A Dreamt Shanghai – Nazim Hikmet’s Gioconda and Si-Ya-U, 1929

I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, no expert in Turkish poetry. However, I’ve recently been reading Charles King’s absorbing history of interwar Istanbul, Midnight at the Pera Palace – The Birth of Modern Istanbul, and have learnt a little. King profiles many of the cultural figures who formed modern Istanbul including the leftist poet Nazim Hikmet, who spent many years in Turkish prisons and in exile in the USSR. One major work by Hikmet, and new to me, is his long poem Gioconda and Si-Ya-U, published in 1929. The poem concerns Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda) which falls in love with a Chinese communist and decides, basically, to elope with him. The poem has elements of Chinoiserie, whimsy, fantasy and reflects the massacre of leftists in Shanghai in 1927, suggesting that Mona Lisa joined the revolution in the city and was killed and burnt. The poem was in memory of Hikmet’s friend and comrade Hsiao San (Si-Ya-U) who he had befriended in Moscow in the early 1920s and believed had been killed in Shanghai in 1927, but in fact had survived. The two eventually reunited in Vienna in 1951 and again in Peking in 1952. You can read the entire poem here. I’ll excerpt several verses of interest to China Rhymers I expect….

Shanghai is a big port,
an excellent port,
It’s ships are taller than
horned mandarin mansions.
My, my!
What a strange place, this Shanghai…

In the blue river boats
with straw sails float.
In the straw-sailed boats
naked coolies sort rice,
raving of rice…
My, my!
What a strange place, this Shanghai…

Shanghai is a big port,
The whites’ ships are tall,
the yellows’ boats are small.
Shanghai is pregnant with a red-headed child.
My, my!