Heidi Trautmann

210 - A last encounter with Fikret Demirağ
1/14/2011

 

By Heidi Trautmann

 

Fikret Demirağ spoke to us from a white wall in the Naci Talat House in Nicosia, to us, a group of friends, family and poets. We had come together to remember Fikret on his birthday,  January 10 and among us was Emine Demirağ, his wife. Her husband had died on November 28, 2010.

 

It was the last interview Ümit Inatçı, artist and poet, and Hakan Çakmak, TV man, were able to have with him, inviting him to talk about his life, the people he met and who influenced him, the events which occurred in the course of his life and which are often the background and the trigger for the poetry he wrote. He spoke about the development he himself went through as poet and the humanist he was and he showed us again the sense of humour he always had. A very important document of 40 minutes, a document about a peaceful man, a humanist, a teacher and a life time poet who not only wrote poems but encouraged other young poets, published several literature and art magazines where he published their work, but also a document about an important period of Cyprus.

 

Neşe Yaşın announced the poet friends who were to read poetry to honour Fikret, his wife and poetry as such. The row started with the youngest among them, Jenan Selçuk; then followed by Tamer Öncül, Ersin Taner, Mehmet Kansu and Arif Albayrak; the latter recited one of the poems I had used in my article when I had learnt about his death; for an article in a German newspaper I had also translated it into German as my personal appreciation of Fikret Demirağ’s poetry.

 

A book on the film was published in January 2011 by the Association of Turkish Cypriot Artists and Writers , also including essays by his colleagues, with the title InsanZamanMekan which means PeopleTimeSpace - Fikret Demirağ’in Anısına.

 

We will not forget him….

 

POEM FOR THE EPILOGUE

 

With the whispering breeze inside,

with the dripping of blood in my heart,

with the sound of the rotting seed, the breaking bough,

with the sound of the seed breaking open, the blooming bough,

in the garden of a distant town still

with the sound of a child picking grass beside its mother,

the decaying relationships amongst the fading days

the seeds humming deep in my heart

with the sound of a hope being grafted

 

I wrote and dedicated these poems to Man

 Also to time                                                                   

Nicosia, 21. 1. 1986





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