Oil Wrestlers by Nazmi Ağıl

Grease Wrestling, detail, by Cemal Tollu (Turkey, 1899-1968). Exact date unknown.

Oil Wrestlers
 
Art   is  to  resist time   they say
Ozymandias, but don’t   believe
in  them, when    the  paint   has
turned   pale, when  the   canvas
got  worn  out, and  the   marble
fragmented  in  a  rough enough
shake,  neither  Keats’s urn will
remain, nor  the   three  hunters
in   Bruegel’s  picture in  whom
Berryman   invests   hopes,  but
if in case of  a disaster  there  is
a   tiny little chance to  survive:
 
in   Cemal  Tollu’s  picture,  the
two wrestlers, who   look   as  if
they’ve   swallowed  two  anvils
in  place  of  shanks, and  set   to 
wrestling  with  concrete   block  
bodies  nailed  with  rancor  into
each   millimeter  square of   the
ground    under  their  feet   who
knows with how much  pressure
so  that they cannot   be   moved
by a  lift, seem  to  say:  this life
that slips away from our   hands
like muscles washed  in olive oil
is short but certainly long is Art. 

Nazmi Ağıl

This poem is an author translation of a poem from his book, Yağmura Bunca Düşkün (So Fond of Rain) published in 2014.  

Nazmi Ağıl graduated from the English Language and Literature Department, Bosphorus University, Istanbul where he also received his PhD with a dissertation on Auden’s poetry. Since 2008 he has been working at the Department of English Language and Comparative Literature, Koç University. He published several volumes of poetry, and translated some canonical works from English literature including Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, The Rape of the Lock and The Prelude.