A Spring Piece Left In The Middle

Taut, thick fingers punch

the teeth of my typewriter.

Three words are down on paper

                   in capitals:

SPRING

     SPRING

           SPRING…

And me — poet, proofreader,

the man who's forced to read

two thousand bad lines

  every day

     for two liras—

why,

   since spring

        has come, am I

            still sitting here

               like a ragged

                   black chair?

My head puts on its cap by itself,

    I fly out of the printer's,

       I'm on the street.

The lead dirt of the composing room

                      on my face,

seventy-five cents in my pocket.

                  SPRING IN THE AIR…

In the barbershops

    they're powdering

        the sallow cheeks

             of the pariah of Publishers Row.

And in the store windows

    three-color bookcovers

       flash like sunstruck mirrors.

But me,

I don't have even a book of ABC's

that lives on this street

and carries my name on its door!

But what the hell…

I don't look back,

the lead dirt of the composing room

                      on my face,

seventy-five cents in my pocket,

             SPRING IN THE AIR…

                 The piece got left in the middle.It rained and swamped the lines.But oh! what I would have written…The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page                             three-volume manuscriptwouldn't stare at the window of the kebab jointbut with his shining eyes would takethe Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm…The sea would start smelling sweet.Spring would rear up         like a sweating red mareand, leaping onto its bare back,                       I'd ride it              into the water.Then    my typewriter would follow me             every step of the way.I'd say:        "Oh, don't do it!        Leave me alone for an hour…"thenmy head-my hair failing out—         would shout into the distance:            "I AM IN LOVE…"                            

I'm twenty-seven,

she's seventeen.

"Blind Cupid,

lame Cupid,

both blind and lame Cupid

said, Love this girl,"

                      I was going to write;

                         I couldn't say it

                             but still can!

But if

      it rained,

if the lines I wrote got swamped,

if I have twenty-five cents left in my pocket,

                                    what the hell…

Hey, spring is here spring is here spring

                                  spring is here!

My blood is budding inside me!

                          20 and 21 April 1929

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)