An introduction to Ottoman poetry

by Walter G. Andrews

Unusual book about early Ottoman poetry.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only book I know of (in English anyway) that explains how Ottoman poetry works, from scansion to rhyme to figures of speech. It primarily focuses on one form, the ghazel, but gives a useful overview of many other forms in the last chapter. I only found out while reading this that Andrews passed away earlier this year - a great loss for scholarship on Middle Eastern literature.

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Walter Andrew's approach to analyzing Ottoman Poetry, he tries as much as possible to include terminology for terms in Prosody, Rhetoric, etc using their original Ottoman titles, sometimes to amusing effect. Ighraq fi-l sifat (drowning in description), husn al-ta'lil (attributing a serene cause), and my favorite Telmih, which refers to literary allusion. All of the things that I've been reading lately, especially books on Persian literature and poetry, show an enviable depth of references to folklore, Islamic mythology, puns on Arabic Grammar, indigenous forms of fortune telling, Sufi symbology, Jurisprudence pissing contests, and the recitation of poetic verses so ingrained in the public conscious (at least for those supposed to know) that only either the first or second hemstitch is ever needed as reference. A few examples for fun:
- In Muhammed Ali Jamalzadeh's memoir of his youth in Isfahan, he visits a Zorkhaneh and explains how while doing exercises, the group calls out numbers by using stand-ins that either have phonological similarity (instead of saying three (seh), they say "causer of all causes" (sabab-saz)) or Islamic references "five people of the cloak, six corners of the grave of Hussein, the seventh Imam"
-In Sa'di's Gulistan he makes an elaborate pun using the coinciding of the word for 'dragging' and the Arabic term for putting a noun in the genitive case with 'raising' with the term for putting a noun in the nominative case so that the two meanings for:

بليت بنحوي يصول مغاضبا

علي كزيد في مقابله العمرو

علي جر ذيل يرفع راسه
و هل يستقيم الرفع من عامل الجر
1) I have been afflicted by a grammarian who attacks me in anger like Zayd beating amr. Despite dragging his skirt he will not lift his head. Can it be right on the part of one who has done such dragging to raise his head?
2) ....on putting the word skirt in the genitive case the word head cannot be put in the nominative case. Can the nominative case be correct in a construction that demands the genitive?

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ottoman literature is great, and the deeper I get the most interesting it becomes, but this is the sort of book that is made for graduate school and should be one of the last books on Ottoman literature you should read.
I would start with Ottoman Lyric Poetry by Andrews, Kalpaklı and Black, then check out Silay's Anthology of Turkish Literature to see some of the different conclusions other translators have come up with. Above all, read deeply into the Ottoman culture because the poems can seem wooden and rhetorical without a solid background in the culture.
if you are still entranced by Turkish (and by extension Persian literature) and would like to delve into the into how Ottoman poetry is engineered, this would be your next text.