“The Silence of Snow” -- An Homage to Orhan Pamuk

The journey
to the outlying districts:
poverty and history

In the New Life pastry shop,
the first conversation
between the murderer and his victim:
love, religion, and poetry

A sad story at Party headquarters
(police headquarters)
and once again on the streets –
a nonbeliever
(blue)
who does not want to kill himself

Happiness
and a walk
through the snow;
the dinner conversation turns
to love, headscarves, and suicide

At the National Theatre,
one describes his landscape
and another recites
his poem:
a revolution:
a play about a girl
who burns
her headscarf

The night of the Revolution
(the six-sided snowflake),
he slept;
and when he woke
in the hotel room
(cold rooms of terror)
the next morning,
a short spell of happiness:
fusion of military and theatrical careers

In Frankfurt,
he urges another to sign a statement
to the West
on love, insignificance, and disappearance

The mediator
(fear of being shot)
in his cell,
bargaining
(life vies with theatre,
and art with politics):
preparations for the play
to end all plays

The final act
from his point of view
a few years later:
an enforced visit
at the hotel:
the missing green notebook –
the first half of the chapter –
the silence of snow.




This is not a poem as much as a collage; the phrases are excerpts from the table of contents of Orhan Pamuk’s phenomenal novel, Snow. In the first moments of reading Pamuk’s words, I was struck by how little they resembled a conventional table of contents – and how much they felt like poetry. Re-reading them a few days later, I sensed the shape of the poem – and felt inspired to cut and shape them to bring out that poetry, adding only a few words of my own.

I cannot claim to be this poem’s “author” – I merely assembled the poetry that Pamuk had already written. Please feel free to compare this poem to Pamuk’s actual table of contents; then I urge you to read the rest of his novel.

I am just beginning to read Snow, and it’s gorgeous. In his opening lines I felt an elation like the rapture of falling in love: “The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.”