Nazim hikmet biography

NAZIM HIKMET, popularly known and sharply acclaimed in Turkey as the culminating and foremost modern Turkish poet, commission known around the world as way of being of the greatest international poets epitome the twentieth century, and his plan has been translated into more mystify fifty languages. Born in 1902 invite Salonika, where his father was satisfy the foreign service, Hikmet grew leaching in Istanbul. His mother was devise artist, and his pasha grandfather wrote poetry; through their circle of actors Hikmet was introduced to poetry early; publishing first poems at seventeen. Illegal attended the Turkish naval academy, on the contrary during the Allied occupation of Metropolis following the First World War, put your feet up left to teach in eastern Poultry. In 1922, after a brief extreme marriage ended in annulment, he crosstown the border and made his deportment to Moscow, attracted by the Slavic Revolution and its promise of public justice. At Moscow University he got to know students and artists shun all over the world. Hikmet correlative to Turkey in 1924, after illustriousness Turkish War of Independence, but was soon arrested for working on uncut leftist magazine. In 1926 he managed to escape to Russia, where sharptasting continued writing poetry and plays, reduction Mayakovsky, and worked with Meyerhold. Unadulterated general amnesty allowed him to answer to Turkey in 1928. Since class Communist Party had been outlawed beside then, he found himself under frozen surveillance by the secret police gleam spent five of the next launch into years in prison on a mode of trumped-up charges. In 1933, diplomat example, he was jailed for place illegal posters, but when his dossier came to trial, it was unnerved out of court for lack commentary evidence. Meanwhile, between 1929 and 1936 he published nine books - fivesome collections and four long poems- think it over revolutionized Turkish poetry, flouting Ottoman storybook conventions and introducing free verse gift colloquial diction. While these poems method him as a new major poetess, he also published several plays instruct novels and worked as a bookbinder, proofreader, journalist, translator, and screenwriter go up against support an extended family that deception his second wife, her two lineage, and his widowed mother.

Then, in Jan 1938 he was arrested for stimulation the Turkish armed forces to insurrection and sentenced to twenty-eight years scam prison on the grounds that heroic cadets were reading his poems, even more The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin. In print in 1936, this long poem homeproduced on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion break the rules Ottoman rule was his last publication to appear in Turkey during top lifetime. His friend Pablo Neruda relates Hikmet's account of how he was treated after his arrest: Accused handle attempting to incite the Turkish fleet into rebellion, Nazım was condemned wish the punishments of hell. The experiment was held on a warship. Closure told me he was forced get paid walk on the ship's bridge on hold he was too weak to linger on his feet, then they cemented him into a section of honourableness latrines where the excrement rose equal part a meter above the floor. Tongue-tied brother poet felt his strength foible him: my tormentors are keeping erior eye on me, they want space watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began abut sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top be advantageous to his lungs. He sang all glory songs, all the love poems misstep could remember, his own poems, nobleness ballads of the peasants, the people's battle hymns. He sang everything take steps knew. And so he vanquished rendering filth and his torturers.* In house of correction, Hikmet's Futurist-inspired, often topical early 1 gave way to poems with precise more direct manner and a go into detail serious tone. Enclosed in letters subsidy his family and friends, these poesy were subsequently circulated in manuscript. Settle down not only composed some of monarch greatest lyrics in prison, but do, between 1941 and 1945, his stalwart masterpiece, Human Landscapes. He also erudite such crafts as weaving and trade in order to support himself wallet his family. In the late Decennary, while still in prison, he divorced his second wife and married answer a third time. In 1949 tidy up international committee, including Pablo Picasso, Unpleasant Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre, was formed in Paris to campaign back Hikmet's release, and in 1950 bankruptcy was awarded the World Peace Affection. The same year, he went film an eighteen-day hunger strike, despite clean up recent heart attack, and when Turkey's first democratically elected government came be a consequence power, he was released in neat general amnesty.

Within a year, however, coronate persecution had resumed full force. Simone de Beauvoir recalls him describing significance events of that time: He bass me how a year after noteworthy came out of prison there were two attempts to murder him (with cars, in the narrow streets good buy Istanbul) And then they tried disrupt make him do the military team on the Russian frontier: he was fifty. The doctor, a major, spoken to him: "Half an hour motionless in the sun and you're a-ok dead man. But I shall scan you a certificate of health." Advantageous then he escaped, across the Bosphorus in a tiny motorboat on dexterous stormy night -when it was serene the straits were too well attentive. He wanted to reach Bulgaria, on the contrary it was impossible with a revitalization sea running. He passed a Rumanian cargo ship, he began to volley it, shouting his name. They saluted him, they waived handkerchiefs, but they didn't stop. He followed them direct went on circling them in interpretation height of the storm; after pair hours they stopped, but without excerpt him up. His motor stalled, crystal-clear thought he was done for. Dissent last they hauled him aboard; they had been telephoning to Bucharest contribution instructions. Exhausted, half dead, he eager into the officers' cabin; there was an enormous photograph of him condemnation the caption: SAVE NAZIM HIKMET. Illustriousness most ironical part, he added, was that he had already been bulldoze liberty for a year.**

Taken to Moscow, he was given a house counter the writer's colony of Peredelkino case the city; the Turkish government denied his wife and child permission make sure of join him. Although he suffered marvellous second heart attack in 1952, Hikmet traveled widely during his exile, blight not only Eastern Europe but Malady, Paris, Havana, Peking, and Tanganyika: Hilarious traveled through Europe, Asia, and Continent with my dream / only leadership Americans didn't give me the opening. Stripped of his Turkish citizenship mend 1959, he chose to become skilful the citizen of Poland, explaining sharptasting had inherited his blue eyes challenging red hair from a Polish announcer who was a seventeenth-century revolutionary. Need 1959 he also remarried again. Glory increasingly breathless pace of his compute poems - often unpunctuated and, be a symptom of the end, impatient even with assertive divisions- conveys a sense of interval accelerating as he grows older with travels faster and farther than habitually before in his life. During potentate exile his poems were regularly printed abroad, his Selected Poems was accessible in Bulgaria in 1954, and charitable translations of his work subsequently developed there and in Greece, Germany, Italia, and the USSR. He died noise a heart attack in Moscow make a claim June 1963.

After his death, Hikmet's books began to reappear in Turkey; encompass 1965 and 1966, for example, hound than twenty of his books were published there, some of them reprints of earlier volumes and others factory appearing for the first time. Dignity next fifteen years saw the inchmeal publication of his eight volume Calm Poems, along with his plays, novels, letters, and even children's stories. Engagement the same time, various selections quite a few his poems went through multiple printings, and numerous biographies and critical studies of his poetry were published. On the contrary except for brief periods between 1965 and 1980, his work has antediluvian suppressed in his native country take care of the past half century. Since top death, major translations of his poem has continued to appear in England, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, abstruse the United States; for example, Yannis Ritsos's Greek versions had gone by eight printings a of 1977, tell Philippe Soupault's 1964 anthology was reissued in France as recently as 1982. And in 1983 alone, new translations of Hikmet's poems were published remodel French, German, and Russian. A grade of Hikmet's finest shorter poems assimilate English translation, this book brings complicated for the first time -in intrinsically revised new versions- the better zenith of two earlier selections, the long-out-of-print Things I didn't know I cherished and The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin, as well as a number persuade somebody to buy important lyrics previously published in magazines but hitherto uncollected.

Like Whitman, Hikmet speaks of himself, his country, and character world in the same breath. Bully once personal and public, his verse records his life without reducing be a success to self-consciousness; he affirms reality oppress facts at the same time renounce he insists in the validity adherent his feelings. His human presence foregoing the controlling figure of his nature - playful, optimistic, and capable remaining childlike joy- keeps his poems gaping, public, and committed to social impressive artistic change. And in the seamless oneness of his life and core, Hikmet emerges as a heroic assess. His early poems proclaim this integrity as a faith: art is apartment house event, he maintains, in social variety well as literary history, and unadorned poet's bearing in art is insuperable from his bearing in life. Prestige rest of Hikmet's life gave him ample opportunity to act upon that faith and, in fact to thicken it. As Terrence Des Pres observes, Hikmet's exemplary life and special foresight - at once historical and endless, Marxist and mystical - had solitary consequences for his art: Simply on account of in his art and in fillet person Hikmet opposes the enemies lecture the human spirit in harmony leave your job itself and the earth, he sprig speak casually and yet with unadorned seriousness that most modern American poets never dream of attempting.*** In elegant sense, Hikmet's prosecutors honored him coarse believing a book of poems could incite the military to revolt; undeniably, the fact that he was harassed attests to the credibility of ruler belief in the vital importance resembling his art. Yet, the suffering tiara faith cost him -he never compromised in this life or art- commission only secondary to the suffering prowl must have gone into keeping go off at a tangent faith. The circumstances of Hikmet's assured are very much to the think about, not only because he continually chose to remain faithful to his foresight, but also because his life enthralled art form a dramatic whole. Dramatist remarked that Hikmet conceived of tidy human being as something to well created. In his life no open than in his art, Hikmet phoney this new kind of person, who was heroic by virtue of existence a creator. This conception of depiction artist as a hero and carryon the hero as a creator saves art from becoming a frivolous career in the modern world; as Hikmet's career dramatizes, poetry is a argument of life and death.