Nâzım Hikmet

Nâzım Hikmet Ran
Born Nâzım Hikmet
(1902-01-15)15 January 1902[1]
Salonica, Ottoman Empire (today Thessaloniki, Greece)
Died 3 June 1963(1963-06-03) (aged 61)
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Occupation Poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, memoirist
Signature

Nâzım Hikmet Ran (15 January 1902 – 3 June 1963),[2][3] commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet (Turkish pronunciation: [naːˈzɯm hicˈmet]) was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements".[4] Described as a "romantic communist"[5] and "romantic revolutionary",[4] he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Family

According to Nâzım Hikmet, he was of paternal Turkish and maternal German, Polish, Georgian, Circassian and French descent.[6][7][8] Nâzım Hikmet's mother came from a distinguished, cosmopolitan family with predominantly Circassian (Adyghe) roots,[9][10] along with high social position and relations to Polish nobility. From his father's side, he had Turkish heritage.[11] His father, Hikmet Bey, was the son of Çerkes Nâzım Pasha,[12] after whom Nâzım Hikmet was named. His mother, Ayşe Celile Hanım, was of 3/8 Circassian, 2/8 Polish, 1/8 Serbian, 1/8 German, 1/8 French (Huguenot) ancestry.[13] Nazım’s maternal grandfather, Hasan Enver Pasha, was the son of Polish Mustafa Celalettin Pasha and Saffet Hanım who was born to Serbian Omar Pasha and Circassian Adviye Hanım (daughter of Çerkes Hafız Pasha). Mustafa Celalettin Pasha (born Konstanty Borzęcki herbu Półkozic) authored "Les Turcs anciens et modernes" in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), in 1869. This is considered one of the first works of national Turkist political thought.[10] Nâzım Hikmet's maternal grandmother, Leyla Hanım, was the daughter of Mehmet Ali Pasha, of French (Huguenot) and German origin, and Circassian Ayşe Sıdıka Hanım who was also a daughter of Çerkes Hafız Pasha.[14] His uncle, Enver Celalettin Pasha, was a member of the Ottoman Army General Staff. Nâzım Hikmet and Celile Hanım's cousins include Oktay Rifat Horozcu, a leading Turkish poet, and the statesman Ali Fuat Cebesoy, among others.[15]

Early life

Ran was born on 15 January 1902, in Salonica, where his father was serving as an Ottoman government official.[2][3] He attended the Taşmektep Primary School in the Göztepe district of Istanbul and later enrolled in the junior high school section of the prestigious Galatasaray High School in the Beyoğlu district, where he began to learn French; but in 1913 he was transferred to the Numune Mektebi in the Nişantaşı district. In 1918 he graduated from the Ottoman Naval School on Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands located in the Sea of Marmara. His school days coincided with a period of political upheaval, during which the Ottoman government entered the First World War, allying itself with Germany. For a brief period he was assigned as a naval officer to the Ottoman cruiser Hamidiye; however in 1919 he became seriously ill and, not being able to fully recover, was exempted from naval service in 1920.

In 1921, together with his friends Vâlâ Nûreddin (Vâ-Nû), Yusuf Ziya Ortaç and Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel, he went to İnebolu in Anatolia in order to join the Turkish War of Independence; from there he (together with Vâlâ Nûreddin) walked to Ankara, where the Turkish liberation movement was headquartered. In Ankara they were introduced to Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) who wanted the two friends to write a poem that would invite and inspire Turkish volunteers in Istanbul and elsewhere to join their struggle. This poem was much appreciated, and Muhittin Bey (Birgen) decided to appoint them as teachers to the Sultani (high-college) in Bolu, rather than sending them to the front as soldiers. However, their communist views were not appreciated by the conservative officials in Bolu, and so the two decided to go to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to witness the results of the Russian Revolution of 1917, arriving there on 30 September 1921. In July 1922 the two friends went to Moscow, where Ran studied Economics and Sociology at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the early 1920s. There, he was influenced by the artistic experiments of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, as well as the ideological vision of Lenin.[5]

Style and achievements

Despite writing his first poems in syllabic meter, Nazım Hikmet distinguished himself from the "syllabic poets" in concept. With the development of his poetic conception, the narrow forms of syllabic verse became too limiting for his style and he set out to seek new forms for his poems.

He was influenced by the young Soviet poets who advocated Futurism. On his return to Turkey, he became the charismatic leader of the Turkish avant-garde, producing streams of innovative poems, plays and film scripts.[5] Breaking the boundaries of syllabic meter he changed his form and began writing in free verse, which harmonised with the rich vocal properties of the Turkish language.

He has been compared by Turkish and non-Turkish men of letters to such figures as Federico García Lorca, Louis Aragon, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Pablo Neruda. Although Ran's work bears a resemblance to these poets and owes them occasional debts of form and stylistic device, his literary personality is unique in terms of the synthesis he made of iconoclasm and lyricism, of ideology and poetic diction.[4]:19

Many of his poems have been set to music by the Turkish composer Zülfü Livaneli. A part of his work has been translated into Greek by Yiannis Ritsos, and some of these translations have been arranged by the Greek composers Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos.

Later life and legacy

Ran's imprisonment in the 1940s became a cause célèbre among intellectuals worldwide; a 1949 committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre campaigned for his release.[16]

Nazim Hikmet

On 8 April 1950, Ran began a hunger strike in protest against the Turkish parliament's failure to include an amnesty law in its agenda before it closed for the upcoming general election. He was then transferred from the prison in Bursa, first to the infirmary of Sultanahmet Jail in Istanbul, and later to Paşakapısı Prison.[17] Seriously ill, Ran suspended his strike on 23 April, the National Sovereignty and Children's Day. His doctor's request to treat him in hospital for three months was refused by officials. So, as his imprisonment status had not changed, he resumed his hunger strike on the morning of 2 May.[16]

Ran's hunger strike caused a stir throughout the country. Petitions were signed and a magazine named after him was published. His mother, Celile, began a hunger strike on 9 May, followed by renowned Turkish poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rıfat the next day. In light of the new political situation after the 1950 Turkish general election, held on 14 May, the strike was ended five days later, on 19 May, Turkey's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day. He was finally released through a general amnesty law enacted by the new government.[16]

On 22 November 1950, the World Council of Peace announced that Nazım Hikmet Ran was among the recipients of the International Peace Prize, along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Pablo Neruda.[16]

Later on, Ran escaped from Turkey to Romania on a ship via the Black Sea, and from there moved to the USSR.

When the EOKA struggle broke out in Cyprus, Ran believed that the population of Cyprus would be able to live together peacefully, and called on the Turkish minority to support the Greek Cypriots' demand for an end to British rule.[18][19]

Persecuted for decades by the Republic of Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Ran died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963 at 6.30 am while picking up a morning newspaper at the door of his summer house in Peredelkino, far away from his beloved homeland.[20] He is buried in Moscow's famous Novodevichy Cemetery, where his imposing tombstone is still today a place of pilgrimage for Turks and many others from around the world. His final wish, never carried out, was to be buried under a plane-tree (platanus) in any village cemetery in Anatolia.

Despite his persecution by the Turkish state, Nâzım Hikmet has always been revered by the Turkish nation. His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, i.e. Human Landscapes from my Country), as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı Destanı, i.e. The Epic of the War of Independence), and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvâyi Milliye, i.e. Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest patriotic literary works of Turkey.

Ran had Polish and Turkish citizenship. The latter was revoked in 1959, and restored in 2009.[21][22] His family has been asked if they want his remains repatriated from Russia.[23]

Patronage

During the 1940s, as he was serving his sentence at Bursa Prison, he used to paint. There, he met a young inmate named İbrahim Balaban. Ran discovered Balaban's talent in drawing, gave all his paint and brushes to him, and encouraged him to continue with painting. Ran influenced the peasant, and educated him, who had finished only a three-grade village school, in forming his own ideas in the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics and politics. Ran admired Balaban much, and referred to him in a letter to the novelist Kemal Tahir as "his peasant painter" (Turkish: Köylü ressam). Their contact remained also after they were released from the prison.[24][25]

Selected works

I come and stand at every door

The poem (titled Ölü Kızcağız [Dead Little Girl] on the photo) typewritten by Nâzım Hikmet Ran himself and the letter of Japanese children to him presenting their thanks

Ran's poem Kız Çocuğu (The Girl Child) conveys a plea for peace from a seven-year-old girl, ten years after she has perished in the atomic bomb attack at Hiroshima. It has achieved popularity as an anti-war message and has been performed as a song by a number of singers and musicians both in Turkey and worldwide;[26] it is also known in English by various other titles, including I come and Stand at Every Door, I Unseen and Hiroshima Girl.[27]

Turkish
Bengali
Greek
English

The song was later covered by

Japanese

In 2005, famous Amami Ōshima singer Chitose Hajime collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto by translating Kız Çocuğu into Japanese, retitling it Shinda Onna no Ko [死んだ女の子]). It was performed live at the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on the eve of the 60th Anniversary (5 August 2005) of Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The song later appeared as a bonus track on Chitose's album Hanadairo in 2006.

Nepali

Suman Pokhrel translated some of Ran's poems into Nepali. Those translations are collected in an anthology entitled Manpareka Kehi Kavita and some among them are published online as well.[31][32]

On the soldier worth 23 cents

How do you propose to get it? Do you want to get it through the cooperation of Turkey where the men in the ranks get 23 cents a month the first year and 32 cents the second year, or do you want to get an American division and equip it and send it over to Turkey which would cost you 10 times as much?
John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State, 1955

He also opposed the Korean War, in which Turkey participated. After the Senate address of John Foster Dulles, who served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, where he valued Turkish soldiers at 23 cents a month[33] compared with the lowest echelon U.S. soldiers at $70,[34] Nazım Hikmet Ran wrote a protest poem criticising the policies of the United States. This poem is titled "23 Sentlik Askere Dair" (On the soldier worth 23 cents).

In popular culture

Bibliography

Plays

Novels

Poems

Poetry

Partial list of translated works in English

Partial list of translated works in other languages

Ancestry

See also

References

  1. Radikal.com.tr
  2. 1 2 Encyclopædia Britannica: Nazım Hikmet (Turkish author)
  3. 1 2 Nazım Hikmet Kültür ve Sanat Vakfı
  4. 1 2 3 Selected poems, Nazim Hikmet translated by Ruth Christie, Richard McKane, Talat Sait Halman, Anvil press Poetry, 2002, p.9 ISBN 0-85646-329-9
  5. 1 2 3 Saime Goksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet, St. Martin's Press, New York ISBN 0-312-22247-5
  6. "Vera tulyakova hikmet nazım la son söyleşimiz". www.issuu.com. Hüseyin Şenol. Retrieved 2015-05-02.
  7. Vera Tulyakova Hikmet, Nâzımʾla söyleşi, Cem Yayınevi, 1989, p. 257.
  8. Hikmet Akgül, Nâzım Hikmet: siyasi biyografi, Çiviyazilari, 2002, p. 50.
  9. Gündem, Mehmet (6 October 2004). "Atatürk'ü Samsun'da koruyanlar Çerkez'di". Milliyet (in Turkish) (Istanbul). Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  10. 1 2 Guillet, Marc (15 January 2012). "Nâzım Hikmet's Tea Garden in Kadıköy". Enjoy-Istanbul.com. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  11. Tulyakova Hikmet, Vera (1989). Nâzım'la Söyleşi (in Turkish). Translated by Ataol Behramoğlu. Cem Yayınevi.
  12. Lussu, Joyce. "Nazim Hikmet". Casa della poesia. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  13. Kalyoncu, Cemal A. (15 June 2009). "Nâzım değil, imajı cezalandırıldı" [Not Nâzım himself, but his reputation was punished]. Aksiyon (in Turkish) (Istanbul: Feza Publications). Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  14. Kalyoncu, Cemal A. (12 September 2005). "Atatürk ile Paşaların arasını açmak istediler" [Desired to drive a wedge between Atatürk and pashas]. Aksiyon (in Turkish) (Istanbul: Feza Publications). Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  15. Çilek, Özgür (18 February 2001). "Nâzım’ın gen haritası" [Nâzım’s gene map]. Hürriyet (in Turkish) (Istanbul). Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  16. 1 2 3 4 "Nazım Hikmet". Ministry of Culture. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
  17. "Life Story -5". Nazım Hikmet Ran. Retrieved 2010-02-07.
  18. Greek newspaper I Avgi, 17 January 1955 and Phileleftheros, 31 March 2007:
    Ran sent a message to the Turks of Cyprus emphasizing that Cyprus was always Greek. [...] (The Turkish Cypriots) must support the Greek Cypriots' struggle for liberation from British imperialism. [...] Only when the British imperialists leave the island will its Turkish residents be truly free. [...] Those who encourage Turks to oppose Greeks actually only support the interest of the foreign ruler.
  19. "Bloody Truth pg.218" (PDF). Movement For Justice And Freedom in Cyprus.
  20. Nazim Hikmet
  21. "Nazım'la ilgili girişim iade-i itibar değil". CNN Turk (in Turkish). 10 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-11.
  22. "Nazım Hikmet Ran’ın Türk Vatandaşlığından Çıkarılmasına İlişkin 25/7/1951 Tarihli ve 3/13401 Sayılı Bakanlar Kurulu Kararının Yürürlükten Kaldırılması Hakkında Karar" (Press release) (in Turkish). Başbakanlık Mevzuatı Geliştirme ve Yayın Genel Müdürlüğü. 10 January 2009. 2009/14540. Retrieved 2009-01-11.
  23. "Nazım yeniden Türk vatandaşı oluyor". Radikal (in Turkish). 5 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-05. |section= ignored (help)
  24. "İbrahim Balaban celebrates six decades of art in latest exhibition". Today's Zaman. 2011-01-13. Retrieved 2014-05-02.
  25. Genç, Türkan (2012-04-08). "Bursa: Tarihin İçinde Zamanın Ötesinde - Şair Baba Nazım'ın Köylü Ressamı: İbrahim Babaan" (in Turkish). Time Out Bursa. Retrieved 2014-05-02.
  26. 1 2 http://www.springsteenlyrics.com/lyrics/i/icomeandstandateverydoor.php
  27. http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch-recent.html
  28. Fazil Say: Kız Cocuğu on YouTube
  29. Seeger describes the story behind his version of the song in his Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (A Musical Autobiography) (1993): "In the late '50's I got a letter: 'Dear Pete Seeger: I've made what I think is a singable translation of a poem by the Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet. Do you think you could make a tune for it? (Signed), Jeanette Turner.' I tried for a week. Failed. Meanwhile I couldn't get out of my head an extraordinary melody put together by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who had put a new tune to a mystical ballad The Great Silkie from the Shetland Islands north of Scotland. Without his permission I used his melody for Hikmet's words. It was wrong of me. I should have gotten his permission. But it worked. The Byrds made a good recording of it, electric guitars and all." http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch-recent.html
  30. "Pete Seeger Marks 68th Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing By Singing...". democracynow. youtube. 9 August 2013. Retrieved 20 September 2013.
  31. http://www.samakalinsahitya.com/index.php?show=detail&art_id=5254
  32. http://www.samakalinsahitya.com/index.php?show=detail&art_id=5268
  33. United States Congress. Senate Committee on Appropriations (1955). Legislative-judiciary Appropriations. U.S. Govt. Print. Off. p. 87.
  34. United States Congress, Committee on Foreign Relations (1951). Mutual Security Act of 1951. U.S. Govt. Print. Off. p. 60.
  35. Sofia Rotaru and children's chorus — We'll Give the Globe to the Children on YouTube
  36. www.notadotradutor.com/edicoes.html

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