Volume 7, No. 11, November 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
The distinct presence of Islamic practice and an Indo-Persian tradition in Faiz’s poetry strike a distinctly different note from that of Hikmet’s verse which, on the whole, remains largely rooted in Turkish folk tradition as much as it is influenced by the modernist avant-garde movement popular with young Soviet poets known as Futurism. Differences apart, philosophical, quasi-religious and decidedly Sufi influences lend poetry a life beyond the present moment as well as a timeless, lyrical quality that allows it to be sung and/or recited. The works of Hikmet and Faiz have therefore proven to be fertile ground for singers and many an evening has been spent in rapture listening to their hypnotic lyrics.
While the language a person speaks is one that the speaker identifies with and must be seen as part of his identity and culture, one can see that Faiz and Hikmet rise above their particular identities as the Pakistani and the Turk, subsume themselves within a ‘universal self’ struggling not only against imperialism, capitalism and exploitation, but also personal conflicts and nostalgia as can be seen in Faiz’s cry:
“How will I return to you, my city?”
a problem to which he finds a unique solution by asking the city to tell all its lovers to turn the wicks of their lamps high so that he may find the way back to his beloved ‘city of many lights’, just as Hikmet’s sorrowful promise to his son:
“Memet, I’ll die far from my language and my songs,
my salt and bread,
homesick for you and your mother,
my friends and my people, but not in exile,
not in some foreign land
I will die in the country of my dreams
in the white city of my best days.”
As full of a yearning nostalgia for the beloved ‘white city’ of ‘many lights’ or loved ones as these verses are, their importance grows ever larger due to the strong note of optimism voiced by each poet despite their respective sorrows. Ironically, it is this very homesickness laden with an apparently indestructible optimism that dictates a visible transformation in each poet’s diction, language, content, meaning and metaphor attributed to the idea of the homeland, crystallized splendidly in Hikmet’s line:
“The country that I like most is the earth.”
In such a state, the importance of one’s own language cannot be overemphasised as can be seen in the life of the imprisoned poet as he states that prison is a place where:
“You shiver there inside
When outside, at forty days’ distance,
a leaf moves”,
with the sound advice to:
“Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice and for spring nights,
and always remember to eat every last piece of bread—
also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.”
In the poem Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison (1949), Hikmet expresses his will to survive despite the tedium of prison life by reading and writing without rest, while encouraging ‘weaving and making mirrors’ with the final bit of advice delivered in a congenial conversational tone:
“I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.”
Meanwhile, in a post-independence, infant Pakistan, Faiz worked in various capacities as a political activist, senior journalist and editor, labor unionist and member of the Communist Party, which landed him in prison in 1951 for an alleged Soviet-backed conspiracy to overthrow the government. Incarcerated for four years, he became a ‘state guest’ again for a few months after the imposition of General Ayub Khan’s 1958 martial law. The only Pakistani to have received the Soviet equivalent of the Nobel prize in 1962, Faiz also served as editor of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in Beirut during self-imposed exile from General Ziaul Haq’s rule in Pakistan. Such wanderings beg the question – why should a man risk life and liberty to write poetry, or anything at all? What must be the finest raison d’etre marking Faiz’s poetry is his own observation that: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.”
Life therefore, is no more nor less than an all-consuming pursuit of the ‘beloved’, a word that defies obvious simplistic identification in all seven volumes of poetry that Faiz produced. Just as the tone of Faiz’s poetry refuses reduction to an obviously single layer, similarly, the use of the word ‘beloved’ carries several layers of meaning, ranging from the complex mystical layers of Rumi’s use of the word, to Sufi thought and tenets, to more secular references such as person, home, or a country. The word ‘beloved’ therefore, metamorphoses itself from a physical entity to serve almost as a synonym for the emotions of ‘hope’ and ‘love’ itself. As for ‘loss’, the small word expands in ever growing ripples to cover enormous territory as it includes references to the loss of home, family, country, livelihood, and anything one holds dear.
True to the spirit of Marxism, the loss of livelihood as a critical means of survival is stated with tender yet fierce fervour as:
“For there are sorrows other than heartache,
joys other than love’s rapture”,
which is perhaps the most satisfying as a translation to those who know Urdu, since it appears closest to the original musicality and lyricism of the poem.
Translation has always been sharply contested territory since losses far outweigh the gains. As Robert Frost stated wisely, “What gets lost in translation is the poetry”, which is a persuasive argument in favour of poets possibly translating their own works. A case in point is Faiz’s letters in English to his wife while in prison, which were translated into lyrical Urdu by the poet himself after much persuasion. The scepticism of the Spanish writer Miguel Jugo is therefore a predictable response since he draws attention to the fact that, “An idea does not pass from one language to another without change”, which in view of several extant translations of a single Faiz poem, each at variance from the other, reinforces Jugo’s view of the problematic role that translations play despite their obvious benefits in universalising the written word. That Hikmet and Faiz have survived the problems of literal or poetically rendered translations is in large measure due to the topical and contextual importance of their works. Hikmet (formidably translated by the husband and wife duo of Randy Blasing and Kutlu Mutluk Blasing) immortalises the survivors of the nuclear holocaust and warns against it with his poem Kiz Cocugu (Hiroshima Girl) in which the haunting spectre of a seven-year old Japanese girl comes to every doorstep to plead for peace, ten years after she has died in the horrific mushroom explosion. The poem’s fierce anti-war message strikes a particularly sensitive note as a world struggling with its conscience simultaneously flexes its muscles at its growing nuclear arsenal. The poem, sung in Turkey as well as worldwide in other languages including a stirring rendition by the legendary Joan Baez, is known by various titles such as The Girl Child, I Unseen, and I Come and Stand at Every Door.
And yet, with a vast selection of themes ranging from war to love, what is truly remarkable about both men is that in letter or poem there is absolutely no sign of bitterness or rancour, no railing against a cruel fate, no teeth gnashing or oath taking for revenge. Instead, there is a passionate love of red-blooded life fed by a steady stream of longing and hope for better things to come. In Faiz’s letters to Alys, for example, the poet delicately balances a wistfulness and hope while confined within the four walls of the cell he lives in, despite being denied pen and paper on occasion. The Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde writing for The Guardian while imprisoned in Reading Jail said: “A beautiful love letter is as much about the writer as it is about the object of affection.” What then should one make of Faiz as he writes a letter to Alys from prison dated October 8, 1952?
“Beloved, This morning the moon shone so brightly in my face that it woke me up. The jail bell tolled the half hour after four…I got up and sat in the verandah opposite my cell and watched the morning come. I heard the jail lock open and shut as the guards changed the key and chains rattle in the distance and the iron gates and doors clamp their jaws as if they were chewing up the last remains of the night’s starry darkness. Then the breeze slowly rose like a languid woman and the sky slowly paled and the stars seemed to billow up and down in pearly white pools and sucked them under. I sat and watched and thoughts and memories flooded into the mind. Perhaps it was on a morning like this that the moon beckoned to a lonely traveller a little distance from where I sit and took him away into the unknown and the traveller was my brother. Perhaps the moon is at this moment softly shining on the upturned faces, painless now in death, of the murdered men in Korean prison camps and these dead men too are my brothers. When they lived they lived far away in lands I have not seen but they also lived in me and were a part of my blood and those who have killed them have killed a part of me and shed some of my blood. Albeit they are dead, as my brother is dead and only the dead can adequately mourn for the dead. Let the living only rejoice for the living.”
Sorrowing for his own brother who died while preparing to visit him in jail, Faiz lassoes the light of a soft moon to include strangers in a faraway land as he reasons that the colour of blood remains the same regardless of where it is shed. The only difference worth noting according to the poet therefore, is between the realms of the living and the dead – not flag, country or cause. While both Faiz and Hikmet write poetry that is simultaneously public and private, they are also prolific letter writers. Since distance is a recurring theme in the work of both poets, almost every other poem works like a handwritten dispatch mapping its way across vast land masses. In an age where the art of letter writing has all but disappeared due to a churlish but impossible to ignore technology, Faiz’s letters revive memories of that incomparable poet Mirza Ghalib, whose exquisite conversational prose laid the foundation for a less Persianised, easily accessible Urdu. Faiz’s prison letters to Alys written in English for obvious reasons, are now available in book form, while Hikmet’s posthumously published record of correspondence in three volumes reveals both men as masters of the art of letter writing in addition to being great poets.
The writer is a Pakistani academic, Film/TV actor, writer and director. Her book Aslan’s Roar: Turkish Television and the Rise of the Muslim Hero (2019) is an extensive study of Turkish popular culture and its rise in the modern world. She is the recipient of one of Pakistan’s highest civil awards, the Pride of Performance for Literature and the Fatima Jinnah Award for Artistic Excellence. As Associate Professor she taught English Literature at the University of Punjab before helping to establish Beaconhouse National University where she set up the Department of Theatre, Film and TV, and is designated Distinguished Professor of Performing Arts. She is currently the Academic Advisor at Lahore Grammar School system.
(To be continued)