Re: [xmca] On the occasion of 11th of June

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Ulvi:
 
Thanks very much for this, and above all thanks for the link to HIkmet's other work.
 
Nazim Hikmet was the man who wrote the poem about the little girl in Hiroshima that David Preiss shared with us (made into a rather lugubrious hit by the Byrds in the 1960s).
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0CDpU44fA
 
 When I was younger, I read a play by him in French about the suicide of Mayakovsky ("Pourquoi Benerdji s'est suicide?").
 
I think I read somewhere that he was one of the first to use the Turkish language to write blank verse, and that prior to his work Turkish poetry borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian to create meter, because Turkish has no long vowels. 
 
I even seem to remember something very historical he said to defend the practice; something like, "Primitive man used rhyme as a mnemonic tool to be able to remember the next line of a long poem, but with the invention of written language rhyme became obsolete."
 
Do you know anything about this?
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 

 


      
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