They were born nine years apart. One died twenty-one years ahead of the other. However, they had an uncanny likeness to one another in so many respects.

This is the story of Nazim Hikmet of Turkiye and Faiz Ahmed Faiz of Pakistan. Hikmet was born in the erstwhile Ottoman town of Salonika in 1902. Faiz was born near the then British Indian town of Sialkot in 1911.

Both were outstanding poets in their languages, focusing their poetry on the oppressed and disenfranchised in their communities.

According to the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, `the world`s one hope lies in the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed.

Faiz and Hikmet were two towering personalities of the literary world in the 20th century who suffered enormous oppression and cruelty for their political views and convictions. Hikmet suffered 13 years in jail and spent another 13 years of forced exile. Faiz remained in jail for four years and spent significant periods in exile in Moscow, London and Beirut. Both wrote in support of the causes of labourers, peasants, tailors, iron-casters, shepherds, postmen and typesetters. Both highlighted the poverty, social discrimination, economic exploitation and political repression in their societies.

The political threat to the authorities from Hikmet and Faiz did not emanate primarily from what they said. Many others in Turkiye and Pakistan were saying the same things. The difference with them lay in how they invested the political with the emotional power of their language.

As Turkish-Bulgarian writer Fahri Erdinc put it in the case of Hikmet: `His war, his battlefield, his weapon was his poetry.

Similarly, in the case of Faiz, it was the power of his poetry that made him so dangerous. Otherwise, Faiz was only a self-styled `mystical` Marxist, and his gentle demeanour and soft style was not really any threat to the authorities.

Difficult as it is to say, the 13 years that Hikmet spent in prison after 1938 made him the poet that he became. Prison gave his poetry a social and historical breadth and texture that he could not have achieved if he had languished in the contemporary scene of professional writers. In prison, he got to know the Anatolia that had brought him the political choice that shaped his life. Similarly, Faiz`s Zindan Nama and Dast-i-Saba would have lacked at least some of the depth if they had been written outside prison.

Both Hikmet and Faiz experienced a transformation in style in their poetry over time. In Hikmet`s case, the tone and rhythm of his poems from the 1920s and early 1930s are quite distinct from his prison poems, which communicate a deeper conviction and authority. He remained the committed revolutionary, but his language was toned down formally and rhetorically; as his audience changed, so did his conception of his audience. As Turkish critic Asim Bezirci notes, the oratorial flair of Hikmet`s polemical pre-prison verse gave way to a lower tone of voice.In Faiz`s case, verses written by him in the final years of his life differ markedly in tone and content from the poetry he wrote when he was younger, particularly the poems written while he was incarcerated. His later poetry is more universal in tone, possessing a greater urgency for change and action, and being more explicit and forthright.

It is a transition from `gham-i-dost` [concerns of personal love] to `gham-i-dunya` [concerns of the world]. The latter poems were influenced by his active participation in the All India Progressive Writers` Association. Among those poems, perhaps the most loved ones are `Mujh se pehli si mohabbat meray mehboob na maang` [My love, do not demand of me that love again], and his poem `Bol` [Speak], written much later, which became a sort of anthem for progressive writers. It is still recited regularly at political gatherings, and starts with: `Speak, your lips are free Speak, your tongue is still your own.

While both Hikmet and Faiz were prolific poets, they also wrote prose. Hikmet`s autobiographical novel, Life`s Good, Brother, completed just before he died in 1963, is a fictionalised account of his life, and is considered the best of his prose work. Hikmet also wrote plays, some of them being A Funeral House, The Skull, and the Forgotten Man.

Faiz wrote prose in both Urdu and English. His Urdu prose tended to be written in strict classical diction, unlike his poetry, which was in a more conversational and casual tenor. As far as Faiz`s English prose was concerned, he wrote articles and editorials which have been compiled by Sheema Majeed in the book Coming Back Home.

Hikmet met Faiz in Moscow and they instantly became friends and comrades. Hikmet also made other friends in Moscow, including the Chinese poet and activist Hsiao San, the Iranian poet Abolqasim Lahouti, and the Indian revolutionary poet Rameshwar Banerjee.

Even though Hikmet and Faiz hit it off well, temperamentally they were poles apart. Ever since his younger days, Faiz was known for his extreme reticence and shyness. By contrast, Hikmet was much more boisterous and aggressive. Va-Nu (real name Ahmet Vala Nureddin), a Turkish writer and journalist, always warned Hikmet that this trait of his would get him hurt.

He did, of course, get himself hurt.

Despite these temperamental differences, the two poets remain the shining stars of progressive and revolutionary poetry, delivered in beautifully selected words.

The writer held senior managerial positions at the World Bank and the United Nations. Over the last decade, he has been passionately drawn to literature, especially to Persian poetry