by Nazim Hikmet (1901 – 1963)

Translated by Süleyman Fatih Akgül

The Ataman Hotel site provides some context for Hikmet’s arrest and imprisonment by the military:

…in January 1938 he was arrested for inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on the grounds that military cadets were reading his poems, particularly The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin. Published in 1936, this long poem based on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule was his last book to appear in Turkey during his lifetime. His friend Pablo Neruda relates Hikmet’s account of how he was treated after his arrest: “Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nazım was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced to walk on the ship’s bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor.”

And The Times explains the significance of his work and the effort to free him:

His release came at the hands of Turkey’s first democratically elected government, after a campaign by an international committee of writers and artists which included Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The remarkable poem that led to Hikmet’s arrest, The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin, is based on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule and remains a major contribution to Turkish poetry in its linguistic experimentation and mixture of narrative voices, Ottoman scholarship and unconcealed political message. Hikmet offered a challenge to Auden’s oft-quoted line, in his elegy of Yeats, that “poetry makes nothing happen”; his work pointed to the possibilities – in literature and in politics – open to those trying to have it otherwise.

Interesting to compare Hikmet with Auden, particularly since they were writing during the same period. Perhaps Auden was just lamenting that in spite of all his own distaste for himself, no one else seemed to find his work inspiring enough to lock him up in the deep end of the latrine? Wonder what Hikmet’s perspective would have been on Auden’s idealist September 1, 1939 poem?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Great, so during a time that Britain and France turned a blind eye to Hitler’s rearmament and breaches of the Treaty of Versailles, and after Kristallnacht, Auden’s poem told people to ignore the authority and love one another. Perhaps that is the drunkenness that Hikmet understood and that made his writing so relevant — able to make things happen. Chamberlain probably hated reading Hikmet.