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.
Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.
National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Until he picked up a pen, Turkish poetry had for centuries been heavily stylized and effete. He was the first writer to produce poetry in conversational, colloquial Turkish, and although his books were banned for years, he was the first to touch the hearts of ordinary Turks, In his approach to literature and life he was comparable to Walt Whitman, a poet of the common man who scorned conventional patriotism but still insisted that he loved his country beyond all reason.
The works Nazim produced in the s have lost none other freshness. Today they speak to Turks as poignantly as ever, like this one written in the Istanbul House of Detention:. Nothing lifts my spirits like its songs and tobacco… My county: goats on the Ankara plain, the sheen of their long blond silky hair. The succulent plump hazelnuts of Giresun.
Amasya apples with fragrant red cheeks, olives, figs, melons, and bunches and bunches of grapes all colors, then plows, and black oxen, and then my people, ready to embrace with the wide-eyed joy of children anything modern, beautiful and good — my honest, hard-working, brave people, half full, half hungry, half slaves…. Nazim was strongly attracted to the epic form, and he first embraced it in a long elegy to Sheikh Bedreddin, a fourteenth-century mystic whose egalitarian ideals led him to foment an ill-fated rebellion against the Ottoman Sultan.
When military cadets were found to be reading it in secret, Nazim was arrested and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on charges that he was inciting the army to rebel. He spent the next thirteen years in jail, producing not only a stream of poems but also translations of Italian librettos for the Ankara State Opera.
This was a wonderful example of how the Turkish state worked and sometimes still works; while a branch of government was imprisoning him, another was paying him to help bring masterpieces of European culture to eager Turkish audiences. The army, however, was not through with him. Soon after his release he was ordered to report for military service despite the fact that he was forty-eight years old and sick. Surmising that he would never survive his service, he fled across the Black Sea to the Soviet Union, where he lived for the rest of his life.
There he was embraced by Communist leaders and wrote crass poems in homage to Lenin and Stalin. After the Turkish authorities stripped him of his citizenship, though, he alienated his hosts by turning down their offer for Soviet citizenship and accepting a Polish offer instead, honoring a Polish ancestor who had fought in anti-Russian uprisings during the eighteenth century.
In his prison poems, Nazim had often reflected on the possibility that he would one day be sentenced to die and summarily executed:. Death — a body swinging from a rope. As it turned out, however, he died in Moscow, never having been allowed to return home to the land he loved.
A month later, he was stripped of his Turkish citizenship. Lust auf Lecker Newsletter? Your lover is a communist, ten years long a prisoner, triste in the fortress of Bursa. Above the sea, a colourful cloud, upon its face, a silver ship, within it, yellow fish, on its floor, blue seaweed, on its shore, a naked man, stops to ponder.
Should I be a cloud or perhaps a ship? Should I be a fish or perhaps seaweed? Keywords: nazim hikmet poem poet politics. Anti-racism now and everywhere!
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