28 March - 3 April 2002
Issue No.579
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 March - 3 April 2002 Issue No.579 |
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Plain talk
UNESCO has declared 2002 the Nazim Hikmat year. All through the year UNESCO member countries will be celebrating the great Turkish poet's 100th birthday.
Born in 1902 in Solinika, then under the yoke of the Ottoman empire, Hikmat grew up in Anatolia. And after finishing his secondary studies in his motherland, he joined Moscow University. It is during those college years that he embraced Marxism for which he was subjected to severe punishment, culminating in a long prison sentence, upon his return to Turkey. In 1951, he left Turkey to Moscow where he lived until his death in June 1963.
I first met Nazim Hikmat in 1958, during the first Afro-Asian writers' conference in Tashkent. After that first introduction we must have met a dozen times. During my 52 visits to Moscow, I always had the opportunity of meeting with him at the majestic headquarters of the Writers' Union where there were always poetry readings by Nazim and some Soviet poets: Sharaf Rashidov and Zulfia from Uzbekistan, Mirza Tursun Zade from Turkmenistan, Sajad Zaheer from India and others. There were also translators who rendered the poems into Arabic or English for my benefit. They were mostly poems on romantic love which made me wonder how such arch Marxists could produce tender, warm poems.
Nazim Hikmat's poetry sank deep in my heart. His love poems addressed to his wife from prison reminded me of Mayakovsky, that great Russian poet and also the French poet Aragon with his beautiful collection "The Eyes of Elsa." I have just come across English translations of some of his poems by Ruth Christie, Richard McKane and Salt Haliman.
"The happiness of loving you is like being reborn
The smell of geranium leaf
Lingering on your fingertips,
a sunny calmness
and the invitation of a body
a deep warm darkness shredded with bright red stripes."
But the poem which I heard Hikmat recite in person and which was to be his last is "My Funeral" in which he contemplated his death. I remember him smiling and telling it almost as a joke:
"Our kitchen window will stare after me as I go
the washing in the balcony will wave to see me off.
I have been happier here than you ever can imagine
friends I wish you all a long and happy life."
Commenting on the English translations of Hikmat's poems, Paul Bailey writes in the Independent Weekend Review: "From these translations we hear Hikmat's poetic voice, it's a voice that carries well into English. You recognise the man who is addressing you, in the same way that you know Constantin Cavafy, another poet who crosses over the language barrier. Hikmat's voice is more fervent, more passionate than Cavafy's, yet it also encompasses irony and a mordant sense of humor."
During the second Afro- Asian writers' conference held in Cairo in 1963, Hikmat and other delegates were received by President Gamal Abdel- Nasser. I had the honour of introducing him to the president when he presented him with a copy of his 20,000 line "The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin," a 15th century revolutionary religious leader in Anatolia.
This epic is an acknowledged masterpiece which, in Paul Bailey's words, "has the narrative energy and the bold lyricism one associates with ballads that were recited before poetry became respectable."
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