Poetry
Divan
Not translated into English
Qazi Burhanaddin · 1390
Synopsis
More than thirteen hundred ghazals, twenty rubai quatrains and a hundred and fifteen tuyughs, those quatrains of Turkic form that the author was among the first to blend into the Sufi tradition. Love and the beauty of the beloved, her hair, her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth, dominate, in a mystical vocabulary; alongside them recur war and bravery, in a combative and rough tone, philosophical and Sufi meditations, and terms taken from astrology, grammar and music. The poems seem to be arranged in the order of their composition, and the author signs none of them with a pen name.
Context
The divan has come down to us in a single manuscript, copied in 1393-1394 by the calligrapher Ham ibn Ahmed and held at the British Museum under the shelfmark Or. 4126. It is written in Old Anatolian Turkish, linked to the Azeri area, with a few pieces in Persian and Arabic. Melioransky gave a partial Russian translation of it in 1895; the Turkish Language Society published a facsimile, Muharrem Ergin the critical edition in 1980, and Alyar Səfərli an edition in Baku in 1988. Ottoman biographers almost ignored him, because he lived outside their borders.
Who it is for
A divan in Old Turkic, difficult to approach, with no French translation; the tuyugh, brief quatrains, are the easiest way in.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the great Turkic poets of the fourteenth century; his love poems are compared to those of the classical masters.
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