to the memory of my friend SI-YA-U,
whose head was cut off in Shanghai

A CLAIM

Renowned Leonardo's
world-famous
"La Gioconda"
has disappeared.
And in the space
vacated by the fugitive
a copy has been placed.

The poet inscribing
the present treatise
knows more than a little
about the fate
of the real Gioconda.
She fell in love
with a seductive
graceful youth:
a honey-tongued
almond-eyed Chinese
named SI-YA-U.
Gioconda ran off
after her lover;
Gioconda was burned
in a Chinese city.

I, Nazim Hikmet,
authority
on this matter,
thumbing my nose at friend and foe
five times a day,
undaunted,
claim
I can prove it;
if I can't,
I'll be ruined and banished
forever from the realm of poesy.

1928


Part One
Excerpts from Gioconda's Diary

15 March 1924: Paris, Louvre Museum

At last I am bored with the Louvre Museum.
You can get fed up with boredom very fast.
I am fed up with my boredom.
And from the devastation inside me
I drew this lesson;
to visit
a museum is fine,
to be a museum piece is terrible!
In this palace that imprisons the past
I am placed under such a heavy sentence
that as the paint on my face cracks out of boredom
I'm forced to keep grinning without letting up.
Because
I am the Gioconda from Florence
whose smile is more famous than Florence.
I am bored with the Louvre Museum.
And since you get sick soon enough
of conversing with the past,

I decided
from now on
to keep a diary.
Writing of today may be of some help
in forgetting yesterday...
However, the Louvre is a strange place.
Here you might find
Alexander the Great's
Longines watch complete with chronometer,

but
not a single sheet of clean notebook paper
or a pencil worth a piaster.
Damn your Louvre, your Paris.
I'll write these entries
on the back of my canvas.

And so
when I picked a pen from the pocket
of a nearsighted American
sticking his red nose into my skirts
--his hair stinking of wine--

I started my memoirs.

I'm writing on my back
the sorrow of having a famous smile...


18 March: Night

The Louvre has fallen asleep.
In the dark, the armless Venus
looks like a veteran of the Great War.
The gold helmet of a knight gleams
as the light from the night watchman's lantern
strikes a dark picture.

Here
in the Louvre
my days are all the same
like the six sides of a wood cube.
My head is full of sharp smells
like the shelf of a medicine cabinet.


20 March

I admire those Flemish painters:
is it easy to give the air of a naked goddess
to the plump ladies
of milk and sausage merchants?
But
even if you wear silk panties,
cow + silk panties = cow.

Last night
a window
was left open.
The naked Flemish goddesses caught cold.
All day
today,
turning their bare
mountain-like pink behinds to the public,
they coughed and sneezed...
I caught cold, too.
So as not to look silly smiling with a cold,
I tried to hide my sniffles
from the visitors.


1 April

Today I saw a Chinese:
he was nothing like those Chinese with their topknots.
How long
he gazed at me!
I'm well aware
the favor of Chinese
who work ivory like silk
is not to be taken lightly...


11 April

I caught the name of the Chinese who comes every day:
SI-YA-U.


16 April

Today we spoke
in the language of eyes.
He works as a weaver days
and studies nights.
Now it's a long time since the night
came on like a pack of black-shirted Fascists.
The cry of a man out of work
who jumped into the Seine
rose from the dark water.
And ah! you on whose fist-size head
mountain-like winds descend,
at this very minute you're probably busy
building towers of thick, leather-bound books
to get answers to the questions you asked of the stars.
READ
SI-YA-U
READ...
And when your eyes find in the lines what they desire,
when your eyes tire,
rest your tired head
like a black-and-yellow Japanese chrysanthemum
on the books..
SLEEP
SI-YA-U
SLEEP...


18 April

I've begun to forget
the names of those Renaissance masters.
I want to see
the black bird-and-flower

watercolors
that slant-eyed Chinese painters

drip
from their long thin bamboo brushes.


NEWS FROM THE PARIS WIRELESS

HALLO
HALLO
HALLO

PARIS
PARIS
PARIS...

Voices race through the air
like the fiery greyhounds.
The wireless in the Eiffel Tower calls out:
HALLO
HALLO
HALLO

PARIS
PARIS
PARIS...

"I, TOO, am Oriental -- this voice is for me.
My ears are receivers, too.
I, too, must listen to Eiffel."
News from China
News from China
News from China:
The dragon that came down from the Kaf mountains
has spread his wings
across the golden skies of the Chinese homeland.
But
in this business it's not only the British lord's
gullet shaved
like the thick neck
of a plucked hen
that will be cut
but also
the long
thin
beard of Confucius!


FROM GIOCONDA'S DIARY


21 April

Today my Chinese
looked my straight
in the eye
and asked:
"Those who crush our rice fields
with the caterpillar treads of their tanks
and who swagger through our cities
like emperors of hell,
are they of YOUR race,
the race of him who CREATED you?"
I almost raised my hand
and cried "No!"


27 April

Tonight at the blare of an American trumpet
--the horn of a 12-horsepower Ford--
I awoke from a dream,
and what I glimpsed for an instant
instantly vanished.
What I'd seen was a still blue lake.
In this lake the slant-eyed light of my life
had wrapped his fingers around the neck of a gilded fish.
I tried to reach him,
my boat a Chinese teacup
and my sail
the embroidered silk
of a Japanese
bamboo umbrella...


NEWS FROM THE PARIS WIRELESS


HALLO
HALLO
HALLO

PARIS
PARIS
PARIS

The radio station signs off.
Once more
blue-shirted Parisians
fill Paris with red voices
and red colors...


FROM GIOCONDA'S DIARY


2 May

Today my Chinese failed to show up.


5 May

Still no sign of him...


8 May

My days
are like the waiting room
of a station:
eyes glued
to the tracks...


10 May

Sculptors of Greece,
painters of Seljuk china,
weavers of fier