Turkish literature
Turkish literature comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Turkish language. The Ottoman form of Turkish, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, was highly influenced by Persian and Arabic literature, and used the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.
The history of the broader Turkic literature spans a period of nearly 1,300 years. The oldest extant records of written Turkic are the Orhon inscriptions, found in the Orhon River valley in central Mongolia and dating to the 7th century. Subsequent to this period, between the 9th and 11th centuries, there arose among the nomadic Turkic peoples of Central Asia a tradition of oral epics, such as the Book of Dede Korkut of the Oghuz Turks— ancestors of the modern Turkish people—and the Epic of Manas of the Kyrgyz people.
Beginning with the victory of the Seljuks at the Battle of Manzikert in the late 11th century, the Oghuz Turks began to settle in Anatolia, and in addition to the earlier oral traditions there arose a written literary tradition issuing largely—in terms of themes, genres, and styles—from Arabic and Persian literature. For the next 900 years, until shortly before the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the oral and written traditions would remain largely separate from one another. With the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the two traditions came together for the first time.
History
The earliest known examples of Turkic poetry date to sometime in the 6th century AD and were composed in the Uyghur language. Some of the earliest verses attributed to Uyghur Turkic writers are only available in Chinese language translations. During the era of oral poetry, the earliest Turkic verses were intended as songs and their recitation a part of the community's social life and entertainment. For example, in the shamanistic and animistic culture of the pre-Islamic Turkic peoples verses of poetry were performed at religious gatherings in ceremonies before a hunt, at communal feasts following a hunt. Poetry was also sung at solemn times and elegy called sagu were recited at yuğ funerals and other commemorations of the dead.Of the long epics, only the Oğuzname has survived in its entirety. The Book of Dede Korkut may have had its origins in the poetry of the 10th century but remained an oral tradition until the 15th century. The earlier written works Kutadgu Bilig and Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk date to the second half of the 11th century and are the earliest known examples of Turkish literature with few exceptions.
One of the most important figures of early Turkish literature was the 13th century Sufi poet Yunus Emre. The golden age of Ottoman literature lasted from the 15th century until the 18th century and included mostly divan poetry but also some prose works, most notably the 10-volume Seyahatnâme written by Evliya Çelebi.
Periodization
The periodization of Turkic literature is debated and scholars have floated different proposals to classify the stages of Turkic literary development. One proposal divides Turkic literature into early literature and modern. Other systems of classification have divided the literature into three periods either pre-Islamic/Islamic/modern or pre-Ottoman/Ottoman/modern. Yet another more complex approach suggests a 5-stage division including both pre-Islamic and pre-Ottoman Islamic. The 5-stage approach further divides modern literature into a transitional period from the 1850s to the 1920s and finally a modern period reaching into the present day.The two traditions of Turkish literature
Throughout most of its history, Turkish literature has been rather sharply divided into two different traditions, neither of which exercised much influence upon the other until the 19th century. The first of these two traditions is Turkish folk literature, and the second is Turkish written literature.For most of the history of Turkish literature, the salient difference between the folk and the written traditions has been the variety of language employed. The folk tradition, by and large, was an oral tradition carried on by minstrels and remained free of the influence of Persian and Arabic literature, and consequently of those literatures' respective languages. In folk poetry—which is by far the tradition's dominant genre—this basic fact led to two major consequences in terms of poetic style:
- folk poetry made use of syllabic verse, as opposed to the qualitative verse employed in the written poetic tradition
- the basic structural unit of folk poetry became the quatrain rather than the couplets more commonly employed in written poetry
In contrast to the tradition of Turkish folk literature, Turkish written literature—prior to the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923—tended to embrace the influence of Persian and Arabic literature. To some extent, this can be seen as far back as the Seljuk period in the late 11th to early 14th centuries, where official business was conducted in the Persian language, rather than in Turkish, and where a court poet such as Dehhanî—who served under the 13th century sultan Ala ad-Din Kay Qubadh I—wrote in a language highly inflected with Persian.
When the Ottoman Empire arose early in the 14th century, in northwestern Anatolia, it continued this tradition. The standard poetic forms—for poetry was as much the dominant genre in the written tradition as in the folk tradition—were derived either directly from the Persian literary tradition, or indirectly through Persian from the Arabic. However, the decision to adopt these poetic forms wholesale led to two important further consequences:
- the poetic meters of Persian poetry were adopted;
- Persian- and Arabic-based words were brought into the Turkish language in great numbers, as Turkish words rarely worked well within the system of Persian poetic meter.
Just as Turkish folk poetry was intimately bound up with Turkish folk music, so did Ottoman Divan poetry develop a strong connection with Turkish classical music, with the poems of the Divan poets often being taken up to serve as song lyrics.
Folk literature
Turkish folk literature is an oral tradition deeply rooted, in its form, in Central Asian nomadic traditions. However, in its themes, Turkish folk literature reflects the problems peculiar to a settled people who have abandoned the nomadic lifestyle. One example of this is the series of folktales surrounding the figure of Keloğlan, a young boy beset with the difficulties of finding a wife, helping his mother to keep the family house intact, and dealing with the problems caused by his neighbors. Another example is the rather mysterious figure of Nasreddin, a trickster who often plays jokes, of a sort, on his neighbors.Nasreddin also reflects another significant change that had occurred between the days when the Turkish people were nomadic and the days when they had largely become settled in Anatolia; namely, Nasreddin is a Muslim Imam. The Turkic peoples had first become Islamized sometime around the 9th or 10th century, as is evidenced from the clear Islamic influence on the 11th century Karakhanid work the Kutadgu Bilig, written by Yusuf Has Hajib. The religion henceforth came to exercise an enormous influence on Turkish society and literature, particularly the heavily mystically oriented Sufi and Shi'a varieties of Islam. The Sufi influence, for instance, can be seen clearly not only in the tales concerning Nasreddin but also in the works of Yunus Emre, a towering figure in Turkish literature and a poet who lived at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, probably in the Karamanid state in south-central Anatolia. The Shi'a influence, on the other hand, can be seen extensively in the tradition of the aşıks, or ozans, who are roughly akin to medieval European minstrels and who traditionally have had a strong connection with the Alevi faith, which can be seen as something of a homegrown Turkish variety of Shi'a Islam. It is, however, important to note that in Turkish culture, such a neat division into Sufi and Shi'a is scarcely possible: for instance, Yunus Emre is considered by some to have been an Alevi, while the entire Turkish aşık/''ozan tradition is permeated with the thought of the Bektashi Sufi order, which is itself a blending of Shi'a and Sufi concepts. The word aşık'' is in fact the term used for first-level members of the Bektashi order.
Because the Turkish folk literature tradition extends in a more or less unbroken line from about the 10th or 11th century to today, it is perhaps best to consider the tradition from the perspective of genre. There are three basic genres in the tradition: epic; folk poetry; and folklore.
The epic tradition
The Turkish epic has its roots in the Central Asian epic tradition that gave rise to the Book of Dede Korkut; written in the Azerbaijani language – and recognizably similar to modern Istanbul Turkish – the form developed from the oral traditions of the Oghuz Turks. The Book of Dede Korkut endured in the oral tradition of the Oghuz Turks after settling in Anatolia. Alpamysh is an earlier epic, still preserved in the literature of various Turkic peoples of Central Asia in addition to its important place in the Anatolian tradition.The Book of Dede Korkut was the primary element of the Azerbaijani–Turkish epic tradition in the Caucasus and Anatolia for several centuries. Concurrent to the Book of Dede Korkut was the so-called Epic of Köroğlu, which concerns the adventures of Rüşen Ali as he exacted revenge for the blinding of his father. The origins of this epic are somewhat more mysterious than those of the Book of Dede Korkut: many believe it to have arisen in Anatolia sometime between the 15th and 17th centuries; more reliable testimony, though, seems to indicate that the story is nearly as old as that of the Book of Dede Korkut, dating from around the dawn of the 11th century. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that Köroğlu is also the name of a poet of the aşık/''ozan tradition.
The epic tradition in modern Turkish literature may be seen in the Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin, published in 1936 by the poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran. This long poem – which concerns an Anatolian shaykh's rebellion against the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed I — is a modern epic, yet draws upon the same independent-minded traditions of the Anatolian people as depicted in the Epic of Köroğlu. Many of the works of the 20th-century novelist Yaşar Kemal, such as the 1955 novel Memed, My Hawk'', can be considered modern prose epics continuing this long tradition.