Nazim Hikmet-Trans. By: Ahmad Poori
Nazim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902 in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen.
Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended the university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924 he returned to Turkey, but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems.
In 1928 a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism.
After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, he came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry.
Many of his works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (2009), Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (1975), The Day Before Tomorrow (1972), The Moscow Symphony (1970), and Selected Poems (1967). In 1936 he published Seyh Bedreddin destani (“The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin”) and Memleketimden insan manzaralari (“Portraits of People from My Land”).
Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.
“My only one!In your last letter "My head aches my heart is stunned!" you say."If they hang you, if I lose you;" you say; "I can't live!"You'll live my dearest wife, like a black smoke in the wind my memory will vanish;you'll live, the red-haired sister of my heartat most one year it lasts in the twentieth century the grief of death..Deatha dead body swinging on a rope.My heart doesn't accept such a death..Butbe sure that, my love,if some pitiable gypsy's hairy black spider like hand slips the rope around my neck,to see the fear in my blue eyes they'll look in vain at Nâzım!And I,in the twilight of my last morning,shall see my friends and you,and carry only the griefof an unfinished song to the soil...My wife!Good hearted,golden coloured,with eyes sweeter than honey, my bee;why did I write you that they want to hang me,the trial is in the first stepand they don't pluck like a turnip the head of a man.Come, forget them all.These are so far away probabilities.If you have some money buy me a flannel underwear,my sciatica is acting up.And don't forget that alwaysthere should be good thoughts in the mind of a prisoner's wife.”