If Half My
Heart Is Here, Doctor,
The Other Half Is In China
With The
Army Flowing
Toward The Yellow River.
And, Every
Morning, Doctor,
Every
Morning At Sunrise My Heart
Is Shot In Greece.
And Every
Night, Doctor,
When The
Prisoners Are Asleep And The Infirmary Is Deserted,
My Heart
Stops At A Run-Down Old House
In Istanbul.
And Then
After Ten Years
All I Have
To Offer My Poor People
Is This
Apple In My Hand, Doctor,
One Red
Apple:
My Heart.
And That,
Doctor, That Is The Reason
For This
Angina Pectoris-
Not
Nicotine, Prison, Or Arteriosclerosis.
I Look At
The Night Through The Bars,
And Despite
The Weight On My Chest
My Heart Still Beats
With The Most Distant Stars.
NAZIM HIKMET was the greatest
Turkish poet of twentieth century. Like Whitman, Hikmet speaks of
himself, his country, and the world in the same breath. At once personal and
public, his poetry records his life without reducing it to self-consciousness;
he affirms reality of facts at the same time that he insists in the validity of
his feelings. His human presence - playful, optimistic, and capable of
childlike joy- keeps his poems open, public, and committed to social and
artistic change. And in the perfect oneness of his life and art, Hikmet emerges
as a heroic figure.
His early poems proclaim this unity as a faith: art is an event, he maintains, in social as well as literary history, and a poet's bearing in art is inseparable from his bearing in life. The rest of Hikmet's life gave him ample opportunity to act upon this faith and, in fact to deepen it. As Terrence Des Pres observes, Hikmet's exemplary life and special vision - at once historical and timeless, Marxist and mystical - had unique consequences for his art: Simply because in his art and in his person Hikmet opposes the enemies of the human spirit in harmony with itself and the earth, he can speak casually and yet with a seriousness that most modern American poets never dream of attempting.
His early poems proclaim this unity as a faith: art is an event, he maintains, in social as well as literary history, and a poet's bearing in art is inseparable from his bearing in life. The rest of Hikmet's life gave him ample opportunity to act upon this faith and, in fact to deepen it. As Terrence Des Pres observes, Hikmet's exemplary life and special vision - at once historical and timeless, Marxist and mystical - had unique consequences for his art: Simply because in his art and in his person Hikmet opposes the enemies of the human spirit in harmony with itself and the earth, he can speak casually and yet with a seriousness that most modern American poets never dream of attempting.
The increasingly breathless
pace of his late poems such as in this one conveys the never-ending agony of
man in all corners of this universe and his eagerness and heroic temper to
embrace the pain of all humanity. There is sense urgency in many of his poems
as if time is accelerating for him and it hooks the reader .
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