The Year of the Poet XI March 2024

The March 2024 issue of our international monthly book, The Year of the Poet, has its focus on the Turkish modernist poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, memoirist and activist Nazım Hikmet.

As a native from Turkey-born, raised and schooled there, who independently studied the books of this "Blue-Eyed Giant" after the ban on them was lifted in 1965, I assert that his life and works demand voluminous analyses . . . a task that cannot be completed within the constraints of this text. Being acutely aware of the challenge at hand, I shall resort to your understanding for the brevity of my words. A few factual glimpses on the personal and literary phenomenon that the name Nazım Hikmet embodies will have to suffice. One three-step-fact remains unchanged; namely, that Nazım is universally acknowledged as Turkey's exceptional modern poet but also as a world poet, and has exhausted-continues to exhaust-the research venues of countless minds at home as well as abroad.

Nazım Hikmet was born in 1902 as Mehmet Nazım Ran in Selânik and raised in Istanbul. When Turkey was occupied by her allies after World War I, he left for the Soviet Union [sic]. His higher education included his degree in Economics and Sociology at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. It is there where Russian Futurists and Symbolists, writers and visual artists, as well as Lenin's ideology influenced him. When the Turkish War of Independence resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1924, Hikmet returned to Turkey.

Soon after his return to his beloved motherland Turkey, Nazım started working for Aydınlık, a liberal newspaper. Having stigmatized his person and his work as "Communist", the Turkish state banned his poems. In addition, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sedition but fled to the Soviet Union, returning to Turkey in 1928 and settling in İstanbul. There, he worked at various newspapers and magazines and film studios, published his first poetry books and wrote his plays (1928-1932).

In 1938, Nazım Hikmet was charged as a "traitor" for the crime of inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt. He was sentenced to 28 years and 4 months in prison. After serving approximately 11 years of his sentence, an international campaign fought for his release. A committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre was formed in 1949, and in the spring of 1950, Hikmet began a hunger strike in protest of the Turkish Parliament for its failure to include an amnesty law in its agenda before it closed for the upcoming general election. He was freed under the forgiveness law of 1950 at last.

As the recorded numbers and facts of history reveal, much of Nazım Hikmet's life was spent behind prison walls: 17 years in Turkish prisons and another 12 years in exile. After his death of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963, his works continued to be banned in Turkey until 1965. Multiple decades after his death, highly justified celebrations are being conducted around the world for this "Blue-Eyed Giant", as Nazım Hikmet became to be known posthumously. Knowing now that he knew to say "I lived", it seems only appropriate for us to conclude our brief visit with his own celebratory words: [...]

hülya n. yılmaz, Ph.D.

Professor Emerita (Liberal Arts), Penn State, U.S.A.
Director of Editing Services at
Inner Child Press International, U.S.A.