Poetry
Beauty and Love
Hüsn ü Aşk
Şeyh Galib · 1783
Synopsis
Hüsn, Beauty, and Aşk, Love, are born on the same day in the same tribe and grow up loving each other. When Aşk wishes to ask for Hüsn's hand, the elders mock him and set a condition: he must bring back from the land of the Heart the “chemistry” found there. He sets out with Gayret, Effort, and faces obstacles and dangers; according to Fountain, dragons with a thousand heads, a sea of fire crossed on a ship of wax, a sorceress, a desert of lions and giants. Characters and places there stand for the divine qualities.
Context
According to the Diyanet encyclopaedia, the poem was composed in 1783 in about six months, to efface the prestige of Nâbî's Hayrâbâd, which the author criticises from the opening; Fountain also says it was completed in less than six months. It has 2,041 couplets according to the same encyclopaedia, 2,101 lines according to another count. The Encyclopædia Iranica links it to the Indian style and to a poem of the same title by Fuzuli. An English translation by Victoria Rowe Holbrook appeared in 2005 in New York.
Who it is for
A long allegorical poem in Ottoman Turkish, readable in English; no French translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
Regarded, according to Princeton and the International Fiction Review, as the greatest work of Ottoman literature.
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