The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse, by Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Untitled document

Nazim Hikmet. Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse. Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Foreword Edward Hirsch. Persea, 2002. 466 pp. $39.95.

Hikmet’s massive twentieth-century epic dramatizes in poetic dialogue several extended episodes of a people’s fervent struggle for liberty. The poet’s sharply etched representative scenes from Turkish life under and in resistance to late Ottoman rule, alternately pathetic, impassioned, and poignantly humorous, illuminate generations of long-suppressed, frustrated aspirations. Restlessly awaiting freedom’s eventual triumph over political oppression, poverty, and ignorance, Hasan Shevket, Mustafa the poet, the political prisoner Halil, and many other memorable dramatis personae relentlessly assail the ponderous machinery of tyranny. In a stirring cavalcade celebrating humble, ordinary people’s yearning and ardor, the words and deeds of these partisans-in-spite-of-themselves celebrate their ceaseless, uphill struggle for liberty. Hikmet’s poetic line is terse, staccato, conversational in its deceptive informality, while rhythmical variation and repetition create a narrative ebb and flow punctuated by moments of epiphany as someone finds his role, another his voice, to combat centuries of peonage. Hikmet’s unabashed communist politics, for which he languished in prison or exile most of his adult life, are reflected in vignettes of idealized “Ivans” of soldierly valor and of real-life heroes, “Tanya” the teenaged Russian revolutionary and the Nazi-martyred journalist Gabriel Peri. Still, the poet’s most profound sympathies lie with the poor man striving to sustain himself and his family in pursuit of a fleeting happiness. Living out prolonged confinement for political activities, dreaming of his wife and child as blindness threatens and days become years, unbowed Halil recalls the poet’s own situation, a cynosure of what an entire culture was forced to endure. Ultimately Hikmet’s art suggests a spaciousness, a grandeur in the details of poor people seeking just to breathe while events portend an invidious recurrence of suffering for love, ambition, misfortune—for living. Finally available complete in English, Hikmet’s hauntingly eloquent masterpiece never flags.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse, by Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk reviewed by Michael Pinker Untitled document Nazim Hikmet. Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse. Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Foreword Edward Hirsch. Persea, 2002. 466 pp. $39.95. Hikmet’s massive twentieth-century epic dramatizes in poetic dialogue several extended episodes of a people’s fervent struggle for liberty. The poet’s sharply etched representative scenes from Turkish life under and in resistance to late Ottoman rule, alternately pathetic, impassioned, and poignantly humorous, illuminate generations of long-suppressed, frustrated aspirations. Restlessly awaiting freedom’s eventual triumph over political oppression, poverty, and ignorance, Hasan Shevket, Mustafa the poet, the political prisoner Halil, and many other memorable dramatis personae relentlessly assail the ponderous machinery of tyranny. In a stirring cavalcade celebrating humble, ordinary people’s yearning and ardor, the words and deeds of these partisans-in-spite-of-themselves celebrate their ceaseless, uphill struggle for liberty. Hikmet’s poetic line is terse, staccato, conversational in its deceptive informality, while rhythmical variation and repetition create a narrative ebb and flow punctuated by moments of epiphany as someone finds his role, another his voice, to combat centuries of peonage. Hikmet’s unabashed communist politics, for which he languished in prison or exile most of his adult life, are reflected in vignettes of idealized “Ivans” of soldierly valor and of real-life heroes, “Tanya” the teenaged Russian revolutionary and the Nazi-martyred journalist Gabriel Peri. Still, the poet’s most profound sympathies lie with the poor man striving to sustain himself and his family in pursuit of a fleeting happiness. Living out prolonged confinement for political activities, dreaming of his wife and child as blindness threatens and days become years, unbowed Halil recalls the poet’s own situation, a cynosure of what an entire culture was forced to endure. Ultimately Hikmet’s art suggests a spaciousness, a grandeur in the details of poor people seeking just to breathe while events portend an invidious recurrence of suffering for love, ambition, misfortune—for living. Finally available complete in English, Hikmet’s hauntingly eloquent masterpiece never flags.

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