Poets and poetry in mid‐17th‐century Istanbul: additions to the Divan of Fa'izi by the Copyist Yahya Efendi and others in the John rylands university library MS Turkish 81 (Manchester)

Abstract

The mainstream of Ottoman literature, on its 'higher' and more popular levels, both written and oral, consisted of poetry. It shares this characteristic with the other 'classical' literatures of the Islamic Middle East, Arabic and Persian. Thousands of poems—gazels, kasides and other forms—were written during the six centuries the Empire existed. Relatively little of this material has been edited and studied, and this is particularly true for the 17th century. We have no up-to-date history of Ottoman literature and we also lack some essential tools to approach the subject. A few biographical dictionaries of Ottoman poets have been edited, but only one concerning the 17th century. This is the more lamentable because the eight or so works known to cover that century are rare and European libraries seem to possess only a few manuscript copies of a minority of them. If we know little about the production of this literature, we know even less about its reception. The Ottomans themselves hardly wrote about the subject although some data can be found in the (few) more elaborate biographical works. Another, albeit indirect, source is the contents and marginal notes of personal anthologies (mecmu'as) which have survived in quite a large number in almost all Turkish manuscript collections. These are even less studied than the mainstream collections of poetry (divans). An interesting sample of such a personal collection of verse is found in the John Rylands Library MS Turkish 81, which I have described succinctly in my forthcoming Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts. Although the main part is a copy of the Divan of Kafzade 'Abdulhayy Efendi, who wrote under the name Fa'izi (d. 1031/1622), some margins, the empty pages preceding (la-8b) and following (36b-57b) the main text as well as the inner boards have numerous additional scribblings, mostly verses, about 150 in number, higgledy-piggledy jotted in blank spaces. Some of these additions are in prose and contain the usual calculations, prayer formulas, a recipe for an aphrodisiac and lexicographical glosses. A letter (lb) and an ebced table (to calculate the numerical value of the letters of the alphabet, 45a) are also found. These additional poems and notes can be considered to form a mecmua in itself, and were understood to be one by earlier owners: the word mecmu'a occurs on the title page, fia. The contents of this mecmua give us some insight into the aspect of reception, or at least into the predilections of a small group of Istanbul poetry aficionados, among them the earliest owners of the manuscript. They were also literary men themselves who responded with