Fish

A few years ago, at my mother’s request, I cleaned out my childhood closet. Amid the stacks of books and baskets of stuffed animals, I located a small purple diary; I jiggled the lock to pop it open and turned to a page at random. Skool was hard today, I had scrawled. I did not see any frends. Suddenly it all came back to me: the loneliness, but also the thrill at the lock’s promise of privacy as well as its fallibility. It was exhilarating, the possibility that someone might later intrude upon my lament and find there something that was of me but also not me—the imprint of a bad feeling that they themselves might recognize. Holding this minor relic from my past, I felt all this anew.

That sensation—the generative disturbance at encountering this emblem of concealment and companionship—returned to me when I read Birhan Keskin’s “Fish” in Öykü Tekten’s translation. At first I passed through the brief poem quickly, but then a hitch of apparent paradox at its heart sent me back to read more slowly: The final line testifies to a muteness the very fact of the expressive poem seems to negate. In this way, “Fish” makes explicit—and invites us to dwell in—a kind of contradiction at the heart of writing itself. “Writing is the destruction of every voice . . . that obliquity into which our subject flees,” Roland Barthes proposes in “The Death of the Author.” Abstracting experience, the word dessicates life, and lies in wait to be reanimated in encounter with another, the reader. In “Fish,” the stutter of the left margin—i, ah!, i—dramatizes the pain of this potent metamorphosis: a realization of the wound through which the i becomes, in the end, quite impersonal, pried open, shared.

— Claire Schwartz

(English follows the Turkish, below.)