From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Subject: Re: "I Come and Stand at Every Door" (was Re: The Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie)
Date: 22 Dec 92 13:50:51 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

dmr@andromeda.rutgers.edu (Daniel Rosenblum) wrote:
> sag@hera.Berkeley.EDU (Steve Goldfield) writes:
>> In addition to Joan Baez' recording [of The Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie
>> -- DMR], Pete Seeger sings an antiwar song, I think the title is "I Come
>> and Stand at Every Door," with words by a Turkish poet and the melody the
>> same as "The Silkie."
> The Turkish poet was Nazim Hikmet.  The poem was also recorded by Paul
> Robeson, set to a different tune.

This one gets around, if it's what I think it is - the one narrated by an
ash cloud that used to be a small girl burned to death at Hiroshima,
revisiting her home?  It was also recorded in a mixture of Greek and
Turkish by Maria Farantouri and Zulfu Livaneli on a record issued in
Germany (it won the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis some time around 1980).  I
assume the tune for this was by Livaneli, it certainly sounds like him.
And there was yet another version released last year in still another
language - the BBC "Mixing It" programme broadcast it, I didn't catch the
details.  And I'm sure I've heard Joan Baez doing a version of it.


> Hikmet was a political radical (I suppose a Communist), and, I gather, a
> major innovator in Turkish poetical style whose work was for many years
> banned in Turkey (it may still be for all I know).

He was imprisoned for a total of 20 years and died in exile in Bulgaria.
The Turkish authorities could never quite make their minds up about his
poetry; even in the aftermath of the September 1980 coup, with all
autonomous political parties banned and tens of thousands of leftists and
trade unionists jailed and tortured, I could still find his work in
bookshops.  In fact, censorship has lightened up so much recently in Turkey
that almost anything is available; I saw stuff on sale in an ordinary high-
street bookshop in Trabzon this summer that darn few British or American
booksellers would touch.  The excellent investigative Maoist weekly
"Towards 2000" is available almost everywhere.  They've just switched their
approach to repression; "Towards 2000" has had several journalists killed,
and Kurdistan is more or less a free-fire zone on people asking awkward
questions.

While other people had already broken up the ossified tradition of Ottoman
poetry, Hikmet had the idea of doing in Turkish what Mayakovsky had tried
in Russian.  It worked brilliantly, but calling it an "innovation" is a bit
misleading: it wasn't entirely new and it also didn't exactly start a new
style - nobody could emulate what he was up to without sounding like a
carbon copy.  (Rather like Irish poets wondering what the heck to do next
after Yeats had gone).  Surrealism maybe became a more important influence.
But he may have been the first Turkish poet of modern times to really get
across to a mass public, and the fact that poetry is still much more popular
in Turkey than in the English-speaking world may be his doing.


> I've seen English translations of only a few of his many poems; these are
> all highly political and often very powerful.

They have been used as agitational texts by the Turkish left in a way that
has no parallel in English - imagine Bob Dylan, William Blake and Burns all
rolled into one and you've got somewhere near it.  They are damn difficult
to translate because he uses Turkish syntax to its limit - qualifiers
precede what they modify in Turkish, and he forms enormous Miltonic
sentences where subordinate clauses build up like stormclouds with the verb
at the end like a thunderbolt.  You just can't do that in English.

The most ambitious translation effort is an English version of his longest
poem, a survey of Turkey in the form of portraits of people encountered on
a long train journey:

   Type of Material: Book
     LC Call Number: PL248.H45 M413 1982
             Author: Nazim Hikmet, 1902-1963.
      Generic Title: Memleketimden insan manzaralari. English
              Title: Human landscapes / by Nazim Hikmet ; translated by Randy
                      Blasing and Mutlu Konuk ; foreword by Denise Levertov.
   Publication Info: New York : Persea Books, c1982.
  Phys. Description: xvii, 294 p. ; 21 cm.
        Series Name: Persea series of poetry in translation
              Notes: Translation of: Memleketimden insan manzaralari.
        Other Names: Blasing, Randy.
        Other Names: Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 1944-
     LC Card Number:    82012201 //r872
               ISBN: 0-89255-068-6 (pbk.) : $9.95
               ISBN: 0-89255-067-8 : $16.95

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland   TEL: 041 339 8855 x6854 (work)
INTERNET: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk or via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk    FAX: 041 330 4913
BANG!net: via mcsun and uknet     BITNET: via UKACRL    UUCP: jack@glasgow.uucp
Xref: sparky rec.music.folk:8731 rec.music.misc:29676