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NAZIM HİKMET: THE LEGEND OF THE NATIONAL MILITIA Title: Kuvayı Milliye destanı (The legend of the national militia) Originally published: The first version of the poem was completed in 1941, only fragments of which were published in collections and anthologies in 1943 and 1946. The entire work was secretly circulated until being published in 1965 with the title ‘The legend of the War of Independence’ Language: Turkish The excerpts used are from the 2001 reprint of the 1968 edition: Nazım Hikmet , Kuvayı Milliye (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2001), pp. 11, 71– 72, 89–90. About the author Nazım Hikmet (Ran) [1902, Selanik (Gr. Thessaloniki, present-day Greece) – 1963, Moscow]: poet and playwright. Recognized as Turkey’s first and foremost modern poet, Nazım Hikmet was born to a family of pashas and bureaucrats. Following his elementary education, Nazım was enrolled in the Ottoman Naval Academy and started publishing his first poems at seventeen. In 1919, during the Allied occupation of Istanbul, he was discharged from the army on medical grounds. The following year, he fled home to join the independence struggle in Anatolia. In the course of the long trip to Ankara, the center of the independence movement, he encountered a group of Turkish students deported from Germany for being involved in the Spartacus movement, who introduced him to the ideas of Marx and Lenin. During the Independence War, the Soviet government allied with Ankara in its struggle against imperialist powers. The institutionalization of the Turkish communist movement and its contacts with the Soviet regime were thereby tolerated, albeit with a great deal of suspicion, by the Kemalist regime. In 1921, Nazım received a grant from the Turkish Ministry of Education to visit the Soviet Union. As a member of the Turkish Communist Party, Nazım spent three years in Moscow which were decisive in the shaping of his literary and political outlook. Relishing the revolutionary zeal of the early Soviet years, Nazım attended classes in the Communist University for the Workers of the East, and was deeply inspired by the innovative works of Russian Futurists such as Mayakovsky and Meyerhold. Returning to Istanbul in 1924, he started publishing essays and poems in Aydınlık (Light), the monthly journal of the Communist Party, where, for the first time, he incorporated modern political and revolutionary themes into Turkish poetry, employing a free and highly experimental style. In 1925, as the new Republic sought to consolidate its power by suppressing all forms of political dissent, Nazım, along with many left-wing intellectuals, was NAZIM HİKMET: THE LEGEND OF THE NATIONAL MILITIA 469 charged in absentia for engaging in ‘subversive’ activities and sentenced to fifteenyears in prison. He fled to Moscow and stayed there until 1928. Upon his return, following a brief period of imprisonment, he contributed to the efforts to rebuild the Communist Party, which had largely been crippled by the authoritarian Kemalist regime. Having by now gained a reputation as a poet, Nazım worked in journals and film studios, spearheading the nascent avant-garde movement in Turkish literature and drama. Between 1929 and 1938, he was recurrently in and out of prison, while publishing several plays, novels and poetry collections. The turning point came in 1938, when he was found guilty (by a farcical military tribunal) of inciting revolt among military students and sentenced to twenty eight years in prison. He composed some of his most celebrated lyrics during his long imprisonment. In 1949, an international committee of artists, organized by the poet Tristan Tzara, campaigned for Nazım Hikmet’s release. The next year, he was awarded the Peace Prize (along with Pablo Picasso and Pablo Neruda) by the World Peace Congress. Nazım was released in a general amnesty in 1950, and to avoid being drafted escaped once again to Moscow , where he lived with Polish citizenship until his death in 1963. While he remained an unassailable political and artistic icon for the Turkish left wing, for many years, Nazım was considered to be a traitor by conservatives. It was only after the 1980 coup, with the full eradication of the leftist movement in Turkey, that his artistic legacy was gradually embraced by a broader public. Main works: 835 Satır [835 lines] (1929); Jakond ile Si-Ya-U [Gioconda and SiYa -U] (1929); Sesini kaybeden şehir [The city that lost its voice] (1931); Benerci kendini nicin öldürdü? [Why did Banerjee kill himself?] (1932); Taranta Babu...

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