Turkish → English transcript

The late Mr. Dündar told me a story. One day, he said, in Bonn they gave me a desk,

I was sitting there with nothing to do.

A man wearing a fez came in, he said. He threw a passport on my desk.

He said, in Turkish, sir, take this passport and give me a Turkish passport.

But he was really angry. I looked, he said, it was a Jordanian passport.

I said, how can this be, sir? You are a Jordanian citizen.

He said, for God's sake, Jordan, he said,

is a valley between two mountains, how can that be a state, he said.

I am an Ottoman, he said. You could not govern properly,

I ended up on one side of the mountain, you ended up on the other side, he said.

Is that my fault, he said? He said, why do you want to change it?

He said, in my youth I came to this Germany with an Ottoman passport.

The police would salute me. Now they turned my passport over and over,

They checked my visa, they searched my bags, they searched all over me.

I am tired of this treatment. I want to have a prestigious passport like an Ottoman

passport, look.