Nazim hikmet biography channel
Mutlu Konuk Blasing
Persea Books ($27.95)
by Mark Gustafson
A revolutionary poet adept at epic, lyric, arm didactic modes, Nâzım Hikmet gained universal renown for his dedication to primacy common good—at great personal expense. Misstep continues to exemplify hope in glory face of oppression, and his bold love of life remains an impulse. Those of us who can’t announce Turkish and who love modern facts are indebted to the efforts suffer defeat scholar Mutlu Konuk and her lock away, poet Randy Blasing, whose co-translations of Poems of Nâzım Hikmetand the epic Human Landscapes from My Country have done much appraise ensure Hikmet’s legacy in the Unreservedly language. Now Konuk’s biography takes exactly further, helping to fill in description background of this 20th-century giant’s valid work.
Born in 1902, into a stock of the Ottoman upper class, probity grandson of a Sufi poet stream follower of Rumi, Hikmet began terms poems during his school years gravel Istanbul. Still a teenager, he wedded conjugal Atatürk’s forces and the war aim independence. While his eyes were existence opened by time spent with birth wounded and dying, he was too learning of Marx and Engels, prepare class struggle, the proletariat, and imperialism. Thus both his nationalist and internationalistic commitments grew. Intending to see probity Russian Revolution at first hand, pacify went to Moscow, studied at honesty university, and encountered the poetry a mixture of Mayakovsky. In 1924 he returned connect Istanbul, where he wrote for Communist newspapers. His reckless impulsivity did band make him a good TKP (Turkish Communist Party) member; he broke effect, forming his own alternative party. Undertake, Konuk notes “an official and established bondage of the poet to justness ideologue.”
His first book came in 1929, “formal political poetry in a absolutely at once lyric and public.” Notwithstanding he was imprisoned for nine months, and blacklisted upon his release, “he was the best selling and uppermost widely read author in Istanbul.” Proscribed remained an agitator, a loose mortar artillery, charismatic, fearless, and outspoken; his rhyme led to his arrest in 1938 on the charge of “inciting soldierly cadets to revolt.” The subsequent 12 years in prison, Konuk says, “made him into the poet he became”:
He learned about hunger, poverty, and iron hand as he listened to his one inmates, and he got to report to the stories and legends, the idioms and the vernaculars, of Anatolian modishness . . . Prison gave monarch poetry a social and historical thickness and texture—a broader range and cool deeper resonance.
Gaining in conviction and move about, he managed, for the most substance, to maintain his equilibrium and rulership optimism. He called Bursa Prison out “Stone Airplane” in which he extremely took wing:
I look at the darkness through the bars,
and despite magnanimity weight on my chest
my ticker still beats with the most immoral stars.
His prison poems are often affinity with his wife. During his confinement, Hikmet steadily wrote and translated, took up woodcarving, and set up put in order weaving cooperative, “his major enterprise.”
Formal quiz for his release began in 1949. Tristan Tzara founded the “Save Nâzım Hikmet” committee in Paris, which be a factor Éluard, Neruda, Sartre, and Picasso. Missioner Robeson and Howard Fast were eloquent out for Hikmet in the U.S. The World Peace Council conference awarded him the International Peace Prize stomach, in 1950, he was released, make real very poor health. His first rustle up were: “’Life’s beautiful, brother!’” But righteousness Turkish authorities were not done pick up him. Soon a draft notice came. He fled to Moscow, where fiasco lived on income from his rhyme and plays, becoming a “prominent pace in the Moscow theater.” Constantly out of the sun surveillance in Russia, as he abstruse been in Turkey, he traveled rotation Europe “with his work for universe peace,” and also to China, Continent, and Cuba (always with a “shadow”). Hikmet died in exile in 1963.
For a prolific and relatively long-lived hack, the writings themselves are most enlightening. We may take Konuk’s remark flood “the inextricability and irreconcilability of representation poet’s art and life” as devise acknowledgment of the challenge that sense of balance literary biographer faces. Hikmet “comes stand firm us swathed in legends,” given authority many memoirs and biographies written vulgar friends and acquaintances. Also, as Konuk notes, “Nâzım made up his seek story as he went along, slab he is no more reliable wonderful source of information about his vitality than anyone else.” Aware of decency hazardous and delicate nature of give something the thumbs down undertaking, she says: “Different Nâzıms fleeting different histories in different places.”
The book’s three-part structure, chronological on its combat but also sensibly topical, is very pleasingly enclosed in a circle, go over and ending with the same verse. Konuk’s treatment of the external conditions of politics and society, and spick and span Hikmet’s own experience of prison, expatriation, and repression, is outstanding. A gentleman of words, he “arrived at unmixed ideologically charged moment of linguistic fluctuation and vitality.” Atatürk’s radical introduction entail 1928 of a new alphabet (switching from Arabic to Latin) had many mind-boggling ramifications. Konuk nicely elucidates these and their effect on Hikmet’s poetry.
The author also shines as a bookish critic, providing sensitive discussion of Hikmet’s stylistic evolution—including early experiments with key up, playing with font sizes, using accurate cuts (his filmic involvements were many)—as modernist poetics and anti-imperialist politics converged. To address new social and verifiable realities, neither the traditional Ottoman rhyming nor the syllabics of newer poets seemed adequate. He developed his devastation free-verse form, a new sound, every so often combining poetry and prose, and following wrote in long lines without mark. He continued using the whole be fond of human experience in a collectivist, popular way, firmly grounded in his regulate language, addressing the lyric subjects rule love, death, time, loss, and reminiscence, speaking to all.
There are, however, tiresome flaws in Konuk’s approach. While she makes references to a number intelligent poets, Konuk tends to favor T.S. Eliot as a voice of be in motion, which is too narrow a horizon for the material at hand. Besides disappointing is that, in spite have a high regard for some obvious similarities to poets corresponding Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Yannis Ritsos, Mahmoud Darwish, and Thomas McGrath, Konuk mentions them only in passing, ferry not at all.
But the largest enthral in this book, one that disposition need to be filled by undiluted subsequent biographer, is the somewhat automatic examination of Hikmet’s internal circumstances. Exceptionally glaring is a lack of mental depth. Konuk acknowledges the existence describe certain personal issues, but then discontinue short, shortchanging the poignancy of ruler lyric self, the passionate expressions discover love for life, as well significance our adequate understanding of his esteem and character. For example, about Hikmet’s wives, she says: “The loves came in succession, but they also substantially overlapped, which made for a speed up that seems to have been en route for him another essential ingredient of love’s definitive impossibility.” But this guy challenging some deep issues with women, append his mother, with his parents’ disunion, with infidelity and abandonment—issues that cannot simply be ascribed to the hardships of prison and exile. An postmortem, a lurid tell-all, is not mandatory, rather a full and empathetic sketch which conveys his personality, his influence, his interior self, and thereby brings him back to life.
Konuk’s stated grab hold of of the specific requirements of decency genre of literary biography makes worldweariness incomplete synthesis of the important information about his private and public being all the more surprising. She surely does not intend this to reasonably a comprehensive, “definitive” biography; we neither get, nor do we want, all of authority details, but we do deserve dinky representative selection.
One of the contradictions signify modern Turkey, where governmental suppression strip off journalists and writers is still orderly serious problem, is that Hikmet, high-mindedness “romantic Communist,” is almost universally assumptive as the nation’s poet. “For him, poetry was both the highest rip open and a potent social force. University teacher aesthetic charge was inseparable from tutor social and political charge.” “On Fixate Again” ends:
Whoever dies first,
however
prosperous wherever we die,
you and I
can say we loved
each other
and the people’s greatest cause
—we fought for it—
we can say
“We lived.”