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.

An anthology of notable poetry and poets in the history of Turkey. Some discussion of the general character, the verse-form, the meters, and the development of Ottoman poetry is included in the beginning of the collection.

The earliest turkish verses, dating from the sixth century A.D., were love lyrics. Since then, love has dominated the Turks’ poetic modes and moods—pre-Islamic, Ottoman, classical, folk, modern. This collection covers love lyrics from all periods of Turkish poetry. It is the first anthology of its kind in English. The translations, faithful to the originals, possess a special freshness in style and sensibility. Here are lyrics from pre-Islamic Central Asia, passages from epics, mystical ecstasies of such eminent thirteenth-century figures as Rumi and Yunus Emre, classical poems of the Ottoman Empire (including Süleyman the Magnificent and women court poets), lilting folk poems, and the work of the legendary communist Nazim Hikmet (who is arguably Turkey’s most famous poet internationally), and the greatest living Turkish poet, Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca. The verses in this collection are true to the Turkish spirit as well as universal in their appeal. They show how Turks praise and satirize love, how they see it as a poetic experience. Poetry was for many centuries the premier Turkish genre and love its predominant theme. Some of the best expressions produced by Turkish poets over a period of fifteen centuries can be found in this volume.

Elias John Wilkinson Gibb (1857-1901) was a Scottish Orientalist who was born and educated in Glasgow. After studying Arabic and Persian, he developed an interest in Turkish language and literature, especially poetry, and in 1882 he published Ottoman Poems Translated into English Verse in the Original Forms. This was a forerunner to the six-volume classic presented here, A History of Ottoman Poetry, published in London between 1900 and 1909. Gibb died in London of scarlet fever at the age of 44, and only the first volume of his masterpiece appeared before his death. His family entrusted to his friend Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926), a distinguished Orientalist in his own right who had made a special study of Babism, the task of posthumously publishing the five remaining volumes. Browne characterized the work as "one of the most important, if not the most important, critical studies of any Muhammadan literature produced in Europe during the last half-century." The first volume contains a long and compelling introduction by Gibb on the entire subject, in which he argues that Ottoman poetry often rose and fell in tandem with Ottoman power. Gibb divides Ottoman poetry into two great schools, the Old or Asiatic (circa 1300-1859), which generally was characterized by its deference to Persian influences; and the New or European (from 1859 onward), which was influenced by French and other Western poetry. According to Gibb, the Old or Asiatic School went through a four periods: a formative period (1300-1450); a period (1450-1600) in which works were modeled after the Persian poet Jami; a period (1600-1700) dominated by the influences of Persian poets Urfi Shirazi and Saʼib Tabrizi; and a period of uncertainty that lasted until 1859. The European school that followed was inaugurated by Ibrahim Sinasi (1826-71), who in 1859 produced a small but momentous collection of French poetry translated into Turkish verse. The influence of the collection was far-reaching and eventually changed the course of Ottoman poetry. Gibb is known for his masterful translations that brilliantly render into English both the meaning and the form of Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic poetry. For almost a century after his death, a family trust financed the Gibb Memorial Series of editions and translations into English of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts.

This book is dedicated to Metin Kunt, which primarily examines diverse cases of changes throughout Ottoman history. Both specialist and non-specialist readers will explore and understand the complexities concerning the longevity as well as the tenacity of the Ottoman Empire.

The early modern Ottoman poet Mihrî Hatun (1460–1515) succeeded in drawing an admiring audience and considerable renown during a time when few women were accepted into the male-dominated intellectual circles. Her poetry collection is among the earliest bodies of women’s writing in the Middle East and Islamicate literature, providing an exceptional vantage point on intellectual history. With this volume, Havlioglu not only gives readers access to this rare text but also investigates the factors that allowed Mihri to survive and thrive despite her clear departure from the cultural norms of the time. Placing the poet in the context of her era and environment, Havlioglu finds that the poet’s dramatic, masterful performance and subversiveness are the very reasons for her endurance and acclaim in intellectual history. Mihri Hatun performed in a way that embraced her marginal position as a woman and leveraged it to her advantage. Havlioglu’s astute and nuanced portrait gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman poet in a highly gendered society and suggests that women have been part of intellectual history long before the modern period.