CLASSICS REVISITED
Nazim Hikmat: The poet of Turkey
BY RAVI VYAS
Hope springs eternal; sympathy is reserved for those trapped inside the bourgeois world.
* * *
The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, edited by Alan Bold, Penguin Books, 1970.
Prague Dawn, Hikmat, translated by Randy Blasing and Muten Konuk, Persea Books.
Under the Rain, Hikmat, translated by Özen Ozüner and John Berger
* * *
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable. Naturally enough, this ratio — echoing man’s situation in the universe — is what has made incarceration an integral metaphor of Christian metaphysics as well as practically the midwife of literature...It’s not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
Joseph Brodsky: The Writer in Prison
In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically came with the territory. Nazim Hikmat (1902-1963), Turkey’s greatest contemporary poet, wrote half his life’s work as a political prisoner in Turkish prisons. Because of his continu
ous incarcerations, the poems, deeply philosophical (they are also full of the capacity for endurance), somehow triumph over distances and transcend endless separations. The here in all his poems is a metaphor; it is elsewhere in the wide, open world. Like a geometry compass, the poetry traces circles, sometimes intimate (his love poems are addressed to his wife), sometimes wide and global with its sharp point inserted in the prison cell. Naturally, the poems have continually to overreach his own confinement but there is no trace of self-pity, or dreams of the Great Escape; he merely places the prison as a nuisance, a small dot on the map of the world. Hope springs eternal; sympathy is reserved for those trapped inside the bourgeois world.
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.
Prison life is claustrophobic but what rankles most is the memory of the world outside and what might have become of it.
Since I was thrown into this hole
The earth has gone around the sun ten times.
If you ask the Earth, it will say,
‘Doesn’t deserve mention
such a microscopic amount of time’
If you ask me, I’ll say,
‘Ten years of my life.’…..
The day I was thrown into this hole
The Second World War had not started;
in the concentration camps of Dachau
the gas ovens had not been built;
the atom bomb had not exploded in Hiroshima
Oh, the time has just flowed
like the blood of a massacred baby.
Now that’s all over
but the American dollar
is already talking
of a Third World War…
But I repeat with the same fervent yearning
what I wrote for my people
ten years ago today:
‘You are as plenty
as the ants in the Earth
as the fish in the sea
as the birds in the sky;
you may be coward or brave
illiterate or literate.
And since you are the makers
Or destroyers
Of all deeds,
Only your adventures
Will be recorded in songs.’
And the rest,
Such as my ten years’ suffering,
Is simply idle talk.
Hikmat is a romantic who believed the world would be a better place when a new generation takes over. In his “Advice to our Children”, he tells them:
Be naughty, that’s all right.
Climb up sheer walls,
Up towering trees.
Like an old captain let your hands direct
The course of your bicycle….
You must know how to build your own paradise on this black soil.
With your geology textbook
you must silence the man who teaches you
that creation began with Adam.
You must recognise
the importance of the Earth,
you must believe the Earth is eternal
Distinguish not between your mother
and your mother Earth.
You must love it
as much you love her.
In “That’s how it goes”, he says “the problem is not falling a captive/ it’s how to avoid surrender.”
Many of the greatest poems of the 20th century have been the most fraternal ever written probably because it was a century of unprecedented massacres; the future was therefore imagined to be a proposed fraternity.
These men, Dino,
who hold tattered shreds of light
where are they going
In this gloom, Dino?
You, me too:
We are with them, Dino.
We too Dino
have glimpsed the blue sky.
Much of what we believed should happen has turned out to be illusory but that is no reason to give up hope because the whole of history is about hopes sustained, lost, renewed. With hope comes strength not to cry when everything seems lost; without hope in the real world you are condemned to be alone.
But it is power of poetry that Hikmat returns to again and again.
Our poems
like milestones
must line the road.
As with all translations, the question we need to ask is whether Hikmat’s voice carries well into English, does it cross the language barrier like the Greek Constantin Cavafy’s, who has the same passion and a mordant sense of humour? It does in many places, though some the Urdu translations come off better.
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