Aron Aji is director of the literary translation MFA program at the University of Iowa and past president of the American Literary Translators Association. A native of Turkey, his translations include three book-length works by Bilge Karasu. Aji’s co-translation (with David Gramling) of Murathan Mungan’s Valor (Northwestern, 2021) received the 2020 Global Humanities Translation Prize. Aji’s translation of Ferid Edgu’s The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (NYRB) is forthcoming in 2022.
you come and go checking on those figs
your eyes scanning the eyelets among branches
you leave the slums of the city
the rain’s hand-pan roofs above the ruins
you come and go checking on those fi...
Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy/Unsplash
the human soul is a dark place, leviathan.
so much that my eyes begrudge the light.
I sense the dark upsurge. I can’t find a hole large enough, can’t liv...