Nazım Hikmet Doc by Stephanie Capparelli

Mavi Boncuk |

Stephanie Capparell is a journalist, author, and filmmaker based in New York City. She is an editor for The Wall Street Journal, where she has worked for more than 20 years, having first joined the newspaper's Brussels office to edit the European edition.
The feature-length documentary “NAZIM HIKMET: LIVING IS NO LAUGHING MATTER” is a biography of the life of the remarkable, world-renowned Turkish poet (1902-1963). She produced, directed and wrote the film with Turkish journalist Niyazi Dalyanci. The film, shot in the U.S., Turkey, France, and Russia, features interviews with family and friends of the poet, and with author Howard Fast and songwriter Pete Seeger in the U.S. Capparell founded Substantial Films Inc. in 1992 to produce her film and other media projects. She serves as its president. Capparell is a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, where she edits the paper's Mansion section. She joined the newspaper's Brussels office in August 1990 as copy editor for the European edition. A year later, she transferred to the paper’s New York office. History Capparell was born in Windham, Ohio. She attended St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind., and received a bachelor's degree in Journalism from Boston University. She graduated with a Master's degree from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and earned a certificate from its Middle East Institute. Capparell began her journalism career working as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Massachusetts. After her graduation from Columbia, she moved to Istanbul to do freelance work for U.S. and European newspapers, including U.S. News and World Report, The San Diego Union-Tribune, El Periodico in Spain, and Cumhuriyet in Istanbul. She helped start the country's first English-language weekly newspaper, Dateline Turkey, a joint effort of BBA, an independent Turkish news agency, and Hurriyet, a leading daily, where she served as its editor-in-chief until 1988. During her work there, she was named President of the Istanbul Foreign Press Association. Returning to the U.S., she was a regular features contributor to The Boston Globe's Sunday edition, until hired by the European Journal in Brussels. She also has contributed to Macmillan's Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and Rough Guide: Turkey. Capparell lives in New York City. poem About this poet Nazim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902 in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen. Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended the university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924 he returned to Turkey, but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems. In 1928 a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism. After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, he came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry. Many of his works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (2009), Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (1975), The Day Before Tomorrow (1972), The Moscow Symphony (1970), and Selected Poems (1967). In 1936 he published Seyh Bedreddin destani (“The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin”) and Memleketimden insan manzaralari (“Portraits of People from My Land”). Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century. facebook twitter tumblr embed poem add to anthology print more fullscreen facebook twitter tumblr embed poem add to anthology print On Living Nazim Hikmet, 1902 - 1963 I Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example-- I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation. Living is no laughing matter: you must take it seriously, so much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall, or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people-- even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, the most beautiful thing. I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees-- and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier. II Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery-- which is to say we might not get up from the white table. Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad about going a little too soon, we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told, we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining, or still wait anxiously for the latest newscast. . . Let’s say we’re at the front-- for something worth fighting for, say. There, in the first offensive, on that very day, we might fall on our face, dead. We’ll know this with a curious anger, but we’ll still worry ourselves to death about the outcome of the war, which could last years. Let’s say we’re in prison and close to fifty, and we have eighteen more years, say, before the iron doors will open. We’ll still live with the outside, with its people and animals, struggle and wind-- I mean with the outside beyond the walls. I mean, however and wherever we are, we must live as if we will never die. III This earth will grow cold, a star among stars and one of the smallest, a gilded mote on blue velvet-- I mean this, our great earth. This earth will grow cold one day, not like a block of ice or a dead cloud even but like an empty walnut it will roll along in pitch-black space . . . You must grieve for this right now --you have to feel this sorrow now-- for the world must be loved this much if you’re going to say “I lived”. . . From Poems of Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, published by Persea Books. Copyright © 1994 by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Used with the permission of Persea Books. All rights reserved. Nazim Hikmet was born in 1902 in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece),