Epic
The Book of Dede Korkut
Kitaby Dädem Gorkut
Anonymous · 1400
Synopsis
Twelve tales from the Oghuz epic cycle, gathered around the court of Baýyndyr Khan and linked by the figure of Gorkut, bard and soothsayer. A prince long without children obtains a son, whom his own warriors turn against his father; Salur Kazan's camp is plundered during a hunt and his family carried off captive; Bamsy Beýrek wins the hand of Banu Çiçek despite the hostility of her brother; Basat, raised among beasts, confronts the one-eyed giant.
Context
Two sixteenth-century manuscripts, kept in Dresden and in the Vatican, were the only ones known until the discovery in 2018, in a private collection in Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran, of a third, titled “second volume of the book of the Turkmens”. The tales mix prose and verse; their heroes are Muslim, but many traces of pre-Islamic beliefs can be read in them. Geoffrey Lewis dates the writing down of the text to the beginning of the fifteenth century. The text belongs to all the peoples of Oghuz origin, and the 2018 inscription on the UNESCO intangible heritage list was put forward by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkey.
Who it is for
Twelve short narratives, in prose mixed with verse; a French translation based on the Vatican and Dresden manuscripts has existed since 1998.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English by Geoffrey Lewis in the Penguin Classics in 1974, and into French by Gallimard in 1998, with a preface by Yachar Kemal.