The pre-islamic Turks practised a Shamanistic religion; Sky-father and Earth-mother, protective spirits and so on. While the Turkish TV show Destan (“Epic”) is fictionalised and takes a bunch of liberties, the writers make an effort to bring in archaic vocabulary and real history. What’s known about it, anyway. It was a long time ago.
Episode 27 from last week, the season finale, features a wedding (if you can’t guess which two characters are married off, then of course the discussion below has spoilers). There is a bunch of really interesting flowery poetic language in the extended wedding ceremony, and some of it is taken from actual historical sources. Lets take a look!
Theres a lot about fire here. Lets start with Ulu Kam Açuray (the “Grand Shaman”) talking to the flames. Machine-generated Turkish subtitles:
1:16:47 Kutsal ateş. Arı ateş. Bütün ruhları arı kıl.
1:16:55 Gecenin baharı ateş. Karanlıkları harlı kıl.
In English, via Google Translate, this has some funny translation errors:
Holy fire. Bee shoot. Purify all souls.
The spring of the night is fire. Darken the darkness.
The first mistranslation, “bee shoot” reminds me of this quote (youtube link) from Homer Simpson when told to leave Mr Burns’ doorstep:
Or what, you’ll release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?
But of course thats not what Açuray meant. “Arı” (noun) is indeed the modern word for “bee”, but here she’s using the adjective meaning “pure”, which Google has correctly interpreted when it’s repeated at the end of the first line. “Kılmak” is the verb “to render”, so “kıl” is an imperative; she’s commanding the fire.
While “bahar” does mean “spring”, I think an alternative translation of “bahar” = “flower” fits better. A native speaker might not agree, I dunno for sure.
Finally while “Darken the darkness” is gloriously edgy, seslisozluk.net gives us a better transation of “harlı” = “furiously burn”.
Put it all together, and a better translation could be:
Holy Fire, pure Fire: cleanse our souls.
Night’s flower, Fire: scour away the darkness.
She very much sounds to me like Melisandre from Game of Thrones here, but luckily she doesn’t burn anyone.
Keep the same video running, and Akkız and Batuga show up for some pre-wedding marriage counseling (machine-generated Turkish subtitles):
1:17:10 Ateşle... ...su gibi... ...hava gibi...
1:17:15 ...Gök Tengri'nin bize armağanıdır. Kişi yüreği ihtiyaç duyduğunda...
1:17:23 ...ateşin başına gelmeyi bilmelidir.
English subtitles, via Google Translate, are:
With fire... ...like water... ...like air... ...It is Gök Tengri's gift to us. When one's heart needs it... ...must know how to handle a fire.
However, if you listen to Açuray I think it’s pretty clear the speech recognition software has made an error here; sounds to me like she says “Ateş de” (“So, fire…”) rather than “Ateşle” (“With fire…”).
Also, the translation of the final line gets a bit mangled since it’s a half-sentence by itself, but if you delete the ellipses in Google Translate, letting it do the whole sentence at once, it does a better job. Putting it all together:
Fire, like water, like air, is a gift from Gök Tengri. A person should know how to come to the fire when his heart needs it.
Later, when the happy couple and their well-wishers jump over the fire, they are invoking similar mystical properties of the flames. Danış Ata introduces the fire-jumping scene (youtube link) like this:
1:40:04 Kalabalık kenara çekilsin. Çekilsin ki...
1:40:09 ...ıduk sahipleri ateşin üzerinden atlasın. Atladıkları ateş...
1:40:17 ...kutlu gelsin, içlerini sağaltsın.
English subtitles (my edits of Google Translate) are as follows:
Let the crowd step aside. Pull back to let the owners of the Iduk jump over the fire. May the fire bless them, let it heal them.
“Kalabalık” (“crowd”) is an interesting word. At first I assumed it had the word for “fish” (“balık”) there at the end. This would make a wonderful visual image of a crowd as a teeming school of fish, but alas; nisanyansozluk.com reports that “Kalabalık” comes straight from the Arabic word “ġalaba(t) (غلبة)” meaning "superiority, multitude, crowd”. Aww, thats nowhere near as fun.
The next word that Google Translate stumbles over is “ıduk”, which seems to be a pretty obscure one. Vikisözlük (the Turkish version of Wiktionary) gives us the definition though (via Google Translate):
A horse that is released as a ride to a protective spirit in Shamanist Turks, is not ridden, is left empty. It is part of the root "id-" meaning to release, to send, and it must have taken the meaning of "blessed, holy" very early, perhaps during the Huns period.
Ahah! So there we have the explanation for the earlier sacrifices (youtube link). For 40 days, “Iduks” were to be sacrificed, consisting of unmilked, unsheared sheep/goats; and horses that have never been ridden. Of course this allows the spirits to take what they need. Note the horse is released alive, but the sheep and goat are sacrificed, with the Grey Wolf looking on (more on him in a future post).
There are a couple of lines that Akkız and Batuga speak together in unison. One of them, …
1:18:30 Ya birlikte yaşarız ya birlikte ölürüz.
…I’ve chosen as the title of this post, as a very normal Destan-type sentiment, that suits the pair of them nicely as a wedding sentiment.
The most interesting line is this; when asked “how long will your marriage last?”, they reply together (Youtube link) (machine-generated Turkish subtitles):
Yağız yel kızıl bakır oluncaya
ateşten yeşil çiçek çıkıncaya kadar.
Which Google translates as:
Until the rainy wind turns red copper
and green flowers emerge from the fire.
Sounds pretty, but does it make sense? The first unusual word “yağız”, Google has obviously confused with “yağış”, which does mean rain or precipitation. “Yel” does mean “wind”, so Google naturally assumes they are talking about the weather. But watch Batuga’s mouth carefully while he talks, and hes clearly saying “yer” not “yel”. Another speech recognition error (it would be tricky for the robot though, if it can’t read lips but has to pick out words from two simultaneous speakers), causing Google to make a translation error.
We are on the right track though. A bit of googling, and we find this fascinating quote from an ancient book, the Kutadgu Bilig.
Yaġız yir baúır bolmaġınça úızıl
Ya otta çiçek önmeginçe yaşıl
If the Turkish looks weird here, thats because it is; its an 11th century Turkic language called Karakhanid (transliterated into Latin letters from the original Arabic script), as appears in this paper by one Faruk Öztürk. He gives a modern Turkish translation, …
Kara toprak kızıl bakır oluncaya kadar,
ateşten yeşil çiçek çıkıncaya kadar.
…which I ran through Google:
Until the black earth turns red copper,
until green flowers emerge from the fire.
Another pretty wedding sentiment.
As written in the Kutadgu Bilig, the language tries to follow a particular Arabic poetic metre (you can read more about it at wikipedia). The phrase “Yaġız yir” fits nicely into that metre, and is used a lot throughout the work.
Quite frankly, its following these trails of knowledge down strange rabbit-holes through wikipedia and beyond that makes me truly glad I live in the age of a global internet. What I don’t know is how much of this archaic language is taught in Turkish schools, or how much would be easily understood by the target audience of Destan. Do they read the Kutadgu Bilig the way we might read Beowulf or Chaucer? Watching this online is a damn good way to be exposed to some ancient poetry though.
That phrase “kara toprak”? The “black earth” in that last translation? Thats something that comes up again and again in Turkish culture, but I’ll need a whole post to even begin to do it justice. *Update* That post is here:
You can watch Destan for free on ATV’s Youtube channel. First episode is here. Pick a language for subtitles, then select “auto-translate” to English if needed.