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.

I always seem to find poets bemoaning the unrealistic and detatched nature of poetry today. Take Harold Monro’s article from 1912, for example, published online by poetrymagazines.org.uk:

Poetry is uninteresting to-day in that degree only that it is remote from life. It need not treat necessarily of events, deeds or episodes, but it must be fundamental, vital, innate, or nothing at all. It must be packed and tense with meaning; no line may be thin, no link may rattle. And in the future, when it has become natural and keen, there will be improvisatori again, who will lavish us their poems carelessly, like a plant its flowers.

So, has anything changed or are does the latest generation of Monro-like critics still complain that poems are too remote from life? After all, who really gets to inventory and count the poems of the world in order to determine their remoteness from life? Do we count lyrics of songs, or is that somehow a lesser form as Monro suggests in his timeline:

the minstrel became poet, and the poet became man of letters

Perhaps a new API for web search engines is in order. Or maybe poetry sites should have a “remoteness” warning on their poetry pages? Here’s Monro’s suggestion:

The poets of the present and the future must re-define, through their work, the true function of poetry. For, though it has become partly, and will become wholly, intellectualized; in spite of innumerable experiments in subject, rhythm and form, straining of metre, novelties in cadence, in spite of fluency, technique, originality, it still must be said that modern poetry is devoid of any real function or aim.

Have you noticed that people always seem to say something like “devoid of purpose” when they dislike expressive works? I think it particularly interesting that Monro calls out Whitman, of all poets, as someone guilty of losing touch with reality:

The reason must be sought deeper; in the fad, namely, that modern poetry fails to express the real aspirations of life. Just as the jargon is distinct from normal language, so the substance is alien to life. Moreover, these two characteristics are interdependent, and the use of a normal vocabulary will not be possible with dignity until poets learn again to represent with dignity and naturalness every aspect and manifestation of life. The experiments of Whitman and Carpenter solve nothing. These authors, and their imitators, have shirked the problem by simply dispensing with metre, and their work, however fluent and rhythmical, nevertheless cannot be called poetry.

Naturalness as dignity? Who really gets to define where nature starts? To me this sounds like a classical composer criticizing hip-hop for being a crude form of structured sounds, when in fact hip-hop has more fundamental and grounded roots than classical…

The Boston Research Center poses an alternative (modern) view of Whitman:

Modern literary scholars now agree that Whitman’s poetry was “a watershed in American literary history,� Myerson explained, noting that by rejecting the formal structures of traditional poetry in favor of free verse and replacing commas and periods with ellipses, Whitman opened the way for later poets to experiment stylistically.

Myerson elaborated by suggesting that Whitman’s verse was a far cry from the poetry of the day that ignored sex, rarely dealt with contemporary life, and was written in highly formal and prescribed poetic language. He pointed out that Whitman was a man of enormous physicality who introduced eroticism into mainstream American poetry, thus making his verse sensuous in an age of decorum. Referring to Whitman as “the great poet of democracy,� Myerson noted that his writing contains elaborate catalogues of Americans, their occupations, and their lives, all presented with a spirit of egalitarianism. This interconnectedness of citizens was intended to evoke the equality of all.

Great poet of democracy? Ironic then that he cheated at the polls to overcome resistance to his work and lubricate (pun not intended) public acceptance:

Leaves of Grass received lukewarm acclaim. The book was assailed as immodest and “quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society,� according to Myerson. In fact, the only positive reviews were written anonymously by Whitman himself.

Whenever I hear a song with a guy laying down a deep and rough bass rhyme while girls sing a liltingly melodic background, I remember the hits of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens (some of the best music ever made, IMHO). The similarities are very striking. Thus, I was not surprised to read that Zola’s success is bringing some to realize that “American” forms of music are rarely an invention at all, but rather an evolutionary step:

“Maybe hip hop does not come from the States,� Zola proposes. “Rhyming over a beat? Zulus and Xhosas have been doing that for a long, long time.� If that is indeed the case, then kwaito has thrown hip hop just about the most raucous homecoming bash imaginable.

And this translation shows a bit of humor in the darkness of poverty and violence, if I’m reading it correctly:

You need to be fluent in tsotsitaal, the street slang of South Africa, to understand so much as a bar, but you quickly get the gist. Like the cratered streets he grew up on, Zola’s music is littered with the scree, broken glass, spent bullet casings and other detritus of recent township wars. The music is a collection of sonic snapshots taken under fire. Umdlwembe sets the tone:

Always looking for more booze
When we leave the only people left standing will be widows
Real men die and left will be the gangsters
The gangsters will die and leave the beers