Nazım Hikmet poem on view at London’s subway station

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Turkish poet Nazım Hİkmet Ran has become one of the six poets to have their poems displayed in London subway trains, as part of the “World Poems on the Underground” project.

The English translation of the poet’s “Geceleyin Baku” (Baku at Night) will be on display on the walls of the train carriages until the end of the Olympic Games, to be held in London this summer.

Together with “Baku at Night,” one poem by Sujata Bhatt, Niyi Osundare, John Agard, Imtiaz Dharker and Lotte Kramer will be displayed on the walls.

The poems will be included in a booklet of “World Poems on the Underground,” together with the other poems that have featured in London subway stations since 1986. Some 120,000 copies will be distributed free to libraries, the Southbank Center, the nayor’s office, and through the British Council and the Scottish Poetry Library.

The booklet includes poets featured in sets of African, Commonwealth, European, Australian and Chinese Poems on the Underground, as well as South American and Southeast Asian poets.

The exhibition “Poems on the Underground” is being organized as part of the London 2012 Festival, a parallel event with the London Olympic Games.

Here is the poem by Nazım Hikmet Ran, “Baku at Night”

“Reaching down to the starless heavy sea in the pitch-black night,

Baku is a sunny wheatfield.

High above on a hill, grains of light hit my face by the handfulls,

And the music in the air flows like Bosphorus. High above on a hill, my heart goes out like a raft into the endless absence,

Beyond memory down to the starless heavy sea in the pitch dark.”