Re-worlding the Mona Lisa: Nazım Hikmet's

Nazım Hikmet's long poem, Gioconda and Si-Ya-U (1929), weaves intriguing connections between Shanghai, Istanbul, Moscow and Paris. What is at stake when a Turkish poet ventriloquizes an iconic Renaissance painting—none other than the Mona Lisa—and sends her in cross-continental pursuit of an anti-imperialist Chinese youth? By examining the poem's literary strategies and historical context through the lens of diplomacy theory, Hikmet's work can be read as an innovative modernist intervention into the nationalist and imperialist official narratives of its time, and as an example of early twentieth-century "imaginative diplomacy."