Nazim Hikmet’s five-book “epic novel in verse”—some 17,000 lines long—is a major work by Turkey’s most accomplished 20th-century poet. Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları made a significant contribution to the traditions of the long poem and to the genre of verse committed to social and political themes.
Composed during Hikmet’s imprisonment from 1938 to 1950, the poem depicts several characters based closely on his fellow prisoners, including Halil (like Hikmet, a communist), an imprisoned intellectual who declares his “love of those who don’t live off others’ labor, / the love of working people.”
Human Landscapes mixes genres, blending techniques of epic narrative, lyric poetry, the screenplay (Hikmet participated in filmmaking), and the novel (he translated Tolstoy’s War and Peace while writing the book). Several features of the work make it, above all, a powerful poem. The highly variable free-verse lines—many just one word long, many indented in various ways—effectively emphasize key words and images.
Sometimes the free verse combines with simile to intensify character portraits. Describing “a leading intellectual,” the narrator emphasizes his slow movement:
No matter where he was,
he always appeared to be underwater—
languid, limp,
barely stirring,
like a lazy sea-creature.
The images, heightened by the lineation, contribute to a devastating satire on a passionless thinker—the opposite of Hikmet.
The authorial narrative voice sometimes sounds like that of a lyrical poem, shifting from reporting to expressing feeling, as when the speaker in the first-person directly addresses the character Tanya, an 18-year-old Soviet partisan tortured and hanged by the Nazis during World War II:
“Tanya, / your picture’s here in front of me in Bursa Prison. . . . They hanged you for loving your country, / I’m in prison for loving mine.”
The tone of admiration and the emotion of kinship are clear—and clearly Hikmet’s.
The narrative frequently dwells on depraved characters, yet several figures—including Halil and his wife, the heroic Soviet soldiers fighting the invading Germans, Tanya the partisan, and the young steelworker Kerim—suggest no small measure of hope for humanity. Periodically Hikmet perceives in the natural world an emblem of the potential in the human world for renewal.
Like Hikmet’s lyric poems taken as a whole, this epic is fundamentally optimistic, even though the formidable obstacles to human progress—greed, political corruption, selfishness, and superstition—are not slighted.
In their comprehensive Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet, Saime Göksu and Edward Timms detail the complex history of the poem’s creation. Originally conceived as an “Encyclopedia of Famous People,” it evolved into a portrayal of “representative types” of people, few of them famous, the full range of society. A four-book plan gave way to five books, and the chronological scheme expanded to include contemporary history: the siege of Moscow by Germany in World War II (in the conclusion of book 4).
The work appeared in Turkish only after Hikmet’s death, published by his son in 1966.
Bibliography
Hikmet, Nazim. Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse. Translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. New York: Persea Books, 2002.
Göksu, Saime, and Edward Timms. Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Turkish Literature