MASA DA MASAYMIŞ HA	WHAT A TABLE WAS THE TABLE
Adam yaşama sevinci içinde Masaya anahtarlarını koydu Bakır kâseye çiçekleri koydu Sütünü yumurtasını koydu Pencereden gelen ışığı koydu Bisiklet sesini çıkrık sesini Ekmeğin havanın yumuşaklığını koydu Adam masaya Aklında olup bitenleri koydu Ne yapmak istiyordu hayatta İşte onu koydu Kimi seviyordu kimi sevmiyordu Adam masaya onları da koydu Üç kere üç dokuz ederdi Adam koydu masaya dokuzu Pencere yanındaydı gökyüzü yanında Uzandı masaya sonsuzu koydu Bir bira içmek istiyordu kaç gündür Masaya biranın dökülüşünü koydu Uykusunu koydu uyanıklığını koydu Tokluğunu açlığını koydu.	A man in his joy for life On the table his keys he put In a copper bowl the flowers he put His milk his egg he put From the window coming the light he put Bicycle sound spinning-wheel sound Of bread of air the softness he put The man on the table Of his mind the startings and stoppings he put What he had wanted to do in life See how he put it Whom he had loved whom he had not loved The man on the table them too he put Three times three nine they made The man put on the table nine It was beside the window beside the sky He reached out on the table infinity he put To drink a beer he had wanted how many days On the table the pouring of the beer he put His sleep he put his waking he put His fulness his hunger he put.
Masa da masaymış ha Bana mısın demedi bu kadar yüke Bir iki sallandı durdu Adam ha babam koyuyordu.	What a table was the table Are you for me it did not say to this much burden Once or twice it shook and stopped How the man had been putting it on.
Edip Cansever, 1954

The translation here is quite literal. There is a smoother English translation, by George Messo. Another blog entry by him gives a (non-intrinsic) reason to be interested in the poem: the Turkish Education Ministry removed lines 18 and 19—the ones mentioning beer—from a high-school poetry textbook.

The translation above tries to preserve even Cansever's word order, if this does not do too much violence to comprehension. But I may be rather tolerant of such violence, having enjoyed Chapman's Homer. Cansever uses no punctuation, but for two periods. The imagery is fantastic. It might be appropriate for an English version to present these images in the same order as the Turkish, even if the English thus becomes strange.

Turkish has no articles, whether definite (“the”) or indefinite (“a(n)”). Turkish also has no gender. But articles and gender are unavoidable in English. These remove some ambiguity that exists in the Turkish. The English here begins with ‘a man” and continues with “the man”; but there is no corresponding transition in Turkish. On line 16, one does not know from the Turkish whether it the man or the table that was beside the window and sky.

The personification of the table in the antepenultimate line may be more pronounced in English, since the Turkish phrase “are you for me he/she/it did not say” is idiomatic.

On Youtube, the poem is featured in several “videos”, including:

• a simple recitation (by Mehmet Erçen);
• a recitation (starting after two minutes) in the midst of music (by Mehmet Önder).