Essay On Nazim Hikmet

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Nazim Hikmet And Concept of Humanity in His Works Dr. Zekai Kardas Assistant Professor, Department of Urdu Language and Literature, Istanbul University ABSTRACT One of the most important figures in 20th century Turkish literature and one of the first Turkish poets to use more or less free verse. Hikmet 's works were widely translated both in the East and the West during his lifetime. However, in his home country Hikmet remained a controversial figure due to his social criticism. Spending some 17 years in prisons, Hikmet once called poetry "the bloodiest of the arts. Because of Hikmet’s amazing grasp of the world affairs and his prophetic vision, his works reflect the period in which they were written and what is awaiting for the humanity in the future. Nazim Hikmet has a unique place in Turkish literature with a record number of poems translated into English. …show more content…

Rumi was exalted by these men, who lived by his words, and Nâzim was not to take lightly this figure of the poet. Some lines, written when he was practically still a child, read: “whirling, always whirling. / We begin in the same place, we end in the same place. / We say we move forward as we cross and recross one path” . A story Nâzim told many times, and one many biographers repeat, goes that when Nâzim published his very early poem “Mevlana” and signed it “Mehmet Nâzim,” Mehmet Nâzim Pasha’s friends mistook it for a poem by the pasha. Certainly the substance was recognizable, but Nâzim Pasha had to convince his friends that he could not possibly be the author of the poem, as it was in syllabic meters, while he wrote only in Ottoman, quantitative meters. Syllabics, the verse form based on the measures of Turkish folk poetry, was reclaimed by the new poets at the time, and Nâzim was “translating” a Sufi view into the twentieth century and modern Turkish

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