Nazim Hikmet’s series of 32 free-verse poems addressed to his wife, Piraye, from Bursa Prison in Turkey in 1945 constitutes a significant contribution to the tradition of the love lyric as it powerfully synthesizes authentic expressions of love, longing, and desire with references to the actual circumstances of Hikmet’s prison life.
The poems make important connections between Hikmet’s personal situation and historical realities. They fulfill the promise of the poet to think only of his wife between the hours of nine and ten at night (lights-out time in the prison) and, with the exception of the first poem, are titled only by a date, beginning on September 20, 1945, and concluding on December 14, 1945.
The language of the Piraye sequence is direct, unadorned, and strikingly concrete. The form is open, a free verse of mainly short lines with varying margins for emphasis and expressive force, a form Hikmet established early in his career and used throughout his life. The opening poem establishes a pattern for several other poems in the sequence, linking autobiographical detail and personal emotion to the context of World War II, the “news”:
How beautiful to think of you:
amid news of death and victory,
in prison,
when I’m past forty . . .
Recalling images of Piraye—“your hand resting on blue cloth, / your hair grave and soft / like my beloved Istanbul”—the poem builds to anguished action:
And jumping
right up
and grabbing the iron bars at my window,
I must shout out the things I write for you
to the milk-white blue of freedom . . .
These poems are mainly intimate and personal, but several observe an equivalence between the conditions of the poet and the world outside prison. In “21 September 1945,” for example, the poet sees an analogy between the condition of his family and the rest of humanity, now suffering but surely bound to prosper in the future: “our fate is like the world’s. . . .”
Some poems make directly political statements, as when the poet imagines a future in which his Marxist ideals are fulfilled. The personification of freedom humorously suggests the poet’s optimism:
And yes, my love,
freedom will walk around swinging its arms
in its Sunday best—workers’ overalls!—
yes, freedom in this beautiful country. . . .
(6 December 1945)
Hikmet wrote other poems to Piraye besides those in this sequence, as well as poems based on her letters to him. Her letters also serve as the source for the verse letters from Halil’s wife, Aysha, in Human Landscapes from My Country, composed at the same time as the Piraye sequence.
Saime Göksu and Edward Timms’s Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet insightfully discusses Hikmet’s poems in their biographical context.
Bibliography
Hikmet, Nazim. Poems of Nazim Hikmet. Translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, 1994. Revised and expanded edition. 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: Literature, Turkish Literature, World Literature
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