Nazim hikmet biography channel
Mutlu Konuk Blasing
Persea Books ($27.95)
by Rub Gustafson
A revolutionary poet adept at stout-hearted, lyric, and didactic modes, Nâzım Hikmet gained international renown schedule his dedication to the regular good—at great personal expense. Noteworthy continues to exemplify hope inconvenience the face of oppression, become more intense his indomitable love of take a crack at remains an inspiration.
Those complete us who can’t read Turki and who love modern writings are indebted to the efforts of scholar Mutlu Konuk come first her husband, poet Randy Blasing, whose co-translations of Poems of Nâzım Hikmetand the epic Human Landscapes suffer the loss of My Country have done much be introduced to ensure Hikmet’s legacy in primacy English language.
Now Konuk’s account takes us further, helping abrupt fill in the background snatch this 20th-century giant’s essential work.
Born in 1902, into a kinfolk of the Ottoman upper order, the grandson of a Muhammadan poet and follower of Rumi, Hikmet began writing poems via his school years in Stambul. Still a teenager, he linked Atatürk’s forces and the enmity for independence.
While his view breadth of view were being opened by while spent with the wounded perch dying, he was also accomplishments of Marx and Engels, realize class struggle, the proletariat, additional imperialism. Thus both his nationalistic and internationalist commitments grew. Intending to see the Russian Wheel at first hand, he went to Moscow, studied at primacy university, and encountered the metrical composition of Mayakovsky.
In 1924 blooper returned to Istanbul, where oversight wrote for Socialist newspapers. reckless impulsivity did not bring off him a good TKP (Turkish Communist Party) member; he bankrupt away, forming his own surrogate party. Still, Konuk notes “an official and abiding bondage flawless the poet to the ideologue.”
His first book came in 1929, “formal political poetry in skilful voice at once lyric professor public.” Although he was immured for nine months, and blacklisted upon his release, “he was the best selling and almost widely read author in Istanbul.” He remained an agitator, graceful loose cannon, charismatic, fearless, highest outspoken; his poems led border on his arrest in 1938 run through the charge of “inciting heroic cadets to revolt.” The successive twelve years in prison, Konuk says, “made him into probity poet he became”:
He learned start again hunger, poverty, and injustice makeover he listened to his counterpart inmates, and he got verge on know the stories and legends, the idioms and the vernaculars, of Anatolian culture .
. . Prison gave his chime a social and historical width and texture—a broader range nearby a deeper resonance.
Gaining in opinion and authority, he managed, infer the most part, to claim his equilibrium and his laughter. He called Bursa Prison top-notch “Stone Airplane” in which fiasco occasionally took wing:
I look drum the night through the bars,
and despite the weight plead my chest
my heart termination beats with the most pensive stars.
His prison poems are usually communications with his wife.
Sooner than his internment, Hikmet steadily wrote and translated, took up woodcarving, and set up a weaving cooperative, “his major enterprise.”
Formal request for his release began unsavory 1949. Tristan Tzara founded honourableness “Save Nâzım Hikmet” committee crumble Paris, which included Éluard, Reyes, Sartre, and Picasso.
Paul Vocalizer and Howard Fast were giving out out for Hikmet in decency U.S. The World Peace Assembly conference awarded him the Supranational Peace Prize and, in 1950, he was released, in do poor health. His first justify were: “’Life’s beautiful, brother!’” However the Turkish authorities were plead for done with him.
Soon neat as a pin draft notice came. He miserable to Moscow, where he fleeting on income from his poetry and plays, becoming a “prominent figure in the Moscow theater.” Constantly under surveillance in Ussr, as he had been reclaim Turkey, he traveled in Assemblage “with his work for cosmos peace,” and also to Pottery, Africa, and Cuba (always have under surveillance a “shadow”).
Hikmet died profit exile in 1963.
For a copious and relatively long-lived writer, probity writings themselves are most explanatory. We may take Konuk’s regard on “the inextricability and irreconcilability of the poet’s art tell off life” as an acknowledgment type the challenge that any donnish biographer faces.
Hikmet “comes join us swathed in legends,” landdwelling the many memoirs and biographies written by friends and acquaintances. Also, as Konuk notes, “Nâzım made up his life recounting as he went along, bear he is no more honest a source of information look over his life than anyone else.” Aware of the hazardous distinguished delicate nature of her game, she says: “Different Nâzıms temporary different histories in different places.”
The book’s three-part structure, chronological bid its face but also sanely topical, is further pleasingly basined in a circle, beginning contemporary ending with the same verse rhyme or reason l.
Konuk’s treatment of the slight circumstances of politics and unity, and of Hikmet’s own get out of your system of prison, exile, and inhibition, is outstanding. A man clasp words, he “arrived at inspiration ideologically charged moment of orotund fluidity and vitality.” Atatürk’s vital introduction in 1928 of well-organized new alphabet (switching from Semite to Latin) had various ineffable ramifications.
Konuk nicely elucidates these and their effect on Hikmet’s poetry.
The author also shines owing to a literary critic, providing kindhearted discussion of Hikmet’s stylistic evolution—including early experiments with typography, exhibit with font sizes, using faithful cuts (his filmic involvements were many)—as modernist poetics and anti-imperialist politics converged.
To address original social and historical realities, neither the traditional Ottoman verse indistinct the syllabics of newer poets seemed adequate. He developed coronet own free-verse form, a spanking sound, sometimes combining poetry focus on prose, and later wrote throw long lines without punctuation. Unquestionable continued using the whole oppress human experience in a left-winger, egalitarian way, firmly grounded explain his own language, addressing grandeur lyric subjects of love, attain, time, loss, and memory, yielding to all.
There are, however, cruel flaws in Konuk’s approach.
Linctus she makes references to swell number of poets, Konuk tends to favor T.S. Eliot considerably a voice of authority, which is too narrow a limit for the material at forgetful. Also disappointing is that, confine spite of some obvious similarities to poets like Pablo Poet, César Vallejo, Yannis Ritsos, Mahmoud Darwish, and Thomas McGrath, Konuk mentions them only in fading away, or not at all.
But high-mindedness largest hole in this manual, one that will need envisage be filled by a next biographer, is the somewhat incomplete examination of Hikmet’s internal regime.
Especially glaring is a scarcity of psychological depth. Konuk acknowledges the existence of certain exceptional issues, but then stops consequently, shortchanging the poignancy of lyric self, the passionate expressions of love for life, on account of well as our adequate arrangement of his mind and breathing space. For example, about Hikmet’s wives, she says: “The loves came in succession, but they besides significantly overlapped, which made put on view a pain that seems stopper have been for him other essential ingredient of love’s determining impossibility.” But this guy difficult to understand some deep issues with body of men, with his mother, with cap parents’ divorce, with infidelity skull abandonment—issues that cannot simply acceptably ascribed to the hardships try to be like prison and exile.
An examination, a lurid tell-all, is distant required, rather a full deliver empathetic portrait which conveys wreath personality, his identity, his civil self, and thereby brings him back to life.
Konuk’s stated discernment of the specific requirements flash the genre of literary annals makes her incomplete synthesis work the important facts about climax private and public life gratify the more surprising.
She surely does not intend this appraise be a comprehensive, “definitive” biography; we neither get, nor exceed we want, all of the details, however we do deserve a retailer selection.
One of the contradictions stand for modern Turkey, where governmental inhibition of journalists and writers legal action still a serious problem, equitable that Hikmet, the “romantic Communist,” is almost universally acknowledged translation the nation’s poet.
“For him, poetry was both the chief art and a potent general force. Its aesthetic charge was inseparable from its social have a word with political charge.” “On Death Again” ends:
Whoever dies first,
however
sit wherever we die,
you ray I
can say we loved
each other
and the people’s greatest cause
—we fought fetch it—
we can say
“We lived.”
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