The Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet opens 'Angina Pectoris' (1948) with the lines: “If half my heart is here, doctor / the other half is in China / with the army flowing / toward the Yellow River”. From his earlier works in the 1920s, to his later writings and activism in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Turkey’s preeminent modern poet sustained a striking preoccupation with China throughout his life and oeuvre. By tracing the arc of his engagement, including poems such as 'Istanbul Detention House' (1939) and 'A White Dove in Beijing' (1952), I explore Hikmet’s poetry as a medium for generating varied configurations of identification and anti-imperialist solidarity between Turkey, China, and beyond. In turn, I examine the Chinese translation and critical reception of Hikmet’s poetry. How was this mutual engagement both bolstered and delimited by revolutionary and Communist ideologies? How was transnational solidarity performed and translated across these contexts?   Hikmet’s engagement with China, intersected with the Chinese translation and reception of Hikmet, presents a provocative starting point for an intervention into twentieth-century literary and diplomatic history. Formed against the backdrops of the monumental Kemalist and Maoist state-building projects, via the cosmopolitan and diasporic communist networks of Moscow, the Hikmet-China connection is one that cannot be subsumed into traditional models of literary relation such as that of the centre-periphery; and one that traverses and unsettles categories of analysis such as nation, language, region, continent, and empire. Meanwhile, many of Hikmet’s relevant poems were written, or translated for Chinese audiences, in periods during which no official Turkish-Chinese diplomatic relations existed, lending his work a particularly dense and fraught relational significance. By engaging with recent efforts to re-conceive the terms and mappings of world literature and transnational solidarity —such as in the work of Pheng Cheah and Anna Bernard— in conjunction with the narrative and emotional turn in international relations —such as in the work of Hussein Banai and Rachel Leow— I will use the Hikmet-China case study as a lens through which to reconsider some of the stakes and dynamics in the ‘worlding’ of world literature and the shaping of diplomatic history, from their material and social networks, to their conceptual and affective grounds.