Nazim Hikmet(1902~1963?)
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
of Istanbul following the First World War, he left to teach in eastern
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 court 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 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. His friend Pablo Neruda relates Hikmet's account of
how he was treated after his arrest: Accused of attempting to incite
the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nazim was condemned to the punishments
of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced
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
remember, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people's
battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished the
filth and his torturers.* In prison, Hikmet's Futurist-inspired,
often topical early poetry gave way to poems 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 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.
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 prison
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 followed 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 of Peredelkino outside the city; the Turkish 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 the 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 also remarried again. The increasingly breathless pace
of his late poems - often unpunctuated and, toward the end, impatient
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 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.
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 gradual 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
through 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 translations
of his poetry has continued to appear in England, France, Germany,
Greece, Poland, Spain, and the United States; for example, Yannis
Ritsos's Greek versions had gone through eight printings a of 1977,
and Philippe Soupault's 1964 anthology was reissued in France as
recently as 1982. And in 1983 alone, new translations of Hikmet's
poems were published in French, German, and Russian. A collection
of Hikmet's finest shorter poems in English translation, this book
brings together for the first time -in substantially revised new
versions- the better part of two earlier selections, the long-out-of-print
Things I didn't know I loved and The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin, as
well as a number of important lyrics previously published in magazines
but hitherto 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 self-consciousness;
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 earth, 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 believing
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, the 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 his life no less than in his art, Hikmet forged this new kind
of person, who was heroic by virtue of being a creator. This conception
of the artist as a hero and of the hero as a creator saves art from
becoming a frivolous activity in the modern world; as Hikmet's career
dramatizes, poetry is a matter of life and death.
KIZ COCUGU
Kapilari calan benim
kapilari birer birer.
Gozunuze gorunemem
goze gorunmez oluler.
Hirosima'da oleli
oluyor bir on yil kadar.
Yedi yasinda bir kizim,
buyumez olu cocuklar.
Saclarim tutustu once,
gozlerim yandi kavruldu.
Bir avuc kul oluverdim,
kulum havaya savruldu.
Benim sizden kendim icin
hicbir sey istedigim yok.
Seker bile yiyemez ki
kagit gibi yanan cocuk.
Caliyorum kapinizi
teyze, amca, bir imza ver.
Cocuklar oldurulmesin
seker de yiyebilsinler.
JAPON BALIKCISI
Balik tuttuk yiyen olur
Elimize degen olur
Bu gemi bir kara tabut,
Lumbarindan giren olur.
Balik tuttuk yiyen olur,
Birden degil, agir agir,
Etleri curur, dagilir,
Balik tuttuk, yiyen olur.
Elimize degen olur,
Tuzla, gunesle yikanan
Bu vefali, bu caliskan
Elimize degen olur.
Birden degil, agir agir agir
Etleri curur, dagilir,
Elimize degen olur...
Badem gozlum, beni unut
Bu gemi bir kara tabut
Lumbarindan giren olur
Ustumuzden gecti bulut
Badem gozlum beni unut
Boynuma sarilma, gulum,
Benden sana gecer olum
Badem gozlum beni unut
Bu gemi bir kara tabut
Badem gozlum beni unut
Curuk yumurtadan curuk
Benden yapacagin cocuk
Bu gemi bir kara tabut
Bu deniz bir olu deniz
Insanlar ey, nerdesiniz?
Nerdesiniz?
OTOBIYOGRAFI
1902'de dogdum
dogdugum sehre donmedim bir daha
geriye donmeyi sevmem
uc yasimda Halep'te pasa torunlugu ettim
on dokuzumda Moskova'da komunist Universite ogrenciligi
kirk dokuzumda yine Moskova'da Tseka-Parti konuklugu
ve on dordumden beri sairlik ederim
kimi insan otlarin kimi insan baliklarin cesidini
bilir
ben ayriliklarin
kimi insan ezbere sayar yildizlarin adini
ben hasretlerin
hapislerde de yattim buyuk otellerde de
aclik cektim aclik girevi de icinde ve tatmadigim yemek yok gibidir
otuzumda asilmami istediler
kirk sekizimde Baris Madalyasinin bana verilmesini
verdiler de
otuz altimda yarim yilda gectim dort metre kare betonu
elli dokuzumda on sekiz saatta uctum Pirag'dan Havana'ya
Lenin'i gormedim nobet tuttum tabutunun basinda
924'de
961'de ziyaret ettigim anitkabri kitaplaridir
partimden koparmaga yeltendiler beni
sokmedi
yikilan putlarin altinda da ezilmedim
951'de bir denizde genc bir arkadasla yurudum ustune olumun
52'de catlak bir yurekle dort ay sirtustu bekledim olumu
sevdigim kadinlari deli gibi kiskandim
su kadarcik haset etmedim Sarlo'ya bile
aldattim kadinlarimi
konusmadim arkasindan dostlarimin
ictim ama aksamci olmadim
hep alnimin teriyle cikardim ekmek parami ne mutlu bana
baskasinin hesabina utandim yalan soyledim
yalan soyledim baskasini uzmemek icin
ama durup dururken de yalan soyledim
bindim tirene ucaga otomobile
Dogunluk binemiyor
operaya gittim
cogunluk gidemiyor adini bile duymamis operanin
cogunlugun gittigi kimi yerlere de ben gitmedim 21'den beri
camiye kiliseye tapinaga havraya buyucuye
ama kahve falima baktirdigim oldu
yazilarim otuz kirk dilde basilir
Turkiye'mde Turkcemle yasak
kansere yakalanmadim daha
yakalanmam da sart degil
basbakan filan olacagim yok
meraklisi da degilim bu isin
bir de harbe girmedim
siginaklara da inmedim gece yarilari
yollara da dusmedim pike yapan ucaklarin altinda
ama sevdalandim altmisima yakin
sozun kisasi yoldaslar
bugun Berlin'de kederden gebermekte olsam da
insanca yasadim diyebilirim
ve daha ne kadar yasarim
basimdan neler gecer daha
kim bilir
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