Nazim Hikmet

Nazim Hikmet Ran, commonly known as Nazim Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist who is acclaimed in Turkey as the first and foremost modern Turkish poet, is known around the world as one of the greatest international poets of the twentieth century. He earned international fame with his lyric power, through the "lyrical flow of his statements". He has been referred to as a "romantic communist" or a "romantic revolutionary". 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.Early lifeHe was born in Selanik (now Thessaloniki, Greece), the westernmost metropolis of the Ottoman Empire, where his father served as a government official. He came from a cosmopolitan and distinguished family. After attending primary school in the Göztepe district of Istanbul, Nazim studied at the prestigious Galatasaray High School just like his father, where he began to learn French; but in 1913, he was transferred to another school in the Ni,,anta,,,, district. His school days coincided with a period of political upheaval, especially as the Ottoman government entered the First World War on Germany's side.Style and achievementsDespite writing his first poems in syllabic meter, Nazim Hikmet distinguished himself from the "syllabic poets" in concept. With the development of his poetic conception, the narrow forms of the syllabic meter were not able to satisfy his needs anymore and he set out to seek new forms for his poems.As a student in the early 1920s in Moscow, he was decisively influenced by the artistic experiments of Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, as well as the ideological vision of Lenin. He was affected 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. Breaking the boundaries of the syllabic meter, he changed his form and preferred 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 Lorca, Aragon, Mayakovsky, Neruda, et al. Although his work bears 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 iconoclasms and lyricism, of ideology and poetic diction.Many of his poems have been composed by Zulfu Livaneli as songs. A part of his work have been translated in the Greek language by poet Yiannis Ritsos, and some of these translations have been arranged by the Greek composers Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos.Later life and legacyHikmet's imprisonment in the 1940s became a cause celebre among intellectuals worldwide; a 1949 committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre campaigned for Hikmet's release. In 1950, Hikmet went on an eighteen-day hunger strike, despite a heart attack. He would later be released in a general amnesty.In 1951 Naz,,m Hikmet was awarded the International Peace Prize by the World Peace Council.Persecuted for decades during the Cold War for his communist views by the Republic of Turkey, Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow after many exiled years away from his family. He is buried in Moscow's famous Novodevichy Cemetery, where his imposing tombstone is even today a place for pilgrimage by Turks and communists from around the world. His final will was to be buried under a platanus tree in any village cemetery in Anatolia, which was never realized.Despite his persecution by the Turkish state, Nazim Hikmet was always and is ever more revered by the Turkish nation. His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden Insan Manzaralari, i.e. Human Landscape from my Country) as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtulus Savasi Destani, i.e. The Epic of the War of Independence) and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvayi Milliye, i.e. Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest patriotic literary works in Turkey.