Hello Goodbye

Elegy for Satan My dog’s name was Satan. “Was” has nothing to do with his name — nothing happened to his name. And he wasn’t anything like his name. Devils are cruel: the cruel are sly and lie, but they aren’t smart. My dog was smart. I helped to kill my dog a little, too: I didn’t know how to take care of him. If you can’t care for it,                 don’t even plant a tree. A tree that dries up in your hands becomes a curse. “A person learns to swim in water”, you say. True. But if you drown, you drown alone. Mornings now I wake up and listen — no one scratching at my door. I feel like crying. I’m ashamed I can’t cry. He was like a person. Most animals are like people —                 and like good people, too. Under the command of friendship, his thick neck was hair-thin.                 His freedom was in his teeth and legs, his politesse in his long bushy tail. We used to miss each other. He would speak of the gravest matters: of hunger, of being full, of love. But he didn’t know longing for home. That’s on my head. When the poet went to heaven,                 he said: “Ah, but my country...” He died the way everyone dies whether human, animal, or plant — on a bed or on the ground, in the air or in water, suddenly, waiting, or asleep — the way everyone dies, the way I’m going to die, the way we’re going to die... Today it’s ninety-eight in the shade. I gaze at the forest from the balcony: tall slender pines rise deep red against the steel-blue sky. The people sweating, the dogs’ tongues hanging out, they’re all headed for the lake to swim. Leaving their heavy bodies on the shore, they’ll know the happiness of fish. Nâzım Hikmet English translation by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk