Poems of Nazim Hikmet
SynopsisPlot
A centennial volume, with previously unavailable poems, by Turkey's greatest poet. Published in celebration of the poet's one-hundredth birthday, this exciting edition of the poems of Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) collects work from his four previously selected volumes and adds more than twenty poems never before available in English. The Blasing/Konuk translations, acclaimed for the past quarter-century for their accuracy and grace, convey Hikmet's compassionate, accessible voice with the subtle music, innovative form, and emotional directness of the originals.
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About this book
Nazim Hikmet, born in 1902 in what was then the Ottoman Empire, became one of the most widely translated Turkish poets of the twentieth century. He spent eighteen years as a political prisoner in Turkey and lived the final thirteen years of his life in exile, dying in 1963. Despite being banned in his home country for three decades, his work reached readers in more than fifty languages.
This collection, published to mark the centennial of Hikmet's birth, draws from four earlier selected volumes translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. It also includes more than twenty poems that had not previously appeared in English. The translations, developed over roughly a quarter century, aim to carry across Hikmet's direct emotional tone and his experiments with poetic form. Hikmet wrote in a style that could shift between lyrical intimacy and political clarity, and the translators worked to preserve that range in a single volume.
Hikmet's poetry often addresses confinement, distance from home, and ordinary human connection. His years in prison and exile gave these subjects a concrete weight drawn from lived experience rather than abstraction. The collection is organized to reflect the full span of his writing life, from early work to his later poems composed abroad.
