Thursday 15 October 2015

NÂZIM HIKMET - A POET

“Perhaps the courtyard will be knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons” - Nâzim Hikmet

Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) is one of the most important figures in 20th century Turkish literature and one of the first Turkish poets to use free verse. He became during his lifetime the best-known Turkish poet in the West, and his works were translated into several languages. However, in his home country, Hikmet was condemned for his commitment to leftist ideals, and he remained a controversial figure decades after his death. His writings were filled with social criticism and he was the only major writer to speak out against the Armenian massacres in 1915 and 1922. Hikmet proclaimed in the early 1930s that, “the artist is the engineer of the human soul”. He spent some 17 years in prisons and called poetry “the bloodiest of the arts.” His poem ‘Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison’ reflected his will to survive.

“To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.”
 (from ‘Some Advice’, 1949)

Hikmet was born in Salonica in Greece and but grew up in Istanbul. His mother was an artist, and his pasha grandfather wrote poetry; through their circle of friends Hikmet was introduced to poetry early; publishing first poems at seventeen. This poem of his I am very partial to:


ANGINA PECTORIS

If half my heart is here, doctor,
the other half is in China
with the army flowing
toward the Yellow River.
And, every morning, doctor,
every morning at sunrise my heart
is shot in Greece.
And every night, doctor,
when the prisoners are asleep and the infirmary is deserted,
my heart stops at a run-down old house
in Istanbul.
And then after ten years
ALL I HAVE TO OFFER MY POOR PEOPLE
IS THIS APPLE IN MY HAND, DOCTOR,
ONE RED APPLE:
MY HEART.
AND THAT, DOCTOR, THAT IS THE REASON
FOR THIS ANGINA PECTORIS-
NOT NICOTINE, PRISON, OR ARTERIOSCLEROSIS.
I look at the night through the bars,
and despite the weight on my chest
MY HEART STILL BEATS WITH THE MOST DISTANT STARS.
Nâzim Hikmet (1948)

After the disastrous events in Greece and Turkey in 1922, the poet went to Russia, attracted by the Communist ideals. He returned to Turkey and was imprisoned several times on trumped up charges. He went back to Russia, returned to Turkey and between 1929 and 1936 he published nine books (five collections and four long poems) that revolutionised Turkish poetry, flouting Ottoman literary conventions and introducing free verse and colloquial diction. While these poems established him as a new major poet, he also published several plays and novels and worked as a bookbinder, proofreader, journalist, translator, and screenwriter to support an extended family that included his second wife, her two children, and his widowed mother.


PLEA

This country shaped like the head of a mare
Coming full gallop from far off Asia
To stretch into the Mediterranean
THIS  COUNTRY IS OURS.

Bloody wrists, clenched teeth
bare feet,
Land like a precious silk carpet
THIS HELL, THIS PARADISE IS OURS.

Let the doors be shut that belong to others
Let them never open again
Do away with the enslaving of man by man
THIS PLEA IS OURS.

To live! Like a tree alone and free
Like a forest in brotherhood
THIS YEARNING IS OURS.

In January 1938 he was arrested for inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on the grounds that military cadets were reading his poems, particularly ‘The Epic of Sheikh Bedrettin’. Published in 1936, this long poem based on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule was his last book to appear in Turkey during his lifetime.

In the late forties, while still in prison, he divorced his second wife and married for a third time. In 1949 an international committee, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre, was formed in Paris to campaign for Hikmet’s release, and in 1950 he was awarded the World Peace Prize. The same year, he went on an eighteen-day hunger strike, despite a recent heart attack, and when Turkey’s first democratically elected government came to power, he was released in a general amnesty. He managed to make his way to Moscow. During his exile his poems were regularly printed abroad, his ‘Selected Poems’ was published in Bulgaria in 1954, and generous translations of his work subsequently appeared there and in Greece, Germany, Italy, and the USSR. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in June 1963.


THE BLUE-EYED GIANT, THE MINIATURE WOMAN AND THE HONEYSUCKLE
He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman.
The woman’s dream was of a miniature house
with a garden where honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house.

The giant loved like a giant,
and his hands were used to such big things
that the giant could not
make the building,
could not knock on the door
of the garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
at that house.

He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman,
a mini miniature woman.
The woman was hungry for comfort
and tired of the giant’s long strides.
And bye bye, off she went to the embraces of a rich dwarf
with a garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house.

Now the blue-eyed giant realises,
a giant isn’t even a graveyard for love:
in the garden where the honeysuckle grows
in a riot of colours
that sort of house...

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