeze the moon's lemon into your tea,
Take candy from the dew-soft clouds,
Or make mattresses and quilts from them-it doesn't matter-
Keep on flying above my head by dawn
Since morrow midnights
You will remain sleepless, confused
Trying to interpret the dreams of your sleeping state.
Keep on loving, keep on
Now a kiss cuts your pain
But, you will grow one day
And your pain will start from a kiss.
Fly free of any claim
Though, being claimless is the biggest claim itself.
All are children until death embraces them
Until seeing life's only truth,
Young and old children
So foolishly pretend to be grownups.
Learn to love
Learn that one and one always makes one
And subtracting one from two leaves nothing but zero.
Remain in love, my dear
And do not trade your wealth
For anything less than a kiss.
Remain in love, my dear
Since even an ideal life is nothing but a disaster
When you find out
That the final order always comes from the mouth of a gun
When you completely understand
That those suffering from hunger
Will never be fed
Unless they are fed up with their lives.
Remain in love, my dear
The earth is heavier than a cannonball
And lighter than a bubble with trembling eyes
Beauty lies in keeping on living deliberately.
My declining crescent does not frighten me
Since my resurrection is your full moon
The sands of my hourglass empty
At the same speed that yours fills
Don't think of life
One should just live one's life
We have nothing to do with the secret of the tulip's pain
Or the viola's hunched back
Or whether the lily truly sprang from Eve's tears
We have nothing to do with describing beauty
Being awed by a rose's immortality is enough for us
With a life as short as a yawn
Learn to love
And to recreate beauty.