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WHAT DID THEY WRITE ABOUT HIM?
Selahattin Hilav (b.1928)
"Those who made Nâzım rot in dungeons copied his poems in their notebooks in their finest handwriting. While they were among those who shared with them the same rank (that is to say, in those circles where there is no outsiders, no one from the people), they did not refrain from reciting his poems by heart. If you asked them about it, they would explain why they liked Nâzım, basing it on some rationale they thought fit: They would say, 'He is a great poet, an artist; his personality and thoughts do not concern us'. 'We only like and appreciate him as a poet'. Years passed by and the 'sultan of the word', who himself, along with his poems, was exiled by eastern fascism, came back with his works. The real owner of Turkish poetry returned; regardless of whether or not he was wanted; he was back at the centre of the debate. As a result of a number of social events, he had been released of official censorship but he now faced a more hidden and wide-spread kind of suppression: Now they said that 'Nâzım was a myth; he owed his success in art to his personal adventure, not to his poetry'... 'He is a great poet but his personality, his adventures and thoughts do not concern us'. In other words, those who were arguing that his ways were wrong and not valid, accepted him as a poet but they did not accept his mythic part. Years later, they accepted his mythic part but denied his poetry. The fact that these two claims (Nâzım is a poet, not a myth/ Nâzım is a myth, not a poet) were derived from the same basis was ignored and only the predicates changed place in the dual judgment that constituted each of the claims... What lay beneath these claims was the dilapidated notion that assumed that it is possible to separate being a myth from being a poet. Without a doubt, Nâzım is at the same time a myth. But he is among the two or three that came out of the bosom of the twentieth century... [...] The word myth not only includes sloppy and fake values but also those who wrote their works with their blood and those who turned their lives into a source for enthusiasm, thinking and affection, as well as into their works. We need only think of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Mayakovski, and Artaud. The glitter of fame is not interest to us; time will take care of that. But those we have enumerated above and those like them, are beyond our consideration; namely those who blend their lives and works in unlimited suffering, renunciation, courage, and pain and thus discover novel realities and who, having perceived these before anyone else, have awarded them to the consciousness of humanity through art. [...]
"Let us assume that Nâzım serves the need for 'myth' and that is why we do not see his artistic value but only his mythic side. Let us assume that we are a nation in need of 'myth'. But what about the Soviet nations, the Chinese, the Latin American nations, the Cubans or the Vietnamese? Are they also in need of myth? Do they also consider the mythic side of Nâzım important and are mistaken about his artistic value? (From "Recent Debates on Art and Nâzım Hikmet.")
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