Nazim Hikmet

Beyond The Walls selected poems

Chosen by Ruth Christie and Richard McKane
Translated by Ruth Christie, Richard McKane and Talat Sait Halman
Anvil Press Poetry in association with Yapi Kredi Yayinlari

Reviewed by Alev Adil

Despite his eventful life – incarceration, exile and peripatetic existence in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, his international reputation and his friendships with Sartre, de
Beauvoir and Neruda amongst others, Nazim Hikmet, Turkey’s most famous and
controversial poet is little known in England. Cultural insularity aside, English readers
haven’t been given much of an opportunity to read his work. (1) This carefully chosen
and beautifully translated collection is a long overdue, very welcome and comprehensive
introduction to the poet’s work. Hikmet’s life and poetry are inextricably linked.
Halman’s brief introductory biography and Christie and McKane’s selection illuminate
the autobiographical nature of his work and how far he traveled from his beginnings, both
as a writer and as a man. (2)
Hikmet was born in Salonika in 1902 to an aristocratic Ottoman family, his grandfather
was a Pasha, his father was in the Foreign Service and his mother an artist. He began
writing poetry as a teenager. This collection includes some rare examples of his juvenilia,
unpublished in his lifetime. His early work was formally conventional and conformed to
the metrical and lyrical conventions of the era, although much of his subject matter
presages life long themes – his love of the landscapes of Turkey, a preoccupation with
love and a hatred of injustice and religious fanaticism. Hikmet attended the Turkish
Naval Academy but following the Allied occupation of Istanbul after the First World War
he escaped to Ankara to join the anti-imperialist resistance and worked as a teacher in
Eastern Turkey. Ataturk advised him to write ‘poetry with a purpose’, but the cause to
which he dedicated himself and his poetry was not to be Kemalist but his own quixotic
and individualist brand of Communism. Much later when the Communist dream as well
as Hikmet’s personal destiny was to take a bleaker turn Stalin’s daughter Svetlana
Alliluyeva was to call him a ‘romantic communist’. Attracted by the Soviet Revolution
and its promise of social and cultural change Hikmet went to study in Moscow in 1922.
Inspired by the cultural fecundity of the revolution and by the Constructivist avant-garde,
he met Mayakovsky and worked with Meyerhold, his poetry changed dramatically. He
embraced free verse and abandoned the conventional metres of Turkish poetry. He
developed a style that was to become recognizably his own using colloquial diction,
alliteration and onomatopoeia, the alternation of long and short lines and a staccato
syntax; and was also to serve as an inspiration for much subsequent modern Turkish
poetry. His subject matter as well as his aesthetics became resolutely materialist and
futurist. In To become a Machine written in Moscow in 1923 he is “a man who wants to
set an engine in his belly”:
I believed …
machines would be ours
and that I would become a machine.
The poetry he wrote in the 1920s is often exuberant and optimistic. Extracts From The
Diary of La Gioconda written in Paris in 1924 is bold and witty. The Mona Lisa begins
a diary out of boredom because
“It’s fun
to explore the Museum,
but not to be one of its treasures!”
She steals a fountain pen
“from a short-sighted American
who sticks his red nose in my skirts”
falls in love with a Chinese man, watches a young girl apply lipstick and concludes by
wishing that
“a cubist painter could take the bones
of that Leonardo da Vinci
and make them into handles for his brushes”.

Hikmet returned to Istanbul in 1928 and became a leading light of the Turkish avant-
garde. His modernism and his ‘poetry with a purpose’ were out of step and out of favour
with the modernism of the young Turkish Republic where there was no room for cultural
pluralism. The Turkish Communist Party was outlawed and Hikmet was placed under
constant surveillance and was prey to harassment. Despite the fact that he was to spend
five of the next ten years in prison because of his political convictions, Hikmet was
prolific, producing nine books of poetry which established and consolidated his
reputation as poet between 1929 and 1936, as well as publishing several plays,
screenplays, novels and working as a journalist.
In 1933 he was imprisoned in Bursa goal for fly posting illegal political posters. There
he read a historical account of a 15th century peasant uprising in Western Anatolia. The
leader of the revolt, Bedreddin, advocated the overthrow of feudalism and the abolition of
discriminatory laws against minorities. Hikmet’s poem The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin,
published in1936 chronicled the uprising Bedreddin and his disciple Borkluce Mustafa
led, and its bloody defeat.
Turkish peasants from Aydin,
Greek pilots from Chios,
Jewish tradesmen,
ten thousand heretic comrades of Borkluce Mustafa,
plunged like ten thousand axes into the enemy forest.
Their standards crimson and green,
their shields inlaid, their ranks of bronze helmets
were all laid low, but
as the sun sank in pouring rain, by evening
of the ten thousand only two thousand remained.

This poem is clearly political and yet much less dogmatic and hectoring than much of
Hikmet’s political verse. Sheik Bedreddin has dramatic momentum, and is suffused with
visually rich and sensuous detail.
On the divan a red and green forest of Bursa silk,
on the wall a blue garden of Kutahiya tiles;
wine in silver ewers
lambs roasted to perfection, in copper dishes.
Celebi Sultan Mehmet strangles his own brother Musa with a bowstring,
washed himself ritual clean with his brother’s blood in a golden bowl
and ascended the throne as Sultan.
This poem has the cinematic grace of a Hollywood blockbuster as well as the urgency
and elegiac fatalism of the traditional oral forms of narrative poetry, and retells the past in
form as well as content, recalling a literary past far removed from the Persian influenced
Ottoman Court poetry. Not just the critics, the State too felt that this lyrical epic of a
multicultural revolt against Ottoman rule was much more than just another historical
poem. It was seen by the Turkish State as a call to arms. Hikmet’s epic was proposing a
different vision, an alternative creation myth for modern Turkish identity, marking a
historical moment that spoke of the possibility of alternative pasts, presents and futures,
of the possibility of an egalitarian and multi-ethnic state – a sort of Sufi socialism. It was
alleged that this poem was popular amongst military cadets and Hikmet was arrested for
inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt and was brought before a military tribunal. He
was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for sedition and subversion.
During his ten years in Bursa jail he continued to write and completed his epic Human
Landscapes as well as many touching and intimate poems to his wife Piraye. Poems like
23rd September 1945:
What is she doing now, at this very moment?
Is she at home, or outside,
working or resting on her feet?
She might be lifting her arm,
O, my rose, that movement of your white, firm wrist
Strips you so naked …

This collection also includes Hikmet’s stirring poem I Love My Country which expresses
not only his, not unconditional, love for his country but does so with an elegiac
wistfulness that is more vulnerable than it is ironic. The poem begins:
I love my country:
I’ve swung on her plane trees, been inside her prisons.
Nothing dispels my depression
like her songs and tobacco.

His prison poems attain a spare simplicity that seems redolent in retrospect of Sufi-
surrealism as much as Communism. In On Living he tells us that
Life’s no joke,
You must live it in earnest
like a squirrel, for example,
expecting nothing outside your life or beyond,
you must concentrate wholly on living.

My talk of ‘Sufi-surrealism’ will seem eccentric to many readers familiar with Hikmet’s
repeated espousal of materialism. In his Quatrains in which he sought to express
materialism through a form used more traditionally for spiritual verse, he addresses the
poet Rumi.
Hey Rumi, what you saw was the real world, not a ‘mirage’,
infinite, not created, a Designer not the ‘Prime Cause’.
The most powerful quatrain left from your burning flesh
Is not the one that says ‘all Forms are shadows.’
Yet like Rumi he finds a sublime transcendence through physical desire.
She kissed me. ‘These lips are as real as the universe, she said.
‘This musky perfume flying from my hair is no invention,’ she said.
‘Look into the skies or into my eyes:
even if the blind cannot see them, still there are stars,’ she said.

In 1949 an international committee, which included Sartre and Picasso, was formed to
campaign for his release. The following year he shared the World Peace Prize with Paul
Robeson and Pablo Neruda. Despite having recently suffered a heart attack Hikmet went
on hunger strike and when Turkey’s first democratically elected government took office
he was granted amnesty and released. However he was still hounded by the state and
after little over a year fled to the Soviet Union where he became an active member of the
World Peace Council sharing a platform with Sartre, Neruda, Picasso and Aragon. He
met Shostakovitch and Castro, and traveled widely throughout Eastern Europe and
beyond from Rome, Paris and Peking to Havana and Tanganyika. Yet his celebrity
couldn’t salve the wounds of exile – in 1959 Turkey stripped him of his citizenship.
He was as uncompromisingly romantic in his love life as in his work. He’d married
young and had the marriage annulled before going to study in the Soviet Union in the
1920s. He divorced his second wife and remarried while in prison. The Turkish
authorities wouldn’t allow his third wife and son to join him in the Soviet Union. In 1959
he married again.
As well as powerful political poems like The Japanese Fisherman, protesting against the
nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, he wrote many poems filled with the sadness of exile and
failed relationships. As he wrote in his poem Autobiography (1961) two years before his
death:
Some people are experts on plants, some on fish –
I am an expert on partings
Some people know the names of stars by heart
I know longings

Flaxen Hair is filled with an elegiac despair, for his lost nineteen-year-old self, for lost
loves,
How many times have I lost her and found her, how many times
and how many times again will I lose and find her.
The futurist exuberance of his youth soured, the city no longer a shining metaphor for
inevitable progress became a place haunted by the terrible ghost of loneliness.
One of the most beautiful cities in the world is emptied,
like a glove from which you have taken your hand,
now its lights went off like mirrors that cannot see you.
The Vltava water flows under the bridges like lost evenings.
The streets are empty,
curtains drawn in all the windows.
Trams pass by empty,
no drivers even or ticket collectors.
Cafes are empty,
so are the restaurants and bars.
He died in Moscow in 1963 and was buried there despite his wish to
be buried in an Anatolian village cemetery, under a plane tree.
Censorship couldn’t erase Hikmet from the Turkish cultural map. On
the contrary he is now widely read and has a mythic status. Much
more than a Turkish Mayakovsky, he is Turkey’s Byron - the poet as
romantic hero, as lover and fighter rather than mere pen pusher. His
work is popular and has even topped the charts when put to music by
Livanelli. He has a curious place in Turkish cultural life. His work is
both canonical and controversial, a site of contestation in Turkish
political and cultural life.
In 1993 Turkish Ministry of Culture to have placed an advertisement
in The Daily Newspaper Cumhuriyet (Republic) which ran "Nazim Hikmet is waiting for
you at the library” in order to encourage public use of the libraries and yet a week later
Cumhuriyet reported that six high school students had been detained in north-east Turkey
and held in police custody for five days after collecting signatures for a campaign to
posthumously restore Nazim Hikmet's citizenship. Two of the students were committed
to prison on charges of membership of an illegal organisation. The four who were
released complained that they had been interrogated under torture. (3)
Everything changes; everything stays the same. The Culture Ministry is keen to reinstate
his citizenship before the centenary celebrations they plan to co-host with Unesco. Half a
million signatures have been gathered in support of the campaign and the Prime Minister
Bulent Ecevit is known to be an admirer of his poetry. However Cabinet Ministers from
the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) refuse to sign a decree restoring his citizenship.
"There would be trouble from our party supporters if I signed this decree," said the
communications minister, Enis Oksuz. "He [Hikmet] was anti-Ataturk [the founder of
modern Turkey] and anti-state. I will not give back citizenship to someone who was a
traitor." (4) The final ugly irony is that Turkey’s most iconic, culturally innovative and
politically controversial poet isn’t officially a Turk at all, but a Polish citizen.

They’ve captured us, and threw us into jail:

me inside the walls,
you outside.
Hikmet wrote in 26th September 1945, one of his prison poems for Piraye.
But the worst thing is,
Consciously or unconsciously
to carry prison inside one.
His message carries beyond the walls, beyond his era, beyond Turkey.
Footnotes
(1) The most complete translation of Hikmet’s verse to date, by Mutlu Konuk and Randy
Blasing is only available in the US. Taner Baybars has published several short
selections and a few of Hikmet’s poems have appeared in the two major anthologies of
Turkish verse published in England, Nermin Menemcioglu’s Penguin Book of Turkish
Verse (Penguin 1978) and Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar’s Modern Turkish Poets (Rockingham
Press 1992).
(2) For a fuller account of Hikmet’s life see Saime Goksu and Edward Timms’
biography, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet (C. Hurst and Co.
1999)
(3) See www.indexoncensorship.org
(4) Chris Morris in The Guardian, Thursday February 22, 2001