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Turkish communist poet, playwright and novelist (1902–1963) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mehmed Nâzım Ran (17 January 1902 – 3 June 1963),[3][4] commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet (Turkish: [naːˈzɯm hicˈmet] ⓘ), was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements".[5][page needed] Described as a "romantic communist"[6][page needed] and a "romantic revolutionary",[5][page needed] 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 50 languages.
Nâzım Hikmet Ran | |
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Born | Mehmed Nâzım 15 January 1902[1] Selanik, Salonica, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia, Greece) |
Died | 3 June 1963 61) Moscow, Soviet Union (now Russia) | (aged
Pen name | Orhan Selim, Ahmet Oğuz, Mümtaz Osman, Ercüment Er |
Occupation | Poet, playwright, memoirist, novelist, screenwriter, film director |
Language | Turkish |
Citizenship |
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Signature | |
According to Nâzım Hikmet, he was of paternal Turkish and maternal German, Polish, French and Georgian descent.[7][8][9] His mother came from a distinguished cosmopolitan family with predominantly-Circassian (Adyghe) roots,[10][11] along with high social position and relations to the Polish nobility. From his father's side, he had Turkish heritage.[12] His father, Hikmet Bey, was the son of Mehmet Nâzım Pasha, after whom Nâzım Hikmet was named.
Nazım’s maternal grandfather, Hasan Enver Pasha, was the son of the Polish-born Mustafa Celalettin Pasha and Saffet Hanım, the daughter, Omar Pasha, a Serbian, and Adviye Hanım, a Circassian who was the daughter of Çerkes Hafız Pasha.
Mustafa Celalettin Pasha (born Konstanty Borzęcki herbu Półkozic) wrote Les Turcs anciens et modernes ("The Ancient and Modern Turks") in Istanbul in 1869. That is considered one of the first works of Turkish nationalist political thought.[11]
Nâzım Hikmet's maternal grandmother, Leyla Hanım, was the daughter of Mehmet Ali Pasha, of French Huguenot and German origin, and Ayşe Sıdıka Hanım, a daughter of Çerkes Hafız Paşa.[13] Nâzım Hikmet and Celile Hanım's cousins included Oktay Rifat Horozcu, a leading Turkish poet, and the statesman Ali Fuat Cebesoy.[14]
Nâzım was born on 15 January 1902, in Selânik (Salonica), where his father was serving as an Ottoman government official.[3][4] 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. However, 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, 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 and was allied with Germany. For a brief period, he was assigned as a naval officer to the Ottoman Navy cruiser Hamidiye, but in 1919 he became seriously ill and was not able to fully recover. That got him exempted from naval service in 1920.
In 1921, together with his friends Vâlâ Nureddin (Vâ-Nû), Yusuf Ziya Ortaç and Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel, he went to İnebolu in Anatolia 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, later called 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. The poem was much appreciated, and Muhittin Bey (Birgen) decided to appoint them as teachers to the Sultani (high college) in Bolu, rather than to send them to the front as soldiers. However, their communist views were not appreciated by the conservative officials in Bolu and so both of them decided to go to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to witness the results of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and arrived there on 30 September 1921. In July 1922, both 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 Vladimir Lenin.[6]
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 by producing streams of innovative poems, plays and film scripts.[6]
In Moscow in 1922, he broke the boundaries of syllabic meter, changed his form and began writing in free verse.[15]
He has been compared by Turkish and non-Turkish men of letters to such figures as Federico García Lorca, Louis Aragon, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Yiannis Ritsos, 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.[5]: 19
Many of his poems have been set to music by the Turkish composer Zülfü Livaneli and by Cem Karaca. Part of his work has been translated into Greek by Yiannis Ritsos, and some of the translations have been arranged by the Greek composers Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos.
Because of his political views, his works were banned in Turkey from 1938 to 1965.[16]
Nâzım'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.[17]
On 8 April 1950, Nâzım began a hunger strike to protest 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.[18] Seriously ill, Ran suspended his strike on 23 April, National Sovereignty and Children's Day. His doctor's request to treat him in hospital for three months was refused by officials. As his imprisonment status had not changed, he resumed his hunger strike on the morning of 2 May.[17]
Nâzım'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 the 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 ended five days later, on 19 May, Turkey's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day, when he was finally released by a general amnesty law enacted by the new government.[17]
On 22 November 1950, the World Council of Peace announced that Nâzım was among the recipients of the International Peace Prize, along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Pablo Neruda.[17]
Later on, Nâzım escaped from Turkey to Romania on a ship via the Black Sea and from there moved to the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet bloc recognized the Turkish minority only in communist Bulgaria, the poet's books were immediately brought out in this country, both in Turkish originals[19] and in Bulgarian translations.[20] The communist authorities in Bulgaria celebrated him in Turkish and Bulgarian publications as 'a poet of liberty and peace.'[21] The goal was to discredit Turkey presented as a "lackey of the imperialist" United States in the eyes of Bulgaria's Turkish minority,[22] many of whom desired to leave for or were expelled to Turkey in 1950–1953.[23]
When the EOKA struggle broke out in Cyprus, Ran believed that its population could live together peacefully, and he called on the Cypriot Turks to support the Greek Cypriots' demand for an end to British rule and union with Greece (enosis).[24][25][26] Hikmet drew negative reaction from Turkish Cypriots for his opinions.[27]
Persecuted for decades by Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Nâzım died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963 at 6.30 a.m. while he was picking up a morning newspaper at the door of his summer house in Peredelkino, far away from his beloved homeland.[28] He is buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, where his tomb is still a place of pilgrimage for Turks and others from around the world. His final wish, which was never carried out, was to be buried under a plane tree (platanus) in any village cemetery in Anatolia.[citation needed]
His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, "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, "Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest literary works of Turkey.[citation needed]
After his death, the Kremlin ordered the publication of the poet's first-ever Turkish-language collected works in communist Bulgaria, where a large and recognized Turkish national minority still existed. The eight volumes of these collected works, Bütün eserleri, appeared at Sofia between 1967 and 1972, in the very last years of the existence of the Turkish minority educational and publishing system in Bulgaria.[29]
Nâzım had Polish and Turkish citizenship.[2] The latter was revoked in 1959 and restored in 2009.[30][31] His family has been asked if it wanted his remains repatriated from Russia.[32]
During the 1940s, as he was serving his sentence at Bursa Prison, painted. There, he met a young inmate, 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 greatly admired Balaban and referred to him in a letter to the novelist Kemal Tahir as "his peasant painter" (Turkish: Köylü ressam). Their contact remained after they were released from the prison.[33][34]
Nâzım's poem "Kız Çocuğu" ("The Girl Child") conveys a plea for peace from a seven-year-old girl, ten years after she perished in the US atomic bomb attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It has achieved worldwide popularity as a powerful anti-war message and has been performed and translated in many languages as a song by a number of singers and musicians both in Turkey and many countries. It is also known in English by various other titles, including "I Come and Stand at Every Door", "I Unseen" and "Hiroshima Girl".[35]
The song was later covered by
Nâzım Hikmet's children's tale, "Sevdalı Bulut" (A Cloud in Love), has been translated into English by Evrim Emir-Sayers for dePICTions, the annual critical review of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT). The translation is open-access.[41]
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] "A dead girl"). 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.
Some of Nâzım's poems are translated into Nepali by Suman Pokhrel and are published in print and online literary journals.[42][43]
Spanish
Spanish avant-garde group Aguaviva covered it in 1971 as Niña de Hiroshima.
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[44] compared with the lowest echelon U.S. soldiers at $70,[45] 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).
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