Poems By Nazim Hikmet

by Nâzım Hikmet

NY 1954 1st (stated) Masses & Mainstream. Sm.8vo., 64pp., wraps. VG, closed tear on bottom of front wrap, heel of spine worn.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1954

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first English edition of Nazim Hikmet's poetry that I bought from a local shop that sells left wing ephemera and out of print books because from the table of contents online I saw that it had a few poems in it that my Poems of Nazim Hikmet by Persea Books doesn't. Unfortunately, Hikmet has been severely sidelined in the publishing industry. You can only really get the 3 book set from Persea and that's it. I don't know about other languages but when it comes to English, a lot of his stuff, such as plays, aren't readily available. There's a lot of repeats in here from the book I already own as well as some that apparently come from his verse novel Human Landscapes from My Country, and many are only excerpts of the full poems, but I still am grateful I managed to find this copy. He's one of my favorite poets and I wish I could read everything he's written. There're definitely some standouts in here. Aside from the one dedicated to Paul Robeson, I really love the excerpt from "The Epic of the Second World War" (1945) in which he describes the last days of a German soldier, the bravery of Red Army men, and the execution of teenaged partisan:

She looked at her bare feet:
they were swollen
they were frozen and chapped, and red all over.
But the partisan
was beyond pain.
She was wrapped in her anger and her faith
just as she was wrapped in her skin.
Her name was Zoya,
she told them she was called Tanya.
//
The year is no more 1941
the year is 1945.
Your people are not defending the gates of Moscow anymore
At the gates of Berlin your people,
our people,
all the people of an honest world,
are fighting.

"The Funniest Creature" (1948) laments the fact that millions of people choose cowardice and accept the oppression of themselves and others whereas "That Is The Question" (1951) tells you who the oppressor is: "All the wealth of the earth cannot quench their thirst/They want to make a lot of money/You have to kill, you have to die/For them to make a lot of money,/" and asks, "To be duped or not to be duped/That is the question./"

But without a doubt my favorite in here (ignoring the duplicate poems I'm already familiar with) is "A Sad Freedom" where he perfectly encapsulates the indoctrination we, under capitalism, undergo. We're told we're free. We believe we are free. The freest people to ever be free. He describes the falsehood of said freedom. The "freedom" to be jobless, to fight in their imperialist wars, to be screwed over by Wall Street. I love all of it but considering the west's foreign policy being carried out right now, I'll end on this:

You love your country as your dearest friend
Some day they sell it, perhaps to America,
And you too, with your great freedom.
With the freedom of becoming an air base
You are free.

**Again much of what's in here can be read from the Persea Books editions but if you want to read from this and perhaps get a taste before buying Poems of Nazim Hikmet (although I highly recommend you do), here's a link https://www.scribd.com/doc/16093710/P...