Turkey’s poet of hope: Nazım Hİkmet

Hailed by many as the writer of hope, Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet, with his profound optimism, may be just what the world needs now to face down the era of coronavirus.

"We will see beautiful days kids / sunny days / We will sail our boats to the blue seas kids / to the bright blue seas," wrote Hikmet in the 1930s - with the Great Depression hanging over much of the globe - in a poem called Optimism.

Today marks the 57th anniversary of the passing of the legendary Turkish poet. At a glance, his biography may make his optimism even more significant: His books banned, he spent most of his life behind bars or in exile, but continued to write.

Gündüz Vassaf, a prolific Turkish writer and psychologist, described Hikmet's  talent as "plainness, essence, and sincerity."

In the beginning, Hikmet was loved, and there were even recordings of his poems on vinyl. But "then Turkey hated him, he was declared a traitor," Vassaf is quoted as saying by Haluk Oral in his 2019 book The Journey of Nazım Hikmet.
Hikmet was born in 1902 into an elite family in Thessalonica, an Ottoman Empire territory in present-day Greece. He grew up in Anatolia, the Turkish heartland.

After studying economics and political science in Moscow, he came home a Marxist in 1924, a year after the new Turkish Republic was founded following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He spent most of his adult life in jail. During his time in prison, international intellectuals such as artist Pablo Picasso and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre urged his release.

In 1951 he left Turkey forever to live in the Soviet Union, from which he traveled to Eastern Europe, Cuba, and other places.

For this reason, when Turks travel across the world in Russia or Cuba or Eastern...

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