Translated Poems

On Living by Nâzım Hikmet

(here is a music composition of this poem by Fazıl Say)

(I)
Living is no laughing matter,
You’ll live with great seriousness,
Like a squirrel for instance,
That is, without expecting anything outside and beyond life,
That is, your sole purpose will be to live.

You’ll take living seriously,
To such a degree, so much so that,
For instance, your arms tied behind your back, your back against the wall,
Or with your huge glasses,
In your white shirt in a laboratory,
You’ll be able to die for people.
Even for those whose faces you haven’t even seen,
Even if nobody has forced you into it,
Even though you know that the most real thing is to live.

So, you’ll take living so seriously that,
Even in your seventies, for instance, you’ll plant olives,
Not to leave it to the children or anything like that,
But because although you’re afraid of dying, you don’t believe in death,
Because living outweighs.

(II)
Let’s say, we’re a patient in critical condition,
So, from the white table
There’s a chance of never waking up again too,
Although it’s impossible not to feel the sorrow of leaving a little early,
We’ll nevertheless laugh at the jokes of Bektasi,
We’ll look out of the window, to see if it’s raining,
Or we’ll still wait impatiently
For the latest news bulletin.

Let’s say, for something worth fighting for,
Let’s say we’re on the frontline.
Right there, in the first attack, on that very day,
There’s a chance of falling flat on our face and dying too.
We’ll know this with a strange sense of resentment,
And yet we’ll still be madly curious
For that which may take years, the end of war.

Let’s say, we’re in prison,
Our age is around fifty,
And we still have eighteen years until the iron door opens,
Nevertheless, we’ll live with the outside,
With its people, animals, fights and winds
That is, the outside behind the wall.

So, whenever and wherever we are,
Living like we’ll never die…

(III)
This world will grow cold,
A star among the stars,
One of the tiniest ones even,
A star particle on a blue velvet
That is, this enormous world of ours.

This world will grow cold one day,
Not like a pack of ice,
Or a dead cloud either,
It’ll roll like an empty walnut,
In the pitch black darkness, vast and endless.

Even now, the pain of it must sting,
The sorrow has to be felt already.
This world must be loved like that
For you to say “I have lived”…