Confessions of a Hooligan: Fifty Poems Book

NAZIM HIKMET: WRITING POETRY WITH ONE’S HEART

Literature is replete with stories of great artists who were hunted and persecuted during their lifetime for their ideologies and convictions. Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam and the Spanish poets Federico Garcia Lorca and Miguel Hernandez are some familiar names that immediately come to my mind. But I doubt whether any poet has suffered so much as Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), the first modern Turkish poet and one of the most important and influential figures in 20th-century Turkish literature.

A Romantic communist, Nazim Hikmet's life is the content of a legend.Hikmet served a thirteen-year jail term in Turkey, imprisoned primarily for speaking out as a communist against the economic situation of Turkey. It took an international campaign by leading artists and a hunger strike by Hikmet himself to obtain his release. Upon release in 1951, he shared Soviet Union’s International Peace Prize with Pablo Neruda. Irritated once again, the Turkish Government banished him forever and revoked his citizenship. This led to spending the rest of his life as an exile in Russia.

These hardships and the trials of WWII provided the raw material of adventure and suffering that informed and inspired his poetry. In the perfect oneness of his life and art, Hikmet emerges as a heroic figure. He was a revolution in life and literature, flouting Ottoman literary conventions and introducing free verse and colloquial language.

While going through much of his poetry, what struck me most is his deep humanism. He has that uncanny ability to vibe with any reader in any part of the universe. His poetry is imbued with rare sincerity, originality and passion for life. His is an authentic voice imbued with optimism even while sinking in darkness. I hope the poems I try to illustrate here will succeed in fathoming the essence of his poetry.

CUCUMBER

The snow is knee-deep in the courtyard
and still coming down hard:
it hasn't let up all morning.
We're in the kitchen.
On the table, on the oilcloth, spring —
on the table there's a very tender young cucumber,
pebbly and fresh as a daisy.

We're sitting around the table staring at it.
It softly lights up our faces,
and the very air smells fresh.
We're sitting around the table staring at it,
amazed
thoughtful
optimistic.

We're as if in a dream.
On the table, on the oilcloth, hope —
on the table, beautiful days,
a cloud seeded with a green sun,
an emerald crowd impatient and on its way,
loves blooming openly —
on the table, there on the oilcloth, a very tender young cucumber,
pebbly and fresh as a daisy.

The snow is knee-deep in the courtyard
and coming down hard.
It hasn't let up all morning.

The poet beautifully captures a hopeful and dreamy atmosphere in this quiet poem when a family sits around a table and watches a tender cucumber. The admiration of a cucumber because of its smell, its freshness and color leads him to much more tender and rapturous feelings . It evokes a million memories of the salad days of his life. How beautifully the poet ruminates on the emerald cucumber (with its teeming seeds) and hopes it to become the green sun in his life too. How wondrously the poet has used 'repetition' as a way to enhance the poetic message .This poem itself is worth an emerald.

As mentioned, Hikmet introduced modern poetic techniques in his poetry combining these with traditional and folk styles. Here is another poem that perfects his mastery of ‘repetition’ as a stylistic device and incidentally the theme of the poem itself is repetition. In utmost simplicity, the poet speaks to his lover about the innumerable repetitions one sees in nature. They are verily joy dancing in nature and without those voiceless, clueless and endless repetitions, our life is monochrome. As the poet affirms at the end, the key is, ‘to repeat without repeating’.

BACH’S CONCERTO NO. 1 IN C MINOR

Fall morning in the vineyard:
in row after row the repetition of knotty vines,
of clusters on the vines,
of grapes in the clusters,
of light on the grapes.

At night, in the big white house,
the repetition of windows,
each lit up separately.

The repetition of all the rain that rains
on earth, trees, and the sea,
on my hands, face, and eyes,
and of the drops crushed on the glass.

The repetition of my days
that are alike,
my days that are not alike.

The repetition of the thread in the weave,
the repetition in the starry sky,
and the repetition of “I love” in all languages,
and the repetition of the tree in the leaves,
and of the pain of living, which ends in an instant
on every deathbed.

The repetition in the snow -
the light snow,
the heavy wet snow,
the dry snow,
the repetition in the snow that whirls
in the blizzard that drives me off the road.

The children are running in the courtyard;
in the courtyard the children are running.
An old woman is passing by on the street;
on the street an old woman is passing by;
passing by on the street is an old woman.

At night, in the big white house,
the repetition of windows,
each lit up separately.

In the clusters, of grapes,
on the grapes, of light.

To walk toward the good, the just, the true,
to fight for the good, the just, the true,
to seize the good, the just, the true.

Your silent tears and smile, my rose,
your sobs and bursts of laughter, my rose,
the repetition of your shining white teeth when you laugh.

Fall morning in the vineyard:
in row after row the repetition of knotty vines,
of clusters on the vines,
of grapes in the clusters,
of light on the grapes,
of my heart in the light.

My rose, this is the miracle of repetition -
to repeat without repeating.

(PS: I have strived to maintain the syntax as given in the book. GR borderline format is unsuitable for maintaining syntax)

The increasingly breathless pace of his late poems such as in the one below conveys the never-ending agony of man in all corners of this universe and his eagerness and heroic temper to embrace the pain of all humanity. There is sense urgency in many of his poems as if time is accelerating for him and it hooks the reader.

ANGINA PECTORIS


If half my heart is here, doctor,
the other half is in China
with the army flowing
toward the Yellow river.
And, every morning, doctor,
every morning at sunrise my heart
is shot in Greece.
And every night, doctor,
when the prisoners are asleep and the infirmary is deserted,
my heart stops at a run-down old house
in Istanbul.

And then after ten years
all I have to offer my poor people
is this apple in my hand, doctor,
one red apple:
my heart.
And that, doctor, that is the reason
for this angina pectoris-
not nicotine, prison, or arteriosclerosis.
I look at the night through the bars,
and despite the weight on my chest
my heart still beats with the most distant stars.


There are poets who, while they love all the bounties and blessings of nature and life, advocate binding bond with their fellow human beings as their pivotal principle and Hikmet was one of them. In his style and humanistic vision, he can be compared with Neruda with whom he shared a deep kinship (Mayakovski could be cited as another people’s poet). In his touching “Last letter to my Son’, he gives the following advice.

From LAST LETTER TO MY SON

Don’t live in the world as if you were renting
or here only for the summer,
but act as if it was your father’s house. . .
Believe in seeds, earth, and the sea,
but people above all.
Love clouds, machines, and books,
but people above all.
Grieve
for the withering branch,
the dying star,
and the hurt animal,
but feel for people above all.
Rejoice in all the earth’s blessings –
darkness and light,
the four seasons,
but people above all.


The emotional directness and his fresh, down-to-earth imagery- e.g., "you must live with great seriousness / like a squirrel" or one red apple: / my heart" as in Angina Pectoris, night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain or the evening star / sparkling like a glass of water -are scintillating. No poet I know of today can compare with Nazim when it comes to the scope, range, and quality of his achievement and the freshness of his metaphors and imageries.

The Selected poems of Nazim Hikmet sensitively and carefully translated by Randy Blasing and his Turkish wife Mutlu Konuk is a treasure trove for poetry lovers . There are many wonderful long poems in this collection and some of my favourites happen to be the long ones like Letters from a Man in Solitary, 9-10 P.M. Poems, Since I Was Thrown Inside, On Living, Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison, Straw-Blond, Autobiography, and Things I Didn't Know I Loved. In the poem Things I Didn’t Know I loved the poet chronicles everything (earth, rivers, stars, flowers) with fresh eyes and records with awe that he didn’t know he loved them so intensely. The poem contains arresting passages like the one below.

From THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I LOVED

I’ve written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I’m going to the shadow play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather’s hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there’s a lantern in the servant’s hand
and I can’t contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky
I didn’t know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below
or whether I’m flying at their side

The most striking "aspect" of his life and work is the way he followed his heart wherever it led him, whether in his life or in his work, without regard for how he appeared to others or the world at large. He didn't keep up appearances but acted on his feelings in his life and put his feelings into poetry, no matter how he looked.

From ON LIVING

"This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . .
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived". . .|

A great poet feels the pulse of everything in this universe, even the cry of an earthworm. These final lines quoted above from the poem in three sections, with the emphatic “You must grieve for this right now” are as forceful as a commandment. Only by embracing mortality “right now”, by understanding and feeling life’s negation, can we live fully. Loving life to the point of grieving for its loss is inseparable from truly living – the half-rhyme of “loved” and “lived” in this translation underscores this.

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 - 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.

Nazim’s poetry is a celebration of our joys and sorrows. His poems are fresh, intimate, honest, uncompromising, gently humorous, musical, filled with longing and hope and refuse to let despair triumph in spite of outward circumstances. It is with a sense of euphoria that I recommend this marvelous poetry collection to all poetry lovers across the globe.