Content area
Full Text
Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet. By Saime Goksu and Edward Timms. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Marian Aguiar
In 1921, two young Turkish poets were introduced to the future president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, at a historical moment when the country balanced between the epoch of the Ottoman dynasty and the advent of the modern republic. The man who would later be called Ataturk, father of the Turks, advised the nineteen-year-old poets not to write modern poetry simply for the sake of being modem but to "write poetry with a purpose" (Goksu and Timms, 21). Twenty years later, one of the young men, Nazim Hikmet, would inscribe this very sentiment into his epic poem, Human Landscapes: "Poetry consists of the world," he wrote, "and in today's world, those are the only things worth saying" (Hikmet 1982, 122). Ironically, Hikmet at the time was one of the republic's most famous political prisoners, the focus of a campaign by such internationally prominent writers as Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, Jean Paul Sartre, and Luis Aragon.
This incident is recounted in Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet, the first English language biography of the poet Neruda described as "a legendary writer" (Neruda 1977, 195). This attention to Hikmet is long overdue. Even after the English translations of Human Landscapes (1982) and Selected Poetry (1986), the work of this renowned poet, playwright, cinematographer, and third-world communist has largely been ignored in the English-speaking world. The work of Goksu and Timms, who published an essay on Hikmet just over a decade ago (1988), is distinguished by the richness of the context it provides for understanding Hikmet's work within the social and political climate of Turkey during the first half of the twentieth century. The promise of their shorter article is fully realized in this biography, which is remarkable for its scope, detail, and captivating narrative.
Nazim Hikmet is what Martin Espada calls a poet of the political imagination, "articulating an artistry of dissent" (Espada 1994, 17). As a lyric poet, Hikmet expresses the human condition through the words and thoughts of the individual subject; as a Marxist poet, he draws together individual experiences to present a landscape of human consciousness.
Within his own...