Yaşamaya Dair

Yaşamaya Dair is a three-part poem by Nazım Hikmet, written between 1947 and 1948 during his years in prison. It remains one of the most widely read poems in modern Turkish literature. Each section pushes the same claim into a harder situation than the one before it, from a hospital bed to a battlefield to a cell with eighteen years still ahead.

The Poem

The first section, dated 1947, opens with a flat rule: yaşamak şakaya gelmez, living is not something to take as a joke. From there it moves through harder scenes, culminating in the poem's closing image of a seventy-year-old planting an olive tree.

The second section, dated 1948, runs through three parallel situations, each opened with the same phrase, diyelim ki, let's say. Let's say we're facing major surgery. Let's say we're at the front. Let's say we're in prison with eighteen years still ahead. Each one answers itself the same way, with something ordinary continuing anyway, a joke, a glance at the window, an ear kept on the news.

The third section, from February 1948, drops the human scale altogether and looks at the world itself, a star that will eventually go cold. It asks the reader to feel that ending now, in advance, so the world gets loved enough in the meantime to earn its closing word: yaşadım. I lived.

Living as an Action

The title is easy to misread in English. Yaşamaya dair doesn't mean "about life" the way "On Living" suggests. Yaşamak is a verb, and dair means something closer to "concerning" or "regarding." The poem rarely describes what life is. It tells you what living requires, mostly through verbs pointed at the future: yaşayacaksın, you will live. Alacaksın. Dikeceksin. You will take it on, you will plant it.

Why a Squirrel?

Bir sincap gibi, like a squirrel, is a strange comparison for a poem this serious. Turkish poetry has grander animals available to it. Hikmet reaches for one known mostly for a single trait: total absorption in whatever it's doing right now, with no visible sense of anything past the next task.

That might be the point. The poem isn't asking the reader to be brave so much as absorbed, which is a stranger thing to ask, since it means giving up the small distance most people keep between themselves and what they're doing.

The Grammar of Commitment

Turkish has a way of turning a verb into something closer to a promise than a prediction, and Hikmet leans on it constantly. Yaşayacaksın sits somewhere between "you will live" and "you must live," carrying more certainty than a plain future tense and more weight than an instruction. English keeps splitting the difference, choosing one or the other, where the Turkish holds both at once.

Ölebileceksin lands the same way. So does dikeceksin. Each verb arrives as something already decided, and the reader is simply informed of it afterward, which is a large part of why the poem reads as commanding rather than persuasive. It never quite builds a case for the reader to accept.

"Yani": Thinking in Turkish

A small word, yani, runs through the first section so often it starts to work like a pulse under the lines. Yani sits between "I mean" and "that is to say," the phrase people reach for in ordinary Turkish speech when restating an idea to get it right.

Hikmet uses it that way here too. A claim gets stated, circled back to with yani, rephrased slightly, circled back to again. It reads like someone working out a thought under pressure, in real time, rather than reciting a conclusion arrived at somewhere else. Yani shows up constantly in spoken Turkish, and rarely gets this kind of attention in a literary text.

The Rhythm of "Hem de"

A second repetition runs underneath yani that tends to get skipped over: hem de, hem de, hem de. It stacks up at the poem's most demanding moment, describing dying for people you've never met. Hem de means roughly "and what's more," or "even though," and Hikmet piles it up three times running, even though no one forced you to this, even though you know living is the truest thing there is.

Each repetition raises the bar slightly higher than the one before. By the third hem de, the reader has been walked somewhere more extreme than a single line could have stated outright, and none of it needed an exclamation mark to get there.

Ordinary Objects

Death rarely gets argued directly here. It routes instead through small, specific things. A person facing surgery isn't asked whether they accept mortality. They're asked whether they'll still want to hear a Bektaşi joke, whether they'll still check if it's raining outside.

That's where the philosophy lives, inside these objects rather than above them. Take them out and what remains is a slogan about facing death bravely.

The Three "Diyelim ki" Scenarios

The second section is built almost entirely on one repeated phrase, diyelim ki, let's say, opening each of its three imagined circumstances. Diyelim ki is a hypothetical marker, but a soft one, closer to something a person says while thinking through a plan out loud than a formal "suppose that."

Used three times in a row, it turns the section into something like a sequence of trial runs, each harder than the one before it. The repetition builds a rhythm that sounds like someone testing their own courage rather than announcing it.

Life Inside Death

The second section's three scenes are, on their surface, all about death. None of them get softened. Nobody is promised the surgery succeeds, or the war spares them, or the sentence gets shortened.

What the lines actually linger on in each case is something else, the specific, unglamorous behavior of a person who keeps going anyway. The joke still gets told. The window still gets checked. The prisoner still stays tuned to whatever is happening on the other side of a wall he can't see through.

The World After Us

The closing image, boş bir ceviz gibi, like an empty walnut tumbling through endless dark, does something unexpected with scale. An empty walnut is small, dry, and hollow, the kind of object that might sit forgotten in a drawer rather than a grand vision of apocalypse. The eventual death of the entire world gets shrunk down to something a reader could hold in one hand.

That smallness is doing more work than a bigger image would. There's no ask here to feel awe at the size of the universe ending, just something quieter, felt now, in advance, so the grief of it turns into a reason to love the world while it still exists.

The Final Line: "Yaşadım"

One word arrives only at the very end: yaşadım. I lived. Past tense, first person, spoken as though from some point after everything else in the poem has already happened.

Nearly every verb up to that point has pointed forward. Yaşadım breaks that pattern. It's the only place in the poem where the grammar looks backward instead of forward, and the only claim stated as a completed fact rather than a demand.

A Voice That Commands Without Shouting

Much of the poem is built around imperative-like future forms, and yet it never raises its voice to make its case. There's no exclamation point doing the emotional work anywhere in it, no rhetorical question demanding the reader's agreement. The commands arrive stated flatly, as though they were already true before the poem got around to saying them.

This restraint is worth sitting with, because it's easy to miss how unusual it is. A poem this insistent about how a person ought to live has plenty of room to turn preachy, and this one never does. Part of the reason may be that Hikmet doesn't ask the reader to feel a particular way about death. 

He states, matter-of-factly, what a person will do, and lets the flatness of the statement carry more weight than urgency could. Read the surgery scene again with that in mind: nobody is instructed to be brave. Someone simply still wants to hear a joke, and the poem records this the way it might record the weather. Shouted, the same content would likely sound like propaganda, a poet telling people how to feel about their own mortality. Said quietly, in plain grammar, it reads more like something the speaker had already settled for himself long before writing it down, and was now simply reporting.

There's also something in this restraint that connects back to where the poem was written. A person naming their own defiance loudly, from inside a cell, risks sounding like a performance aimed at an audience. A person stating it flatly, almost as fact, sounds like something closer to a private decision that happens to have been overheard.

Reading Experience

The poem doesn't feel the same at the end as it does at the start. The first section stays close and personal, a single person's death, a single tree planted by a single old man. It's intimate, almost claustrophobic in scale.

The second section tightens further before it opens up. Diyelim ki, diyelim ki, diyelim ki, each scenario narrower than the last, ending in a cell with eighteen years still ahead, about as confined as a life can get. Right at that point, the line breaks outward: however and wherever we are, we must live as if we'll never die.

By the third section, the scale has broken open completely, set against a picture of the whole planet going cold and dark. And then the last section pulls everything back down to one small word. Yaşadım. After all that scale, the poem ends on the smallest possible claim.

Who Should Read This Poem?

For Turkish learners. The poem rewards attention to grammar as much as image. Its future-obligation verb forms and its repeated yani and hem de carry a good deal of the argument, and all of them show up constantly in everyday spoken Turkish.

For readers of modern poetry. The poem offers a case study in argument built through repetition and plain grammar rather than layered metaphor.

For readers of prison and political literature. It states no ideology outright. Its conviction runs instead through its insistence on ordinary continued living inside conditions built to make that impossible, a quieter kind of political writing than slogans or direct address.