Wilsede Alive

Nazim Hikmek: His life

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Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“Before anything else, I want to recall his greatness as a human being
and his abundant energy. I met him in the course of his illness and was
surprised by his willpower to live and struggle. But what really affected
me was his melancholic and ironic alertness. This man, who was
rescued from torture and death, did not rest, like others would do.
Nothing was finished injsl II !dofor him. While struggling with the outside
enemy, he was carrying on a fra ternal war against the errors of insider
friends. Even when he, along with everyone, was fighting for peace,
and against imperialism and fascism, he was warning his friends about
the dangers of bureaucracy. He neither underwent militant discipline
nor an authorial , critical attitude. He lived this contradiction to the very
end. In the last years of his life, this continuous tension consumed up
all the strength that was left to him from his prison term. But essentially
by this characteristic does he remain an example to us today.
“He, the faithful friend , brave militant, merciless enemy of the enemies
of the human, wanted to serve everywhere but he did not want to
undermine anyth ing. [ ... J
The works of a man who was on ceaseless duty, continue to do the
same after his death." (From "Respect for Nazlm Hikmet.")

INTRODUCTION to Selected Poetry of Nazim Hikmet

Translations by. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

NAZIM HIKMET, popularly known and critically acclaimed in Turkey as the first and
foremost modern Turkish poet, is known around the world as one of the greatest
international poets of the twentieth century, and his poetry has been translated into
more than fifty languages. Born in 1902 in Salonika, where his father was in the foreign
service, Hikmet 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. He attended the Turkish naval
academy, but during the Allied occupation ofIstanbul following the First World War,
he left to teach in eastfrn Turkey. In 1922, after a brief first marriage ended in
annulment, he crossed the border and made his way to Moscow, attracted by the
Russian Revolution and its promise of social justice. At Moscow University he got to
know students and artists from all over the world. Hikmet returned to Turkey in 1924,
after the Turkish War of Independence, but was soon arrested for working on a leftist
magazine. In 1926 he managed to escape to Russia, where he continued writing poetry
and plays, met Mayakovsky, and worked with Meyerhold. A general amnesty allowed
him to return to Turkey in 1928. Since the Communist Party had been outlawed by
then, he found himself under constant surveillance by the secret police and spent five of
the next ten years in prison on a variety of trumped-up charges. In 1933, for example, he
was jailed for putting illegal posters, but when his case came to trial, it was thrown out
of cou rt for lack of evidence. Meanwhile, between 1929 and 1936 he published nine
books - five collections and four long poems- that revolutionized 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.
Then, 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 Sheik Bedrettin." Published in1936, this
long poem based on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule was his
last hook to appear in Turkey during his lifetime. His friend Pablo Neruda relates
Hikmet's account of how he was treated after his arrest: " Accused of attempting to
inci te the T urkish navy into rebellion, Nazim was condemned to the punishmen ts of heB.
The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was foced to walk on the ship's bridge
until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines
where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength
failing him: my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to watch me suffer. His
strength came back with pride. He began to sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at
the  top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remeber, his own
poems, the ballads ofthe peasants, the people's battle hymns. He sang everything he
knew. ADS so he vanquished the filth and his torturers. " In prison, Hjkmet's Futu r istinspired,
often topical early poetry gave way to pot:ms with a more direct manner and a
more serious tone. Enclosed in letters to his family and friends, these poems were
subsequently circulated in manuscript. He not only composed some of his greatest lyrics
in prison, but produced, between 1941 and 1945, his epic masterpiece, Human
Landscapes. He also learned such crafts as weaving and woodworking in order to
support himself and his family. In the. late Forties, while still in pr ison, he divorced his
second wife and ma rried fo r a third time. [n 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.
Within a year, however, his persecution had resumed full force. Simone de Beauvoir
recalls him describing the events of that time: "He told me how a year after he came out
of pr ison there were two attempts to murder him (with cars, in the narrow streets of
Istanbul) And then they tried to make him do the military service on the Russian
frontier· he was fifty. The doctor, a major, said to him: "Half an hour standing in the
sun and you're a dead man. But I shall give you a certificate of health." So then he
escaped, across the Bosphorus in a tiny motorboat on a stormy night -when it was calm
the straits were too well guarded. He wanted to reach Bulgaria, but it was impossible
with a high sea running. He passed a Rumanian cargo ship, he began to circle it,
shouting his name. They saluted him, they waived handkerchiefs, but they didn't stop.
He fo llowed them and went on circling them in the height of the storm; after two hours
they stopped, but without picking him up. His motor stalled, he thought he was done for.
At last they hauled him aboard; they had been telephoning to Bucharest for instructions.
Exhausted, half dead, he staggered into the officers' cabin; there was an enormous
photograph of him with the caption: SAVE NAZIM HIKMET. The most ironical part,
he added, was that he had already been at liberty for a year. **"
Taken to Moscow, he was given a house in the writer's colony ofPeredelkino outside the
city; the T urkish government denied his wife and child permission to join him. Although
he suffered a second heart attack in 1952, Hikmet traveled widely during his exile,
visiting not only Eastern Europe but Rome, Paris, Havana, Peking, and Tanganyika: " I
traveled through Europe, Asia, and Africa with my dream / only the Americans didn 't
give me the visa." Stripped of his Turkish citizenship in 1959, he chose to become a
citizen of Poland, explaining he had inherited his blue eyes and red hair from a Polish
ancestor who was a, seventeenth-century revolutionary. In 1959 he remarried again.
The increasingly  breathless pace of his latc poems -often unpunctuated and, toward the
end, impat ient even with line divisions- conveys a sense of time accelerating as he grows
older and travels faster and farther than ever before in his life. During his exile his
poems were regula rly printed abroad, his "Selected Poems" was published in Bulgaria
in 1954, and generous translations of his work subsequently appeared there and in
Greecc, Germany, Italy, and the USSR. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in June
1963.
After his death, Hikmet's books began to reappear in Turkey; in 1965 and 1966, for
example, more than twenty of his books were published there, some of them reprints of
earlier volumes and others works appearing for the first time. The next fifteen years saw
the grdual publication of his eight volume "Collected Poems," along with his plays,
novels, letters, and even children's stories. At the same time, various selections of his
poems went th rough multiple printings, and numerous biographies and critical studies
of his poetry were published. But except for brief periods between 1965 and 1980, his
work has been suppressed in his native country for the past half century. Since his
death, major translat ions of his poetry hae continued to appear in England, France,
Gemumy, Greece, Poland, Spain, and the United States; for example, Yannis Ritsos's
Greck versions had gone through eight pr intings a of 1977, and Philippe Soupault's 1964
" anthology" was reissued in France as recently as 1982. And in 1983 alone, new
tt"anslations of Hikmet's poems were published in F rench, German, and Russian. A
collection of Hikmet's finest shorter poems in English translation, this book brings
togcthcr for the first time -in substantially revised new versions- the better part of two
earlier selections, the long-out-of-print " Things] didn’t know] loved” and “The Epic of
Sheik Bedrettin,” as well as a number of important lyrics previously published in
magazines buthitherto uncollected.

Like Whitman, Hikmet speaks of himself, his country and the world in the same breath.
At once personal and public, his poetry records his life without reducing it to selfconciousness; he affirms reality of facts at the same time that he insists in the validity of his feelings. His human presence or the controlling figure of his personality – playful,
optimistic, and capable of childlike joy- keeps his poems open, public, and committed to
social and artistic change. And in the perfect oneness of his life and art, Hikmet emerges
as a heroic figure. His early poems proclaim this unity as a faith: art is an event, he
maintains, in social as well as literary history, and a poet’s bearing in art is inseparable
from his bearing in life. The rest of Hikmet’s life gave him ample opportunity to act
upon this faith and, in fact to deepen it. As Terrence Des Pres observes, Hikmet’s
” exemplary life” and “special vision” -”at once historical and timeless, Marxist and
mystical” – had unique consequences for his art: “Simply because in his art and in his
person Hikmet opposes the enemies of the human spirit in harmony with itself and the
carth, he can speak casually and yet with a seriousness that most modern American
poets never dream of attempting. ***” In a sense, Hikmet’s prosecutors honored him by
bcicving a book of poems could incite the military to revolt; indeed, the fact that he was
persecuted attests to the credibility of his belief in the vital importance of his art. Yet,
thc suffering his faith cost him -he never compromised in this life or art- is only
secondary to the suffering that must have gone into keeping that faith. The
circumstances of Hikmet’s life are very much to the point, not only because he
continually chose to remain faithful to his vision, but also because his life and art form a
dramatic whole. Sartre remarked that Hikmet conceived of a human being as something
to be created. In ihs life no less than in his art, Hikmet forged this new kind of person,
whi was heroic by virtue of being a creator. This conception of the artist as a hero and of
the het”o as a creator saves art from becoming a frivolous activity in the modern world;
as Bikmet’s career dramatizes, poetry is a matter of life and death.
Mudu Konuk 1993
(*) Memoirs, trans. Hardie St. Martin (New York; Penguin, 1978), pp. 195-196.
Cd,) Force of circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (New York; Putnam’s, 1965), pp.
390-91.
(”,**) ” Poetry and Politics: The example of Nazim Hikmet,” Parnassus 6 (Spring/
Summer 1978); 12,23.

The Walnut Tree