When a story club member posted Hikmet’s poem, “On Living,” I picked up his book from my shelf, to read some of these poems again. No one can forget the image of the cold earth “like an empty walnut” rolling “along in pitch-black space,” near the end of “On Living,” written in 1948. A few other lines of this poem:
Living is no laughing matter;
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree that,
for example, you hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall…
…I mean you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you will plant olives —
and not so they’ll be left behind for your children either,
but because even though you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
Todays news says the Ukrainian city of Kherson has fallen and that people must now obey its armed invaders. Because living, I mean, weighs heavy, we have to pay attention to what’s going on. We have to ask ourselves, as would-be writers and would-be poets, what is our role in the world as it is?
About Nazim Hikmet (1902 - 1963)
Born in Turkey in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire and raised in Istanbul, Nazim Hikmet is regarded as the most important Turkish poet of the 20th century, if not of much greater standing. In 1922, attracted by leftist ideas and political events in Russia, Hikmet moved to Moscow to study politics and economics. Always reading literature and writing — plays, novels, and polemics, along with the poetry he was known for since his youth, Hikmet spent his twenties in and out of Turkish prisions, escaping to Russia several times where he could live among friends. In Turkey, his books were published in the 1930s, and sold very well, so much so that he was sent to prison for twenty-five years in 1938, for the cime of influencing young people too much: “inciting military cadets to revolt.” What higher praise for a poet or writer, I can’t imagine!
During his twelve year of confinement, he continued to write, managing to smuggle out many pages of a subversive epic poem. In prison Hikmet met and helped to educate important young artists and writers, as they themselves were shuffled in and out of jail in those years.
Here is another of Nazim Hikmet’s poems that speak to this moment, today, when children are being killed in Ukraine. The poem begins as if with an epigraph in quotations about plum trees in bloom, about lovers sitting together on the grass, but not till we get near the end do we realize that its all in his imagination and he sits in prison, “carried away by a strange feeling/ and about to explode.” Somehow, he manages to include the lines about the children and babies being killed.
A Strange Feeling
by Nazim Hikmet
“The plum trees
are in bloom
—the wild apricot flowers first,
the plum last —My love,
let’s sit
face to face
on the grass.
The air is delicious and light
—but not really warm yet—
the almond shells are green
and fuzzy, still
very soft . . .We’re happy
because we’re alive,
We’d probably have been killed long ago
if you were in London,
if I were in Tobruk or on an English freighter . . .Put your hands on your knees, my love
—your wrists thick and white—
and open your left hand:
the daylight is inside your palm
like an apricot . . .
Of the people killed in yesterday’s air raid,
about one hundred were under five,
twenty-four still babies . . .I love the color of pomegranate seeds, my love
—a pomegranate seed, seed of light—
I like melons tart . . .”. . . . . . a rainy day
far from fruits and you
—not a single tree has bloomed yet,
and there’s even a chance of snow—
in Bursa Prision,
carried away by a strange feeling
and about to explode,
I write this out of pigheadedness—
out of sheer spite — for myself and for the people I love.2.7.1941
In 1949, a world-wide committee of luminaries sincluding Jean Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Pablo Neruda and Paul Robeson got together in Paris to plead for Hikmet’s relase from prison. He was finally freed in 1950, but was only allowed to stay in his homeland of Turkey with his family for a year before he was forced to flee and live in exile the rest of his life. Blasing and Konuks introduction to their 1975 volume, which appears to be the first major translation of his works in English, includes this note:
Throughout his career Hikmet conceived of his art as inseparable from his life, and in his work poetic purpose and political responsibility are one. For his poems are political; while he does not provide us with political commentary, he does accept that the purpose of his art is to change the world.
Books noted:
Things I Didn’t Know I Loved, Selected Poems of Nazim Hikmet
Translated by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk
Persea Books, 1975.
Nâzim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet
by Mutlu Konuk Blasing
Persea Books, 2013 (George Braziller, Inc.)
https://www.perseabooks.com/nazim-hikmet-the-life-and-times-of-turkeys-world-poet
Beautiful. Thank you.