The English-speaking world has applauded the 11 books on Nazım Hikmet published by Mutlu Konuk Blasing, a professor of American literature at Brown University since the 1980s. This week, she will be giving a special lecture at Bilkent on Nazım Hikmet, in Turkish. Organized by the Department of Turkish Literature, the lecture is entitled “Güzel Yalanlar: Bir Şair, Bir Ulus, Bir Dünya.” It will take place on Wednesday, December 17 at 4:30 p.m. in FEASS, A-130.
Prof. Blasing is the author of a major new Nazım Hikmet study, “The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet,” published in New York in 2013. The Turkish translation, “Nazım Hikmet: Yaşamı, Dönemi ve Yazıları” (translated by Dr. Barış Gümüşbaş of Hacettepe University), will be published soon by Yapı Kredi Yayınları.
Between 1975 and 2012, Prof. Blasing published (with her husband, American poet Randy Blasing) nine Nazım Hikmet books in translation, including: “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” “The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin and Other Poems,” “Rubaiyat,” “Selected Poetry,” “Poems of Nazım Hikmet,” “Human Landscapes From My Country” and “Letters to Taranta-Babu.” In 2013 she published her translation of Nazım’s “Life’s Good, Brother.” She is also the author of four important books on American literature.