prison lyrics

The other day Chapati Mystery posted a Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem I hadn't seen or heard before, and between the audio and a rough attempt to decipher a line or two of the Urdu, I managed to find first a transliterated version of Nisar mein teri galiyon pe aye watan, and then an English translation online somewhere (Sepoy has since put up his own). I followed his link to this wonderful essay on Faiz's Dast-e Saba by Tim Genoways, and unsurprisingly found myself thinking of Hikmet's prison poems, some of which Faiz later translated into Urdu.

Nazim Hikmet was arrested--not for the first time--in January 1938. He was charged with inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt, ostensibly because military cadets had been found reading his poems, particularly The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin, his 1936 historical-revolutionary epic. He was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison, of which he served twelve before escaping and spending the rest of his life in exile. Hikmet wrote thousands of lines of verse in prison, and circulated poems through letters to friends and family, but none of his poetry after Bedreddin was ever published again in Turkey in his lifetime.

I was thinking of this one in particular, which--though it differs considerably in content and style--seems to share some basic essence with the poems I've read from Dast-e Saba: faith in the promise held out by the struggle for justice against overwhelming odds, and something that a friend of mine might call 'rooted cosmopolitanism'--a devotion to country that resists and transcends nationalist chauvinism and the depredations of an unjust regime, turning that love outward to encompass a wider community. I've put it up in honor of a few people I don't dare name aloud here, who are waging that struggle at considerable cost.

İstanbul'da, Tevkifane avlusunda (In the Istanbul Detention House Yard, Turkish here)

In the Istanbul Detention House yard
on a sunny winter day after rain,
as clouds, red tiles, walls, and my face
         trembled in puddles on the ground,
I--with all that was bravest and meanest in me,
strongest and weakest--
I thought of the world, my country, and you.

1.

My love, they're on the march:
heads forward, eyes wide open,
the red glare of burning cities,
            crops trampled,
            endless
                  footsteps.
And people slaughtered:
        like trees and calves,
                  only easier
                    and faster.

My love,
amid these footsteps and this slaughter
I sometimes lost my freedom, bread, and you,
but never my faith in the days that will come
out of the darkness, screams, and hunger,
knocking on our door with hands full of sun.

2.

I'm wonderfully happy I came into the world:
I love its earth, light, struggle, bread.

Although I know its dimensions from pole to pole
 to the centimeter,
and while I'm not unaware that it's a mere toy next to the sun,
the world for me is unbelievably big.
I would have liked to go around the world
and see the fish, fruits, and stars I haven't seen.
However,
I made my European trip only in books and pictures.
In my whole life I never got one letter
with its blue stamp canceled in Asia.
Me and our corner grocer,
we're both mightily unknown in America.
Nevertheless,
from China to Spain, from the Cape of Good Hope to Alaska,
in every nautical mile, in every kilometer, I have friends
                                    and enemies.
Such friends that we haven't met even once
yet we can die for the same bread, the same freedom, the same
dream.
And such enemies that they thirst for my blood--
                       I thirst for theirs.
My strength
is that I'm not alone in this big world,
The world and its people are no secret in my heart,
  no mystery in my science.
Calmly and openly
    I took my place
         in the great struggle.
And without it,
you and the earth
    are not enough for me.
And yet you are astonishingly beautiful,
         the earth is warm and beautiful.

3.
I love my country:
I've swung on its plane trees,
I've slept in its prisons.
Nothing lifts my spirits like its songs and tobacco.

My country:
Bedreddin, Sinan, Yunus Emre, and Sakarya,
lead domes and factory chimneys--
it's all the work of my people, whose drooping mustaches
hide their smiles
even from themselves.

My country:
so big
it seems endless.
Edirne, Izmir, Ulukişla, Maraş, Trabzon, Erzurum.
All I know of the Erzurum plateau are its songs,
and I'm ashamed to say
I never crossed the Tauruses
to visit the cotton pickers
      in the south.

My country:
camels, trains, Fords, and sick donkeys,
  poplars,
     willow trees,
         and red earth.

My country:
goats on the Ankara plain,
the sheen of their long blond silky hair.
The succulent plump hazelnuts of Giresun,
Amasya apples with fragrant red cheeks,
 olives,
     figs,
        melons,
and bunches and bunches of grapes
                           all colors.

then plows
and black oxen,
and then my people
ready to embrace
   with the wide-eyed joy of children
anything modern, beautiful, and good--
my honest, hard-working, brave people,
    half-full, half-hungry,
               half slaves...

February 1939, trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk.