“Rubailer,” maqāṭīʿ, and a transhistorical approach to the work of Nâzım Hikmet

Abstract

Nâzım Hikmet’s (d. 1963) poetry is often approached from competing perspectives: one privileges his communist politics and modernist aesthetics, and another emphasizes the poet’s place within and influence from Turkish literary tradition. In Hikmet’s poem “Rubailer” [Rubaiyat or Quatrains], the poet’s political views and traditional engagement are intertwined as materialist content is expressed through a Perso-Ottoman form. This paper reads “Rubailer” alongside maqāṭīʿ of Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), poems which similarly pair genre-specific stylizations with depictions of social reality. This dialogic reading argues for the inseparability and interplay of form and content, or when applied to Hikmet, of tradition and materialism. Furthermore, this article presents a case in favor of transhistorical comparison, as working through the points of connection between maqāṭīʿ and “Rubailer” invites a productive reading of the latter. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Middle Eastern Literatures.