Things I didn't know I loved

with Nazim Hikmet

it is friday, 9th August
i am sitting on a desk
at a friend’s house,
writing
i am just a visitor

the rains are here again
waiting patiently
to tell me that it is time

the rains are just a visitor

i’m sitting and writing
everything changes
the time, the dream,
even the nature of the imprisonment
but this doesn’t

the pen is a furrow on a tired face
whose hairs, like fingers of wheat
tell the time to slow down
tell eternity to be patient

i did not know that i love
the smell of burnt toast
the sound of attention slowly slipping away
i did not know that my eyes start
from their spheres, when you remind me
to switch off the toaster
i did not know that my body
knew the answer to the question
that your fingers asked
better than i did

the meaning of solitude
lies in the gap between my fingers
and the impossiblity of
ever fully knowing another
surface

i did not know that i love silence
that i like to speak to the abyss
to the crack in space, that allows me to plant
a shadow, a false sense, more real to me
than all the people in the world
and their soundless tears, wept in the damp
cellars of their own guilt.
i did not know that
the only time this body becomes empty cup,
this heart, a tablet, and the moment, a passerby,
- the one time when language loses its grip -
is when you look at me.

when your gaze holds me
and my riverine village blushes
in the onslaught of your rain
when you, a country ravaged,
a land to which i’m immigrant,
demand allegiance.

the meaning of love
for nation, for soil,
for body and heart,
lies in that gaze, its quiet certainty,
its awareness of imminent end.

---

a short excerpt from the poem by Nazim Hikmet that inspired the fragment:

THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I LOVED

it’s 1962 March 28th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird
I didn’t know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it
I’ve never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long
as a crow

I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
and will be said after me…

2 more poems by Hikmet:

I have share the writings of John Berger on this platform before. I return to a text of his that is special to me, to cite his words on Hikmet. Previously, I had referred to Hold Everything Dear in a commentary that shared some Palestinian poems. His “Seven Levels of Despair”, contemplations on death and resistance in Gaza, are relevant today, and I urge you to visit the text, if you haven’t. In this commentary i share his vision of the Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet.

I'm not sure whether I ever saw Nazim Hikmet. I would swear to it that I did, but I can't find the circumstantial evidence. I believe it was in London in 1954. Four years
after he had been released from prison, nine years before his death. He was speaking at a political meeting held in Red Lion Square, He said a few words and then he read some poems. Some in English, others in Turkish. His voice was strong, calm, highly personal and very musical. But it did not seem to come from his throat — or not from his throat at that moment. It was as though he had a radio in his breast, which he switched on and off with one of his large, slightly trembling, hands. I'm describing it badly because his presence and sincerity were very obvious. In one of his long poems he describes six people in Turkey listening in the early 1 940s to a symphony by Shostakovich on the radio. Three of the six people are (like him) in prison. The broadcast is live; the symphony is being played at that same moment in Moscow, several thousand kilometres away. Hearing him read his poems in Red Lion Square, I had the impression that the words he was saying were also coming from the other side of the world. Not because they were difficult to understand (they were not), nor because they were blurred or weary (they were full of the capacity of endurance), but because they were being said to somehow triumph over distances and to transcend endless separations. The here of all his poems is elsewhere.

'In Prague a cart —
a one-horse wagon
passes the Old Jewish Cemetery.
The cart is full of longing for another city
I am the driver.’

Even when he was sitting on the platform before he got up to speak, you could see he was an unusually large and tall man. It was not for nothing that he was nicknamed 'The tree with blue eyes'. When he did stand up, you had the impression he was also very light, so light that he risked to become airborne.
Perhaps I never did see him, for it would seem unlikely that, at a meeting organized in London by the international Peace movement, Hikmet would have been tethered to the platform by several guy-ropes so that he should remain earthbound.

Yet that is my clear memory. His words after he pronounced them rose into the sky - it was a meeting outdoors and his body made as if to follow the words he had written, as they drifted higher and higher above the Square and above the sparks of the one-time trams which had been suppressed three or four years before, along Theobald's Road.

I am reminded of De Souza’s “best to meet in poems”, and Berger’s defiance of that maxim - how he loved the poet, and the poem, how his ideas grew in the presence of artists and writers; creative fires that flamed fearlessly against the establishment. always against the establishment.

Nearly all the contemporary poets who have counted most for me during my long life I have read in translation, seldom in their original language. I think it would have been impossible for anyone to say this before the twentieth century. Arguments about poetry being or not being translatable went on for centuries — but they were chamber arguments — like chamber music. During the twentieth century most of the chambers were reduced to rubble.

New means of communication, global politics, imperialisms, world markets, etc. threw millions of people together and took millions of people apart in an indiscriminate and quite unprecedented way. And as a result the expectations of poetry changed; more and more the best poetry counted on readers who were further and further away.

'Our poems
like milestones
must line the road.'

During the twentieth century, many naked lines of poetry were strung between different continents, between forsaken villages and distant capitals. You all know it, all of you; Hikmet, Brecht, Vallejo, Atilla Josef, Adonis, Juan Gelman . . .

Some of the translations of Hikmet’s poems shared in these passages are by Berger himself. This line stays with me. always.

‘Our poems/ like milestones/must line the road’

---

I hope you are finding silence, and the space to create.
Do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments.
I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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