From Nazim to Piraye is a series of visual exploration of intimacy in poems of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, from a contemporary perspective. He was imprisoned because of his humanitarian ideas, where he wrote love poems to his beloved, Piraye. His poems were some kind of an escape for him to meet his lover. Through the work, it is aimed to visualise intimacy by reflecting the poet’ pure and intense emotions locked inside the poems for his beloved. The illustrations are produced with traditional and contemporary techniques. With the use of blind embossing, the tactile nature of the paper gives an added dimension to the work, making it simultaneously instant and distant.
With the project, it is aimed to demonstrate people how valuable it is to feel and to share intimate feelings and express them. The fact that it is being forgotten to feel and express these human feelings, within contemporary lifestyle is critiqued. In contemporary times there is a lack of intimacy, which is the essential to life, the basis of how life continues. This is why it is desired to make the audience feel emphatic, looking at the illustrations of a love story from 1945, that could not be expressed freely in real life.
8 October 1945
I’ve become impossible again:
sleepless, irritable, perverse.
One day
I work
as if beating a wild beast, as if cursing all that’s holy,
and the next day
I lie on my back from morning to night,
a lazy song on my lips. like an unlit cigarette.
And it drives me crazy,
the hatred
and pity I feel for my self…
I’ve become impossible again:
sleepless, irritable, perverse.
Again, as always, I’m wrong.
I have no cause
and couldn’t possibly.
What I’m doing is shameful,
a disgrace.
But I can’t help it:
I’m jealous of you,
forgive me…
10 October 1945
"When I look into your eyes
the smell of sunny earth hits me:
I’m in a wheat field, lost amid the grain.
Their bottomless green-glittering abyss
is ever-changing like eternal matter,
which is forever giving up its secrets
but will never
totally surrender…"
27 October 1945
We are one half of an apple,
the other half is this big world.
We are half of an apple,
the other half is our people.
You are one half of an apple,
the other half is me,
us two…
28 October 1945
The smelling fragrance of the rose geranium,
the humming of the sea,
and fall is here with its full clouds and wise earth.
My love,
the years have ripened.
We’re gone through so much
We could be a thousand years old.
But we are still
wide-eyed children
running barefoot in the sun hand in hand…
4 December 1945
Take out the dress I first saw you in,
Look your best,
Look like spring trees…
Wear in your hair
The carnation I sent you in a letter from prison,
Raise your kissable, lined, broad white forehead.
Today, not broken and sad-
No way!-
Today Nazim Hikmet’s woman must be beautiful
Like a rebel flag…