Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology

by Walter G. Andrews (Editor), Najaat Black (Editor), Mehmet Kalpakli (Editor)

The Ottoman Empire was one of the most significant forces in world history and yet little attention is paid to its rich cultural life. For the people of the Ottoman Empire, lyrical poetry was the most prized literary activity. People from all walks of life aspired to be poets. Ottoman poetry was highly complex and sophisticated and was used to express all manner of things, from feelings of love to a plea for employment.

This collection offers free verse translations of 75 lyric poems from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries, along with the Ottoman Turkish texts and, new to this expanded edition, photographs of printed, lithographed, and hand-written Ottoman script versions of several of the texts--a bonus for those studying Ottoman Turkish. Biographies of the poets and background information on Ottoman history and literature complete the volume.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

392 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

in the early dawn, far from you-I burn
[…]
I’m not burning from winds of passion,
from truest grief-I burn
*
Come, my soul-or separation from you
will destroy me!
*
[…] we dwell
in the loneliness of solitude.
*
Poetry reveals the pained desires
*
If there is dust on the mirror of my heart, if there is this longing,
it is because of you

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a precious few translations of Ottoman poetry into English and this is easily the best- but not merely by default. This translation was accomplished with the aid of a historian and critical theorist who has been working in Ottoman poetry for decades as well as a poet whose native language is Turkish (admittedly not as much help as it seems, as the language barrier still exists). The result is a clean, clear set of wonderful poems from a nearly forgotten literary tradition which are entirely free of the Anglicisms and Orientalist taint of previous translations. None of these poets is a Hafez or a Ferdowsi but they're still very very good. This book is sure to go a long way in establishing the position of Ottoman poetry in the literary canon of the Middle East.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

For too long Ottoman writing has been the domain of scholars. Though I must thank E. J. W. Gibb for being the first English-language scholar to delve deeply into the intricacies of Ottoman poetry, and though my Universal Classics Library edition has any number of erotically-suggestive plates in the grand Orientalist tradition, Gibb’s introduction is still valuable, even when it is just plain wrong: It reminds us of how much can change in the more than 100 years since he published his work.
More difficult to digest are the poems themselves. As Andrews pointed out in a recent interview, "They saw literature as a kind of relationship to universal things—to nature. It wasn’t so intensely personal. They said, “It can’t be as emotional as it sounds. It must just an exercise in complex retoric and not actually felt." And believing that the subtle Ottoman formality could be best translated with an equal degree of 19th Century English formality, Gibb insists on a strict rhyming scheme in this poem by Nâ’ilî (Ottoman Lyric Poetry p 9):

Before thy form, the box-tree’s lissome figure dwarfed would show;
Those locks of thine the pride of ambergris would overthrow.

Who, seeing thy cheek’s glow, recalls the ruby is deceived:
He who hath drunken deep of wine inebriate doth grow.

Should she move forth with figure like the juniper in grace,
The garden’s cypress to the loved one’s form must bend right low.

Beware, give not the mirror bright to yonder paynim maid.
Lest she idolater become, when there her face doth show.

Baqi, doth he not drink the wine of obligation’s grape,
Who drunken with A-lestu’s cup’s o’erwhelming draught doth go?

‘Wine inebriate, lest she idolater become?’ Ouch. As Andrews points out, though Gibb does an incredible job of retaining the ‘formal features,’ he has chosen to attempt to bring to life the ‘dead’ Ottoman language with the stillborn language of the rigid scholasticism of his time. Gibb deserves credit for being the first to bring Ottoman poems into English but they are now artifacts.

Andrews then proceed to present this version of the same poem (Ottoman Lyric Poetry, p 10) by John Walsh of Edinburgh University from the 1978 Penguin Book of Turkish Verse:

My tears were as the streams which make the garden places sweet;
Forth flowed my heart like water to a roguish sapling’s feet.

A strange Mejnun am I! The specters of my Sweetheart’s eyes
Surround me like distraught gazelles in never-ending suite.

Your eyelashes, like witches, change their colour; all in black
They plan to raid my heart by night and crush it in defeat.

My heart’s become a tree of sighs; inspired by your svelte form,
It waves about the garden like a cypress trim and neat.

The brilliant aspect of my virgin verses, Nailî
Derides the mirror of the sun, like love’s moon-faced elite.

Andrews is more sympathetic to this translation. He knows Walsh is a scholar, and what Andrews calls the heaviness of the rhyme in English is an attempt to express the formal style that the Ottomans used.
Though Andrews is of course spot on when he says this is a more sensitive version than the one by Gibbs, is it more a translation or a poem?
Still very much a translation. I will never be in love with lines like ‘Forth flowed my heart,’ ‘distraught gazelles,’ or ‘svelte form.’ Walsh is working awfully hard to create a poem that is grafted to the tradition of scholarly language in the translation, while at the same time trying to give it an air of modernity. But as a poem it still feels forced.
I chose Andrews, Black and Kalpaklı’s version of this poem (Ottoman Lyric Poetry p 124) because it is a poem:

My tears became desire that illuminates
The rose-garden like a stream
My heart poured forth love like water
For a shy young tree

I am a strange lover, Mejnûn, circled
by images of the beloved’s eye
Again and again, like bewildered gazelles,
they wander around me

Your eyelashes matched their dress
to that of witches
The all donned black for a night-raid
on my heart

Your sapling body is like the slender elif
in the âh of my heart’s passion
Just like the swaying, heart-seeking cypress
in the garden of the rose

Hey Nâ’ilî , from the rising of your verses
comes luster and a brilliant shine
Which puts to shame the mirror of the sun
like the moon-face of the beloveds

This is the only version of this poem that opens the depth of feeling in this Ottoman poem to the reader. By no longer striving to replicate the rhyming scheme, by forgoing the syllabic regularity of the Ottoman, the poem illuminates the reader. Only now will a lover of poetry rather than the scholar become interested in all the many pieces of the poem that were left behind when it was translated into English.
For I believe the deeper one delves into the intricacies of Ottoman poetry, the more one is rewarded. As I entered the emotions of this world, issues such as worldly desire and the desire for annihilation in the oneness of God, I found myself continually moved by the conflicts in these desires, the mythological traditions of Turko/Iranian/Arabic poetry, and from time to time, when the subtle wordplay of these Ottoman poets surfaced in rhyme or in the reddit (the use of repeated words), I saw through the veil of years and culture into the way of life that created fantastically sophisticated poems of real depth.
This is only possible because of the remarkable work that the editors and translators of this book have done to bring these seemingly archaic poems into the light of the contemporary day. Though professors Andrews and Kalpaklı are without doubt two of the greatest scholars in the field of Ottoman letters, by bringing the poet Najaat Black in on the project, the stripped the formidable barriers that have so often confronted the contemporary reader of Ottoman Poetry by providing an excellent introduction, short sections in the book itself that introduce the reader to the mythology and themes of Ottoman poets, end notes and short biographies of the different poets.
Most importantly they have chosen to make poems rather than trying to literally translate the Ottoman poetic world. There is a place, to be sure, for those who insist on hewing to a more literally translation, but this is a scholarly (and less beguiling) place for someone like myself, who though versed in modern Turkey, with some knowledge of modern Turkish, still found most formal translation of Ottoman hard to read. The attempt to rigidly translate forms like the gazal made the English stiff; this is what happens when words are included in a poetic line to adhere to the traditions of the form. Though this book certainly isn’t where I first started reading Ottoman poetry, it is the place that anyone who wants to know about Ottoman poetry should start and use as a reference as the years go by.

[Lulu]

c. 1270-1320 Yunus Emre - pre ottoman turkish “Nightingales and Pleasure Gardens: Turkish Love Poems” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...

This book: c.1400[nesimi]-early 20th (in chronological order)

[Antara As]

good