TURKISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

TURKISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. The term Turkish literature refers to the literature produced in the Asian and Eastern European lands of the Ottoman Empire and composed in the Western Turkic, Oghuz-Turcoman dialects, of which the literary languages were Ottoman and Azeri Turkish. Ottoman literature here refers to the high-culture literature of the Ottoman period (c. 1326–1860). During early modern times, the Eastern Turkic, Kipchak-Chaghatai dialects produced their own distinctive literature, which flourished in Central Asia and the eastern parts of the Middle East. This literature is conventionally referred to by the general term Turkic literature, of which the predominant high-culture manifestation is called Chaghatai literature.

OTTOMAN ORIGINS

Late in the eleventh century, Muslim Oghuz-Turcoman armies coming from the East had driven the Byzantines out of much of Asia Minor and established the Persianized sultanate of the Seljuks. In the aftermath of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, Seljuk hegemony ended, and Asia Minor disintegrated into a hodge-podge of fiefdoms headed by local dynasts who favored the Turkish culture of their nomadic power base rather than the Persian high-culture focus of their Seljuk predecessors. The early Ottoman state originated in western Anatolia on the borders of Byzantium during the late thirteenth century as an assemblage of Turcoman seminomads under the command of a chieftain named Osman (Arabic 'Uthmān, from which the name "Ottoman" derives). Successful incursions into Byzantine territory brought a flood of recruits into the Ottoman army and expanded Ottoman domination throughout western Asia Minor and into eastern Europe. With the capture of Constantinople (Turkish, Istanbul) in 1453, the Ottomans stood poised on the threshold of becoming the largest and arguably the most powerful empire of early modern times.

LITERARY CURRENTS

Implicit in the origins of the Ottoman state are linguistic, literary, and cultural currents that resonate through almost six hundred years of Turkish literary history. The Turkic peoples who entered the Middle East in migratory military waves from Central Asia brought with them traditional literary forms, which had taken on an Islamic overlay. The territories they entered were dominated by a Perso-Arabic high culture that had developed in concert with the expansion of Islam. Legitimacy for any ambitious ruler depended upon his being perceived as the defender of the Islamic community and its traditions, which included Islamic high culture and its canonical languages—Persian and Arabic. Thus, the early Turkish rulers of Asia Minor drew their military support from the nomadic Turcoman tribes and therefore needed to speak their language and respect their traditions. However, as their domains extended, successful Turkish rulers came under increasing pressure to conform to the cultural norms associated with Islamic monarchical models.

As a result, Western Turkish literature diverged early onto two main trajectories. The leadership—the court, the court-dependent elites, the educated, educating, and administrative classes—adopted the genres, forms, themes, and rhetoric of the Islamic Perso-Arab tradition. Educated people were often trilingual and tended to think of the elite literary culture of what they called "the three languages" (Arabic, Persian, Turkish) as a single global culture with three voices. Ottoman poets wrote verses in Persian and Arabic as well as in Turkish, and the Ottoman court was lavish in its support of visiting Persian poets. Elite literature extensively employed Arabic and Persian vocabulary and elements of syntax within an overall Turkish grammatical scheme. As the Ottomans expanded into the Balkans and Greece, Turkish became a European language and imported some vocabulary from the many languages of the empire. Although a number of conquered Europeans adopted Ottoman language and culture, and former captives became noted Ottoman poets and authors, literary influences coming directly from Europe are impossible to trace with any certainty. The common people—villagers, nomads, urban non-elites, low-level military—continued a popular tradition of Central Asian Turkic literatures that was generally monolingual (Turkish), largely oral, most often sung, conservative, and local or tribal. However, despite the differences between these two trajectories, differences exaggerated by the tendency of academic institutions to distinguish between "literature" and "folklore," there was continual commerce between them, as exemplified by poet-musicians (aşik, 'lover'), who performed in both villages and urban areas, composing relatively accessible verses that moved easily between the forms, styles, themes, and base vocabulary of both traditions.

THE POPULAR TRADITION

The literature of the village, the countryside, and the lower classes was based on a long tradition of Turkic poetry predating Islam. Popular poetry employed "syllable counting" rhythms (in Turkish, parmak hesabi, or 'finger counting'), which identified groups of syllables separated by minor caesuras (for example, the pattern 4 + 4 + 3 syllables). The folk poet (aşik, or ozan) most commonly composed in stanza forms, which were sung to the accompaniment of the "long lute" or saz and were often extemporized. The elite poetry of the Turks was urban and set in private gardens, parks, and taverns, while the popular poetry sang of mountains, forests, and fields, where a wandering minstrel sought his dream beloved and flirted with enticing village maids or sought mystical union with the Divine, who was imagined as a coy and inaccessible beauty. Popular literature included love songs, folk songs particular to various regions, poems about military heroism, religious verses reflecting the popular mysticism of villagers and nomads, songs of passages such as weddings and death, and a host of oral prose tales. The folk poet's verses had a counterpart in the prose of the meddah or 'storyteller', who enthralled audiences in villages, coffeehouses, bazaars, and taverns with a repertoire of tales in a variety of rhetorical styles. Although it is possible to discern when the elite early modern Ottoman literary tradition gave way to a distinctly modern literature, much of the popular tradition persisted substantially unchanged into the modern period, where it had a profound influence on the language, style, and themes of modern authors and poets who turned from the elite tradition.

THE ELITE TRADITION: OTTOMAN LITERATURE

To the Ottoman elites, "literature" was, first and foremost, poetry. The elite literature adopted the genres of the Perso-Arab poetic tradition, including the rhythmical scheme, called aruz, which, via Persian, depended on metrical feet formed by the regular alternation of "long" and "short" syllables, which do not exist naturally in Turkish. A "long" syllable consists of either a consonant and a long vowel or a "closed" syllable (consonant-vowel-consonant); a "short" syllable is an "open syllable," a consonant, and a short vowel. The metrical feet are conventionally expressed as mnemonic word forms derived from the Arabic root meaning "to do." For example, one common metrical foot is symbolized by the word fāilātun (fā'i-lā-tun, long, short, long, long). The basic formal unit of elite poetry is the couplet (beyt), which is composed of two hemistiches (misra), based on set patterns of metrical feet. The most common rhyme scheme for lyric poetry and its relatives is a monorhyme with a rhyming first couplet (aa, ba, ca, da, etc.). There also exist stanzaic forms, which are thought of as expansions of couplets created by adding hemistiches to a base couplet. Longer narrative poems were written in rhyming couplets (aa, bb, cc, etc.). It was the custom for a poet's work, exclusive of narrative poems, to be collected into a single volume called a divan, which would contain hundreds and often thousands of poems. For this reason, elite Ottoman poetry is often referred to, especially in modern Turkey, as "Divan Poetry."

The dominant poetic genre of Ottoman literature was the short, approximately sonnet length (most often ten or fourteen hemistiches, five or seven couplets), erotic (and erotic-mystical) love poem called the gazel (Arabic, ghazal ). A respected poet's collected works (divan) would commonly contain from a few hundred to thousands of gazel s. Rooted in a generic Islamic mysticism expressed in the Neoplatonic imagery and understanding of love—differing only in minor details from what one would find, for example, in Ficino's De Amore —gazel poetry features a love-crazed, melancholic lover tormented by desire for a cruel and indifferent beloved who is at times a beautiful boy or (far less often) a beautiful girl, at times a beloved patron or ruler, at times God in the form of the mystical Divine, and many times a conflation of all three. The interactions of lover and beloved are carried out and reflected in conventional settings with a conventional cast of characters. Typically, there is a wine party, attended by a group of close friends who share an esoteric understanding of the universal, mystical meaning of the intoxications of passionate love and wine, which are misunderstood by ignorant and censorious outsiders. In the party, the carouser is served wine by an attractive boy in a tavern or in a secluded garden where each flower and tree, bird and animal also acts out the drama of lover and beloved. Beneath the esoteric and mystical pretenses of gazel poetry, however, lay direct connections to the actual erotic lives and entertainments of educated urban elites. Many gazel s were composed to honor or attract famous beautiful boys. Poets caroused in taverns run by Jews or Europeans, who were not bound by Islamic prohibitions against wine.

The kaside (Arabic, qasīdah ) is a long (often running to more than one hundred couplets), monorhyming, occasional poem, usually in praise of God, the Prophet Muhammad, the monarch, a highly placed official, or a patron. In addition, some kaside s were composed to commemorate holidays, festivals, military victories, weddings, circumcisions, deaths, or buildings and monuments. A kaside usually begins with a prelude referencing a theme from erotic love poetry: love, a garden, a wine party, the heavens, a festival, and so forth. It then makes a transition linking the prelude to praise, which is followed by mention of the poet and, in many cases, by a specific request for favors. The kaside was expected to be a tour de force and kaside s formed the second largest section in a poet's divan.

The narrative poem is known generically as mesnevî (Arabic, mathnawî ), which means "rhyming couplets" and distinguishes this kind of poem from the monorhyming genres. Narrative poems in rhyming couplets told and retold the classical romantic tales of the Perso-Arab tradition, most of which, by Ottoman times, had taken on a distinct mystical, theosophical overlay. Poets also composed works such as verse histories, mystical and theological treatises, Islamic legends and tales of the Prophet, didactic works, and advice for princes in mesnevî form.

The minor genres of poetry included satire and invective, religious verse, riddles and enigmas, war poetry, and chronograms (verses in which the numerical values of Arabic script letters add up to a target date). Prose genres, like the poetry, contained a heavy burden of Persian and Arabic vocabulary and were generously larded with poetic interpolations. Some of the prominent prose genres were historical works, biobibliographical compendia, travel literature, legendary tales, interpretation of the Koran, essays, manuals on style, and treatises on religious, scientific, ethical, political, geographical, grammatical, and philological topics.

HISTORICAL TRENDS

Mehmed II (the Conqueror, ruled 1451–1481) initiated a practice of lavish support for poets and litterateurs. He not only supported Ottoman poets but also is known to have patronized the master poets of the Timurid court in Herat: the Persian poet Djami and the famed Chaghatai poet Mir Ali Şir Nevayî. Through the early glory years of the reign of Suleiman (the Magnificent, 1520–1566), support for literary art remainedhigh andliterarytalentwas akeyto upward mobility. For example, Necatî (d. 1509), considered the first great voice of Ottoman gazel poetry, began as a slave. One of Necatî's contemporaries was a woman named Mihrî (d. 1512), whose poems—delivered to the court by male intermediaries—won substantial cash rewards from the royal treasury. Bakî (d. 1600), the sixteenth century "sultan of poets" and model of rhetorical complexity for subsequent generations, was a low-level mosque functionary's son who became a chief magistrate. Hayalî (d. 1557), whose gazel s married mysticism, eroticism, and libertinism, started as a mendicant dervish youth and ended a provincial governor. The reach of Ottoman literature is attested to by the case of Fuzulî (d. 1556), an attendant of a shrine in Iraq, who is considered today as one of the greatest Ottoman poets. Fuzulîcompiled major poetry collections in Persian and Arabic and wrote in the Azeri dialectof Western Turkish.

The latter half of the sixteenth century and the early years of the seventeenth saw extensive regularization of appointments to the bureaucracy, economic crises, and social unrest, all of which served to lessen opportunities for literary talents from outside the educated and bureaucratic classes. This was the age of the greatest of the Ottoman court panegyrists, Nef'î (d. 1635), whose magnificent kaside s could not save him from being executed for indulging in the vicious lampooning of powerful courtiers. During the seventeenth century, the center of literary production moved from the court in the direction of the dervish lodges and the educated elites. High-culture poetry tended toward the complex mystical esotericism of the Persian "Indian Style," exemplified by the poetry of Na'ilî (d. 1666) and away from the cultural synthesis and public entertainments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that had seen beloved shop boys and young soldiers as the recipients of rhetorically refined love poems. The synthesis was left to the burgeoning number of popular aşiks who performed in coffeehouses and taverns in both the elite and folk styles. During the so-called Tulip Era of the early eighteenth century—named after the tulip craze that swept the Empire—the court attempted to recapture the earlier synthesis and the support of a growing class of wealthy entrepreneurs by patronizing lavish entertainments, pleasure parks, and the work of such poets as the brilliant Nedim (d. 1730), who moved easily between the elite style and genres that reflected popular verses in simpler Turkish. The latter years of the eighteenth century saw the last great original mystical narrative poem Beauty and Love by Sheyh Galip, a Sufi master extensively patronized by the court. For the Turkish literature of the elites the early modern period does not end until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ottoman intellectuals begin to adapt to European modernism.

See also Ottoman Empire ; Suleiman I ; Tulip Era (Ottoman Empire) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Walter G. An Introduction to Ottoman Poetry. Minneapolis, 1976.

——. Poetry's Voice, Society's Song. Seattle, 1985.

Andrews, Walter G., Najaat Black, Mehmet Kalpakli, eds. and trans. Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology. Austin, Tex., 1997.

Deny, Jean, et al. Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta. Wiesbaden, 1965. Contains articles in several languages on Turkish and Turkic literatures. See especially the introductory chapter, "The Turkic Literatures. Introductory Notes on the History and Style" by Alessio Bombaci.

Gibb, E. J. W. A History of Ottoman Poetry. Vols 1–6. London, 1900–1909. The most comprehensive history but marred by nineteenth-century British imperial attitudes.

Holbrook, Victoria Rowe. The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance. Austin, Tex., 1994.

Silay, Kemal, ed. An Anthology of Turkish Literature. Bloomington, Ind., 1996.

Walter G. Andrews