Poetry
Human Landscapes from My Country
Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları
Nâzım Hikmet · 1966
Synopsis
The book opens at Haydarpaşa station in Istanbul: according to the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative, the 3.45 p.m. train carries third-class travellers to Anatolia, the 7 p.m. express the officers and notables. The first two books follow, according to William Armstrong, these parallel journeys of 1941; the third takes place in a prison on the steppe, and the last two move more freely in time and space. Characters from all classes, including a young worker beaten by the police for demanding a better wage, tell of their lives there.
Context
The poet began the book in 1941 in Bursa, where he was held, and wrote it during his captivity; William Armstrong reports that many of its peasants were taken from life at Bursa prison. The Turkish Ministry of Culture sees in it a work combining poetry, prose, drama and screenplay, with a technique close to cinema, and counts about twelve thousand lines of verse and a hundred or so characters, three hundred in the initial plan; Armstrong speaks of seventeen thousand lines. The whole appeared in five volumes in 1966 and 1967 from the publisher De, under the direction of Memet Fuat. The complete English translation by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk appeared in 2002.
Who it is for
A long verse novel in five books, available in French in Münevver Andaç's translation, reissued several times.
Prizes and reception
William Armstrong sees in it a poem of great economy, without a wasted word; a website of American librarians calls it a masterwork.
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