Nazim Hikmet [1902-1963] was a poet, playwright and novelist.  He was the first modern poet from Turkey.  He was a fervent nationalist patriot whose work was banned in his own country while he was forced to live in exile.  He was a socialist whose views went beyond borders and race.  As one of the greatest international poets of the twentieth century, his poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.Nazim was born in 1902, in Salonika, Turkey, which is now part of Greece. It was the westernmost major city of the Ottoman Empire. His father was a government official, his mother was an artist and his grandfather, who was the governor of Salonika, was a poet. He attended primary school in the Göztepe district of Istanbul, then studied at the prestigious Galatasaray High School. While he was in high school, Turkey went through a period of political upheaval as the Ottoman government entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Hikmet enrolled at the Naval Academy but was given a medical discharge after suffering repeated bouts of pleurisy. He had his first poems published when he was seventeen.

Hikmet left for eastern Turkey during the Allied occupation of Istanbul and taught school in Anatolia. In 1922, he had a brief marriage that failed and was annulled. He became disillusioned by the political environment during the Nationalist struggle and crossed the border into Russia and made his way to Moscow. He was drawn to the Russian Revolution and its promise of social justice. He was accepted into the Department of Economic and Social Studies at the University of Moscow. After the Turkish War of Independence in 1924, he returned to Turkey. He was arrested soon after his return for working on a leftist magazine. In 1926, while Hikmet was in Istanbul, the Ankara Independence Tribunal sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor and exile “in absentia” for one of his poems. He learned of this and managed to escape back to Russia, where he continued writing. A general amnesty for political offenders was decreed in 1928. Hikmet returned to Turkey, but was immediately arrested and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. His sentence was reduced by one and a half years in 1933 by another amnesty and he was released.

Because of his communist beliefs, Hikmet was under constant surveillance by the Turkish secret police and spent five of the next ten years in prison because of various trumped-up charges. During the years of 1929 through 1936 he published nine books of poetry, became the charismatic leader of the Turkish avant-garde and revolutionized Turkish poetry. He also published several plays and novels and worked as a bookbinder, proofreader, journalist, translator, and screenwriter to support an extended family that included his second wife, her two children, and his widowed mother.

His freedom came to and end in 1938 when the Court of the Military Academy sentenced Nazim Hikmet to 15 years for his supposed subversive activities among its student body and the Naval Academy Special Court added a sentence of 20 years for the same offense. Additional sentences delivered by the courts brought the total sentence to 61 and a half years.

In prison, Hikmet’s poetry reflected the seriousness and steadfastness of a spirit that could not be broken. He produced some of his greatest work between the years of 1941 and 1945 while in prison. He sent them in letters to his family and friends and his poems were circulated in manuscript. He also learned such crafts as weaving and woodworking in order to support himself and his family. In the late Forties, while still in prison, he divorced his second wife and married for a third time. In 1949 an international committee was formed in Paris to campaign for Hikmet’s release. In 1950, he went on an eighteen-day hunger strike, despite a recent heart attack. In 1951, he was awarded the International Peace Prize by the World Peace Council. When Turkey’s first democratically elected government came to power, he was released in a general amnesty.

Within a year after his freedom, his persecution had resumed. There were two attempts to murder him (with cars, in the narrow streets of Istanbul). Then the government ordered him to do military service on the Russian frontier at the age of fifty. It would surely have killed him so he escaped, across the Bosphorus in a tiny motorboat on a stormy night. He was finally rescued from the storm by a Rumanian cargo ship. Hikmet never returned to Turkey again and spent the rest of his life in Poland, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union as a political refugee working for the ideals of world Communism. He was given a house in the writer’s colony of Peredelkino outside the city of Moscow. The Turkish government denied his wife and child permission to join him. Although he suffered a second heart attack in 1952, Hikmet traveled widely during his exile, visiting not only Eastern Europe but Rome, Paris, Havana, Peking, and Tanganyika. He was stripped of his Turkish citizenship and chose to become a citizen of Poland. In 1959, he married his third wife.

While in exile he had more poetry published in various countries and translation of his work appeared throughout Europe. Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in June of 1963. He was buried in Moscow’s famous Novodevichy Cemetery. None of his works were published or publicly sold in Turkey between 1938 and the reestablishment of multi-party goverment in 1965. After his death, Hikmet’s books gradually began to reappear in Turkey; in 1965 and 1966, for example, more than twenty of his books were published and major translations of his poetry have continued to appear in England, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, and the United States.

Despite his persecution by Turkey, Nazim Hikmet was always and always will be revered by the Turkish people. He wrote poems, plays, novels, letters and children’s stories which depicted the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland; the Turkish War of Independence and the Turkish revolutionaries. He was considered by some to be a romantic revolutionary and his works are considered to be among the greatest patriotic literature to come out of Turkey.

A Sad State Of Freedom

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you’ll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others—
you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you’re born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you’re free
with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom—
you have the freedom to become an air-base.

You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being—
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.

There’s neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life;
there’s no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.

Hymn To Life

The hair falling on your forehead
                          suddenly lifted.
Suddenly something stirred on the ground.
The trees are whispering
                       in the dark.
Your bare arms will be cold.

Far off
    where we can’t see,
         the moon must be rising.
It hasn’t reached us yet,
    slipping through the leaves
         to light up your shoulder.
But I know
          a wind comes up with the moon.
The trees are whispering.
Your bare arms will be cold.

From above,
from the branches lost in the dark,
                   something dropped at your feet.
You moved closer to me.
Under my hand your bare flesh is like the fuzzy skin of a fruit.
Neither a song of the heart nor “common sense”—
before the trees, birds, and insects,
my hand on my wife’s flesh
               is thinking.
Tonight my hand
                can’t read or write.
Neither loving nor unloving…
It’s the tongue of a leopard at a spring,
                                 a grape leaf,
                                     a wolf’s paw.
To move, breathe, eat, drink.
My hand is like a seed
                   splitting open underground.
Neither a song of the heart nor “common sense,”
neither loving nor unloving.
My hand thinking on my wife’s flesh
                             is the hand of the first man.
Like a root that finds water underground,
it says to me:
“To eat, drink, cold, hot, struggle, smell, color—
not to live in order to die
but to die to live…”

And now
as red female hair blows across my face,
as something stirs on the ground,
as the trees whisper in the dark,
and as the moon rises far off
                  where we can’t see,
my hand on my wife’s flesh
before the trees, birds, and insects,
I want the right of life,
of the leopard at the spring, of the seed splitting open—
                       I want the right of the first man.

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

I Love You

I love you
like dipping bread into salt and eating
Like waking up at night with high fever
and drinking water, with the tap in my mouth
Like unwrapping the heavy box from the postman
with no clue what it is
fluttering, happy, doubtful
I love you
like flying over the sea in a plane for the first time
Like something moves inside me
when it gets dark softly in Istanbul
I love you
Like thanking God that we live.

Translated by Süleyman Fatih Akgül