Love Beyond the Box of Chocolates with Nazım Hikmet
Pronounced “Naazum Hikmet”
Nazım Hikmet Ran was born in 1902 in Selanik; a port city in modern-day Greece, then part of the Ottoman Empire. His mother Celile being a painter and his paternal grandfather, Mehmed Nazım Pasha, a poet, Nazım was surrounded by creativity from a young age.
Already an avid poet by the time he was in school, his teacher Yahya Kemal asked to see the subject of one of Nazım’s poems in person - the subject was Nazım’s sister’s cat.
Upon seeing the cat, he realised that the cat in the poem was far from reality. Yahya Kemal, who happened to be a renowned Turkish poet, then turned to Nazım and said:
“You know how to praise this dirty, pesky cat, you will become a poet.” ¹
Nazim at 4.5 years old in Aleppo - Courtesy of the Nazim Hikmet Foundation
Nazım Hikmet was a pioneer of modernist poetry in the young Turkish Republic. Turkish poetry, despite its 1000+ old year history, had mostly been limited to the folk genre.²
In his writing, Nazım reflected the social circumstances he was actively involved in. During his teenage years, with the War of Independence in Anatolia, he had the chance to get to know the Turkish peasant, whose stories he then told based on his observations.
Nazım Hikmet in Kosovo, 1952
Similarly, when he travelled to Moscow in 1917, he became influenced by the intense atmosphere of the Leninist period of revolution, which he also reflected in his poems.
Later when he was imprisoned and exiled due to his communist ideology, he started focusing on concepts around life, death, love and longing.³
No doubt, Nazım felt a sense of emptiness and disappointment caused by the antagonism he continuously received from his state, which in itself went against his ideology of humanitarianism and equality, but it did not diminish his love for his homeland. On the contrary, it seemed to strengthen it. "I love my country", he wrote in one of his poems... ⁴
“…I swung in its lofty trees,
I lay in its prisons.
Nothing relieves my depression like the songs and tobacco of my country…”
Nazım and his friends in Bursa Prison, 1938 - Courtesy of the Nazım Hikmet Foundation
The greatest proof that love is a philosophy of life for Nazım Hikmet is that, when reflecting upon his life in his work, love always dominates, regardless of his social situation.
The concept of love addressed in Nazım’s poems, however, is not just an emotional pleasure, but a philosophy of life that reflects passion and responsibility towards existence. In this sense, love is an existential responsibility for life, the work one puts towards living, and a reciprocal bond that occurs and feeds into each other as a result.³
Nazım’s self-portrait painted in Bursa prison in 1946
It is due to this connection to love that Nazım has been able to talk about abstract political concepts with a highly personal and concrete language, reaching an international audience way beyond his given circle.²
Often called the Romantic Revolutionary, he was immortalised by Pablo Neruda -with whom he shared the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize in 1950- and openly supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso.
“…Thanks for what you were and for the fire / which your song left forever burning…”
Section of Pablo Neruda’s poem on Nazım Hikmet
Nazım’s works from his time in prison - Courtesy of Yapı Kredi Yayınları
Nazım was imprisoned in Turkey for more than a decade and died in exile in Moscow in 1963. He was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1951 because of his communist views, but despite a ban on his poetry, which remained in place until 1965, he has remained one of Turkey's best-loved poets.⁴
Nazım himself wasn’t always perfect in the department of love, especially in regards to women. But he’s an important figure when it comes to reminding us of the resilience of love. We are capable of withstanding so much hardship and if we can grab life by the horns like Nazım, love is the one thing that remains. So whether you’re celebrating Valentine’s Day this month or not, let Nazım’s life and work be a gentle reminder to celebrate love beyond the box of chocolates.
Courtesy of the Nazım Hikmet Foundation
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
On Living Part 1/3 by Nazım Hikmet
translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk
Copyright © Studio Halbuki, 2021
Special thanks to Cansu Peker for her extensive research paper titled “Love in the poems of Nazım Hikmet”*
[1] https://listelist.com/nazim-hikmet-kimdir/
[2] https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/article/29354/POETITORIAL-Remembering-a-poet-in-exile/en/tile
*[3] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/162020652.pdf
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/07/turkey-nazim-hikmet
