# Kultura > Letërsia shqiptare > Krijime në gjuhë të huaja >  Nazim Hikmet

## AsgjëSikurDielli

*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 Univ- ersity 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, flout- ing 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 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 of the peasants, the people's battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. Ans 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 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 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 hae 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 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 self-conciousness; 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 beieving 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 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 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. 

Mutlu Konuk 1993 

(*) Memoirs, trans. Hardie St. Martin (New York; Penguin, 1978), pp. 195-196. 
(**) 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.

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*The Walnut Tree*

    my head foaming clouds, sea inside me and out
    I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park
    an old walnut, knot by knot, shred by shred
    Neither you are aware of this, nor the police

    I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park
    My leaves are nimble, nimble like fish in water
    My leaves are sheer, sheer like a silk handkerchief
    pick, wipe, my rose, the tear from your eyes
    My leaves are my hands, I have one hundred thousand
    I touch you with one hundred thousand hands, I touch Istanbul
    My leaves are my eyes, I look in amazement
    I watch you with one hundred thousand eyes, I watch Istanbul
    Like one hundred thousand hearts, beat, beat my leaves

    I am a walnut tree in Gulhane Park
    neither you are aware of this, nor the police


*Nazim Hikmet

translated from Turkish by Gun Gencer*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*TODAY IS SUNDAY*

Today is Sunday.
For the first time they took me out into the sun today.
And for the first time in my life I was aghast
that the sky is so far away
          and so blue 
          and so vast
              I stood there without a motion.
Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion
leaning against the white wall.
Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll
Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now.
The soil, the sun and me...
I feel joyful and how.


*NAZIM HIKMET

Translated by Talat Sait Halman.
(Literature East & West, March 1973)*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*A SAD STATE OF FREEDOM*

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
        of which you'll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others-
you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you're born
       they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
       a finger on your temple
            free to have a free conscience.

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
         you're free
             with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
         they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom-
you have the freedom to become an air-base.

You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being-
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
         and even hanged.

There's neither an iron, wooden
         nor a tulle curtain
             in your life;
there's no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
          is a sad affair under the stars.

*Nazim Hikmet
Translated by Taner Baybars*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*A SPRING PIECE LEFT IN THE MIDDLE*

Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
		    in capitals:
SPRING
      SPRING
	    SPRING...
And me - poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
   every day
      for two liras-
why,
    since spring
	 has come, am I
	     still sitting here
		like a ragged 
		    black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
     I fly out of the printer's,
	I'm on the street.
The lead dirt of the composing room
		       on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket.
		   SPRING IN THE AIR...

In the barbershops
     they're powdering
	 the sallow cheeks
	      of the pariah of Publishers Row.
And in the store windows
     three-color bookcovers
	flash like sunstruck mirrors.
But me,
I don't have even a book of ABC's
that lives on this street
and carries my name on its door!
But what the hell...
I don't look back,
the lead dirt of the composing room
		       on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket,
	      SPRING IN THE AIR...
                  *
The piece got left in the middle.
It rained and swamped the lines.
But oh! what I would have written...
The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page
			     three-volume manuscript
wouldn't stare at the window of the kebab joint
but with his shining eyes would take
the Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm...
The sea would start smelling sweet.
Spring would rear up
	 like a sweating red mare
and, leaping onto its bare back,
		       I'd ride it
              into the water.
Then
    my typewriter would follow me
	     every step of the way.
I'd say:
	``Oh, don't do it!
	Leave me alone for an hour...''
then
my head-my hair failing out-
	 would shout into the distance:
	    ``I AM IN LOVE...''
		*
I'm twenty-seven,
she's seventeen.
``Blind Cupid,
lame Cupid,
both blind and lame Cupid
said, Love this girl,''
		       I was going to write;
			  I couldn't say it
			      but still can!
But if
       it rained,
if the lines I wrote got swamped,
if I have twenty-five cents left in my pocket,
				     what the hell...
Hey, spring is here spring is here spring
				   spring is here!
My blood is budding inside me!

*			   20 and 21 April 1929
			   Nazim Hikmet
                 Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*LETTER TO MY WIFE
					     11-11-1933
					    Bursa Prison*

My one and only!
Your last letter says:
``My head is throbbing,
	       my heart is stunned!''
You say:
``If they hang you,
	   if I lose you,
		     I'll die!''
You'll live, my dear-
my memory will vanish like black smoke in the wind.
Of course you'll live, red-haired lady of my heart:
in the twentieth century
		    grief lasts
			 at most a year.

Death-
a body swinging from a rope.
My heart
	 can't accept such a death.
But
you can bet
     if some poor gypsy's hairy black
	       spidery hand
		  slips a noose
		      around my neck,
they'll look in vain for fear
		      in Nazim's
			  blue eyes!
In the twilight of my last morning
I
will see my friends and you,
and I'll go
to my grave
	    regretting nothing but an unfinished song...
My wife!
Good-hearted,
golden,
eyes sweeter than honey-my bee!
Why did I write you
		   they want to hang me?
The trial has hardly begun,
and they don't just pluck a man's head
			     like a turnip.
Look, forget all this.
If you have any money,
	       buy me some flannel underwear:
my sciatica is acting up again.
And don't forget,
a prisoner's wife
	       must always think good thoughts.

*Nazim Hikmet
                 Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*"9-10 P. M. POEMS WRITTEN FOR PIRAYE"
(SELECTIONS)* 

How lovely it is to remember you :
in the midst of the news of death and victory, 
in prison
and over forty years of age...

How lovely it is to remember you :
your hand forgotten on a blue cloth 
and in your hair
the grave softness of my beloved Istanbul earth...
It is like a second human in me 
                                 the happiness of loving you...
The smell of geranium leaf on the fingertips,
a sunny ease
and the call of flesh : 
                parted by quite red lines
                                                a warm
                                                   deep darkness...

How lovely it is to remember you,
to write about you, 
to lie back in prison and think of you :
that day, that place, the words you said, 
                                 not the words themselves
                                    but the way you said them...

How lovely it is to remember you.
I should carve something for you out of wood : 
                                                      a drawer
                                                           a ring,
and I should weave three meters of fine silk.
And jumping right up 
                          from my place

grabbing the iron bars at my window,
to the milk-white blueness of freedom 
                           I should shout out the poems I wrote for you. 
How lovely it is to remember you :
in the midst of the news of death and victory,
in prison
and over forty years of age...


*tr. by Fuat Engin*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*20 September 1945*

At this late hour
in this autumn night
                 I am full of your words;
eternal as time and matter,
                      naked as an eye,
                             heavy as a hand
                     and gleaming as stars
                                        your words.

Your words came to me,
they were of your heart, of your head, of your flesh.
Your words brought you,
                      they were : mother, 
                      they were : woman
                                   and they were comrade...
They were sad, painful, joyful, hopeful, heroic,
                                             your words were human...

*tr. by Fuat Engin*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*22 September 1945*

I read a book : 
                   you are in it,
I listen to a song :
                  you in it.
I sit down to eat my bread :
                  you sit facing me,
I work 
                  you facing me.
You who are everywhere my "ever present"
                  we cannot talk together
                  we cannot hear each other's voice : 
you are my eight years widow. 

*tr. by Fuat Engin*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*23 September 1945*

What is she doing now, :
                     right now, this instant? 
Is she in the house or outside?
Is she working, lying down, or standing up?
Maybe she's just raised her arm,
- hey,
       how this suddenly bares her thick white wrist!.. -

What is she doing now, 
               right now, this instant? 
Maybe she's petting 
                         a kitten on her lap.
Or maybe she is walking, about to take a step,
- those beloved feet that take her straight to me
                                                 on my dark days!.. -
And what's she thinking about -
                                                  me?
Or
    - oh, I don't know -
                           why the beans refuse to cook? 
Or else
              why most people are this unhappy?
What is she doing now,
                       right now, this instant?


*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*24 September 1945*

The most beautiful sea :
                       is the sea which is not reached yet.
The most beautiful child :
                       hasn't grown yet.
The most beautiful days of ours :
                       are those which we didn't live yet.
And the most beautiful words I want to tell you :
                       are the words which I did'nt tell yet...

*tr. by Fuat Engin*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*26 September 1945*

They've taken us prisoner,
they've locked us up :
                      me inside the walls,
                                          you outside.
But that's nothing.
The worst
is when people - knowingly or not -
carry prison inside themselves...
Most people have been forced to do this, 
honest, hard-working, good people
who deserve to be loved as much as I love you...

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*2 October 1945*

The wind blows on, the same cherry branch
doesn't bend in the same wind even once. 
Birds chirp in the tree :
                     the wings want to fly.
The door is closed :
                      it wants to break open.
I want you :
life should be
beautiful like you,
              friendly and loving...
I know the feast of poverty
                            still isn't over...
It will be yet...

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*6 October 1945*

Clouds pass, heavy with news.
The letter that didn't come crumples in my hand.
My heart is at the tips of my eyelashes,
        blessing the earth that disappeares into the distance.
I want to call out : "P i r a y é,
                                  P i r a y é !"

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*8 October 1945*

I've become impossible again 
                                    sleeples, irritible, perverse.
One day
          I work
as if beating a wild beast, as if cursing all that's holy,
and the next day
I lie on my back from morning to night
a lazy song on my lips like an unlit cigarette.
And it drives me crazy, 
                           the hatred
                                      and pity I feel for myself...        
I've become impossible again :
                           sleeples, irritible, perverse.
Again, as always, I am wrong.
I have no cause
                            and couldn't possibly.
What I am doing is shameful,
                            a disgrace.
But I can't help it
                     I'm jealous of you,
                     forgive me...

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*13 November 1945*

The poverty of Istanbul - they say - defies description,
hunger - they say - has ravaged the people,
TB - they say - is eveywhere.
Little girls this high - they say - 
                       in burned-out buildings, movie theaters...

Dark news comes from my far-off city
of honest, hard-working, poor people -
                                               the real Istanbul,
which is your home, my love,
and which I carry in the bag on my back
               wherever I'm exiled, to whatever prison,
               the city I hold in my heart like the loss of a child,
               like your image in my eyes...

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*The fourth day of December 1945*

Take out of the box the dress you had on when our eyes met 
    the first time,
look your best,
look like spring trees.
Set in your hair
      the carnation I'd sent you in a letter from prison,
raise your white, broad forehead wrinkled with kissable lines, 
in such a day, not daunted and sorrowful,
                                                 why, on what pretext
in such a day as beautiful as a rebel-flag she should be, Nazim
    Hikmet's woman... 
*tr. by Fuat Engin*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*5 December 1945*

The keel has snapped,
the slaves are breaking their chains.
That's a northeaster blowing,
it'll smash the hull on the rocks.
This world, this pirate ship, will sink -
                     come hell or high water, it will sink.
And we will build a world as hopeful, free,
                    and open as your forehead, my Pirayé... 

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*6 December 1945*

They are the enemies of hope, my love,
of flowing water,
                of the fruitful tree,
                of life growing and flourishing.
Because death has branded them on their forehead :
                                - rotting teeth, decaying flesh -
                and soon they will be gone not to come back again.
And be sure, my love, be sure,
freedom will walk around swinging its arms,
freedom in its most glorious garment : worker's overalls
                                     in this beautiful country of ours...

*tr. by Fuat Engin*

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## AsgjëSikurDielli

*12 December 1945*

The trees on the plain make one last effort to shine :
                                spangled gold
                                        copper
                                              bronze and wood...
The oxen's hooves sink softly into the moist earth.
And the mountains are plunged in fog : 
                                               lead-gray, soaking wet...
That's it -
fall must be finally over today.
Wild geese just shot by,
                    probably headed for Iznik Lake.
The air is cool
       and smells like soot :
       the smell of snow is in the air.

To be outside now,
        to ride a horse at full gallop toward the mountains.
You'll say, "You don't know how to ride a horse,"
but don't laugh
            or get jealous :
I've picked up a new habit in prison,
I love nature nearly as much
            as I love you.
            And both of you are far away...

*tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk*

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