On Nazim Hikmet's Poetry in Translation in Book

Form

Subsequent to Nermin Menemencioğlu's translation of

Nazim Hikmet's poems, which introduced the poet to the
English-speaking literary audience, another early endeavor
in translating his poetry into English was undertaken by
Nilűfer Mizanoğlu Reddy and Rosette Avigdor Coryell. In
the following article, Mizanoğlu Reddy gives background
information about the circumstances under which she and
her friend Rosette Avigdor Coryell, at the time two graduate
students from Turkey at Columbia University in New York,
began to translate Nazim Hikmet's poems. The poet was
then serving his twelfth year of a 38-year sentence on the
charge of propagating communist ideas among students at
the military schools. This unjust conviction aroused public
protest campaigns calling for the liberation of the poet, both
in Turkey and worldwide. In her article, Mizanoğlu Reddy
refers to this international protest movement, which led to
an atmosphere of solidarity worldwide that encouraged them
for the translation of his poetry into English and paved the
way for its subsequent publication.

Nilűfer Mizanoğlu Reddy and Rosette Avigdor Coryell's

endeavor resulted in the publication of Nazim Hikmet's
poetry in translation for the first time in book form. This
book entitled Selected Poems was published in 1952 in
Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India, with a cover illustration
by Satyajit Roy and the foreword by David Cohen. Two
years later, in 1954, this time in the United States,
Mizanoğlu Reddy and Avigdor Coryell's translation of
Nazim Hikmet's selected poems was republished by Masses
and Mainstream Press, under the title Poems by Nazim Hikmet.
The book included a preface by Samuel Sillen, the editor of
the prestigious leftist American journal Masses &
Mainstream. Following Reddy's article, the cover pages of
these two publications and their prefaces, written by Cohen
and Sillen, along with the facsimile of the message Nazim
Hikmet sent to India and his short comment on the art and
craft of the poet, contained originally in the Indian version,
are reproduced with the kind permission of Nilűfer
Mizanoğlu Reddy as the last part of this special feature on
Nazim Hikmet.

The Journal of Turkish Literature and its editors are grateful to

Mr. Enuga S. Reddy for his extremely valuable help in
providing the material relating to Nazim Hikmet for this
section of the special feature.

The Editors
 Born of Necessity and Love:
Some Early Nazim Hikmet Translations
Nilűfer Mizanoğlu Reddy

A small book entitled Nazim Hikmet: Selected Poems was published in

Calcutta (now Kolkata), Benerjee's (Benerci) city in India in 1952.1 This
inexpensively printed book cost one rupee and eight annas - equivalent to
about 30 American cents then. After the foreword, it had a facsimile of a
message that Nazim Hikmet sent to India in August 1951 from the World
Youth Festival in Berlin. The next page had two paragraphs by Nazim about
the art and the craft of the poet.

The poems in this book had been translated by Rosette Avigdor and Nilűfer
Mizanoğlu (that is, myself), two graduate students from Turkey at
Columbia University in New York. We were very close friends from the
university in Ankara which we called Dil-Tarih2 then. We belonged to a
generation that had the privilege of studying with brilliant social scientists
like Muzaffer Sherif, Behice Boran and Niyazi Berkes at the university
during its short-lived golden age.

In 1949, Nazim Hikmet was serving the 12th year of a 38-year sentence on
the charge of propagating communist ideas among the students at the army
and navy schools who were found with some of his books which were then
available in the bookstores. Consequent to Ahmet Emin Yalman's articles
calling public attention to Nazim's unjust imprisonment and Mehmet Ali
Sebűk's detailed investigative report proving that he was in prison due to a
legal error, published in Vatan newspaper in 1949, there began a series of
public demonstrations and petition campaigns against his imprisonment in
Turkey, leading subsequently to an international campaign for the liberation
of the poet.

The same year, we received news from friends in Paris that a worldwide
movement was being organized for Nazim's liberation. In September 1949
an International Committee to Free Nazim Hikmet was formed in Paris by
Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara and was supported by many French intellectuals,

1
Nazim Hikmet. Selected Poems. Trans. Nilűfer Mizanoğlu (Reddy) and Rosette Avigdor (Coryell).
Calcutta: Parichaya - Unity Publication, 1952. The publication did not indicate the names of the
translators.

2
"Dil-Tarih": a shortened version of Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakűltesi (Faculty of Letters
at Ankara University).
writers and artists, including Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Aragon,
Picasso, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, and many organizations,
among them the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Democratic
Lawyers and the International Union of Students.

These protests extended to the United States where left-wing intellectuals and
publications called their readers to a public campaign to protest against the
imprisonment by sending letters and telegrams to the Turkish embassy as well as
to the United States Department of State.

Nazim's poems were then not known in the United States with the exception
of an article written by Nermin Menemencioğlu (signed as Nermine
Mouvafac then) and published in the magazine The Bookman in January-
February 1932 when she was a young student. This article with some
excerpts from Nazim's poems ("The Madman", "Weeping Willow", "Pierre
Loti", "Perhaps", "A Round Table and Four Bottles") still stands as a
testament to Nermin Menemencioğlu's outstanding career as a translator of
Turkish literature into English for more than half a century.

Nazim Hikmet was in and out of jails since the publication of

Menemencioğlu's aforementioned article, but was as productive as he was in
his earlier years. His poems, his plays and his articles - sometimes published
with pseudonyms, sometimes clandestinely distributed - were always alive
and read by many people.

Our friends in Paris sent us a number of typewritten poems and asked us if

we could translate them into English. Rosette and I decided to do that
without hesitation although we had no previous experience in
translating poetry. I had studied French in a Turkish high school. (A strange
coincidence, my French teacher in the 10th and 11th grades in Ankara Kiz
Lisesi3 was Nűzhet Hanim 4. I learned decades later that she was briefly
married to Nazim Hikmet in the early 1920s in Moscow). While I was
studying sociology and psychology I took English at Dil-Tarih from Orhan
Burian5. By the time I graduated I was able to read not only the social
science texts but also some American and English literature. Rosette, who
was a few years older than I, had lived in France before the war and had

3
"Ankara Kiz Lisesi": Ankara Girls High School.

4
Editors' Note: Nűzhet Berkin (1900-1987), a childhood friend of Nazim Hikmet's sister,
Samiye, married Nazim Hikmet in the early 1920s while they were both students at the
Communist University of Eastern Laborers (KUTV). Nűzhet Berkin was Nazim Hikmet's first
wife.

5
Editors' Note: Orhan Burian (1914-1953), prominent Turkish literary critic, essayist and
professor of English literature who taught at the newly-founded Faculty of Letters at Ankara
University from 1937 to 1953.
graduated from a French lycée. She had worked at the Anatolian News
Agency and at the British Council in Ankara. A few years in New York had
given both of us a good background in poetry as it was quite popular in our
circles to read Lorca, Neruda and Brecht, as well as contemporary American
poets.

We were familiar with Nazim Hikmet’s poems. Many of us had read his
poems circulating at the university in typewritten sheets. I was in the 11 th
grade in the 1938-39 school year when Nazim was jailed, and our literature
textbook had three poems by him (“The Wounded Ghost,” “Leather-Bound
Book” and “Barefoot”). These poems must have been taken out later from
that excellent book 6 the following year. But we all knew by heart many lines
of that wonderfully rhymed 1922 poem “Barefoot,” bursting with vivid
images of Anatolian poverty and the desire to end it with steam, electricity
and machines. Years later I translated that poem into English.

Among the poems sent to us from Paris there were shorter ones like
“Optimism,” “Perhaps,” “Plea,” “Prison Letters,” “Twentieth Century,” and
“Angina Pectoris” written in a simple language, personal and lyrical but also
reflecting a point of view embracing the entire world. We also translated
excerpts from the Epic of Sheik Bedreddin and Human Landscapes from My
Country.

PLEA

This country shaped like the head of a mare

Coming full gallop from far off Asia
To stretch into the Mediterranean
This country is ours.

Bloody wrists, clenched teeth

bare feet,
Land like a precious silk carpet
This hell, this paradise is ours.
Let the doors be shut that belong to others,
Let them never open again
Do away with the enslaving of man by man
This plea is ours
To live! Like a tree alone and free
Like a forest in brotherhood
This yearning is ours!

6
Mustafa Nihat (Őzőn). Metinlerle Muasır Tűrk Edebryatı Tarihi. Istanbul: Istanbul Devlet
Matbaası, 1934.
 “Plea” in Poems by Nazim Hikmet (New York, 1954)
translated by Ali Yunus (penname of Nilufer Mizanoglu Reddy
and Rosette Avigdor Coryell)

Masses & Mainstream published an article about Nazim Hikmet in its March
1950 issue and reproduced a few of our translations. A number of writers,
artists and intellectuals – including Paul Robeson and Howard Fast – joined
in demands for his release. Masses and Mainstream Press republished in
1954, our translations of twenty-five Nazim Hikmet poems, first published
in India as mentioned above, under the title Poems by Nazim Hikmet7 with a
preface written by Samuel Sillen, editor of Masses and Mainstream.

At Columbia University we became friendly with a group of Indian students.

They were also very much interested in Nazim’s poems. A friend sent our
translations of forty-one poems to Unity, a cultural monthly in Calcutta,
edited by David Cohen, a left-wing intellectual. They were published in a
book by Parichaya Prakashini as a Parichaya Unity publication. This was the
first time that Nazim Hikmet’s poems appeared in book form in English. At
the same time our dear Indian friend Sabira Zaidi translated Nazim’s poems
into Urdu from our English translation and sent them to Urdu literary
magazines. These translations into English and Urdu have often been quoted
in the Indian media since then.

Asim Bezirci, in a footnote, mentions that Nermin Menemencioğlu

informed him about Halide Edib’s (Adivar) translation of Letters to Taranta-
Babu which was published in four installments in Bombay Chronicle between
19 January and 9 February 1936. 8 Halide Edib was in India in 1935 and
wrote the book Inside India.9
When I looked at the Indian book again and read the foreword by David Cohen dated March 31, 1952, I felt it was written
in faraway Calcutta when there was no possibility of checking all the details. For instance, it was not quite correct to say
that Nazim was not allowed to see newspapers, letters and visitors. When he was in Bursa prison (1940-1950) he could

7
Nazim Hikmet. Poems by Nazim Hikmet. Trans. Ali Yunus (penname of Nilűfer Mizanoğlu
[Reddy] and Rosette Avigdor [Coryell]). New York: Masses & Mainstream Inc., 1954.

8
Footnote by Asım Bezirci in Nazim Hikmet . Şiirler 3. Istanbul: Cern Yayınevi,
1975: 264.

9
Halide Edib. Inside India. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937.
meet his family and friends in the prison director's office.10 He was allowed
to exchange letters. He painted pictures. His creativity in producing poems
continued as Prison Letters to My Wife and Human Landscapes from My Country
would testify. What was most remarkable was his capacity for endurance.
Yet in spite of his handsome, robust physique, his health was not good and
the years of prison life certainly precipitated his death at the age of 61.

I took more than two decades to get back to translations again. My friend
Rosette Avigdor Coryell lived in Paris and continued her life as a translator,
writer and photographer until her last days. I wish she were with me to help
in delving into these memories of a long time ago.

10
For more information see "Une Amitiẻ de Quarante Ans, Entretien avec Gűzin Dino".
Europe: Revue Mensuelle (June-July 2002): 64-69.