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Re: [xmca] About Nazim Hikmet
Thanks, Ulvi!
Nazim Hikmet's story really does get more and more interesting, though it never (for me) eclipses the actual poetry.
Bilekler kan içinde, dişler kenetli, ayaklar çıplak
ve ipek bir halıya benzeyen toprak,
bu cehennem, bu cennet bizim.
(Wrists in blood, teeth clenched,feet bare
and this soil spreading like a silk carpet,
this hell, this paradise is ours)
The Turkish word for "hell" is obviously the same as the Hebrew one, "Gehenna". I suppose it must be an Arabic borrowing.
In section six of Chapter Six of Thinking and Speech (p. 226 in the MInick translation) Vygotsky discusses the "measure of generality", a kind of Mercator projection where the point on the line of longitude represents a word meaning's paradigmatic relations and that on the line of latitude represents the meaning's syntagmatic relations.
Because this is all about scientific concepts, he is interested in how words are defined in terms of other words. But of course Vygotsky also tells us that the reverse movement, from non-object related meaning to object related meaning is equally creative and important in development; i.e. it is not original, and must be learned and developed socioculturally.
The use of "carpet" for soil (and why not for consciousness?) is a beautiful example of this. Like a carpet, soil is really knotworking.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Mon, 6/22/09, ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com> wrote:
From: ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] About Nazim Hikmet
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, June 22, 2009, 1:47 AM
David, apologizes for beign so late.
Here are some comments for your questions
Ulvi
Nazim Hikmet is the first Turkish poet who started to write without a
certain rhyme and without a defined meter. The first Turkish one who
tried to give the form to the poem according to its content. His first
trials correspond to 1920s. There are earlier steps done towards free
verse before him but Nazim Hikmet is the first serious one. He knows
French poetry and before learning Russian, he saw Mayakovsky's verses
(he knew 1920s avant-garde art milieu) and this should have encouraged
him. In Nazim Hikmet, one should mention not the disappearance of
measure and rhyme, but rather it being more free. Nazim uses the
measure and rhyme as possibilities in terms of the rhythm and sound of
the poem and uses these for a diversity.
It is highly probable that he used that sentence and the content of
that sentence is a generally admitted fact about Nazim Hikmet.
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