Poetry
Dîvân
Not translated into English
Ahmed Nedîm · 1720
Synopsis
Court poems, odes and ghazals, and songs known as şarkı, which describe life in Istanbul in the Tulip Era: its entertainments, its places of pleasure such as Sadâbâd, its traditions and fashions, and the buildings of the grand vizier, according to the Diyanet and the ministry's website. Love, wine and beautiful women take the place that tradition gave to Sufism, and the lovers are real people in real places. The language, simpler than that of his contemporaries, draws on popular speech.
Context
The collection took shape during the years of the author's favour, under Ahmed III, in the so-called Tulip Period, which Britannica describes as a time of relative peace and of the court's taste for beauty and pleasure. Britannica praises his şarkı, lively songs that are still sung, and the Turkish Ministry of Culture notes a song in syllabic metre, in the popular manner. The Diyanet notes that his musicality made many of his poems suited to being set to music. Halil Nihat published the first edition of the collection in 1922, Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı another in 1951.
Who it is for
Short poems in Ottoman Turkish, with no French translation, several of which live on in music.
Prizes and reception
The Diyanet credits him with a style that bears his name, imitated in his lifetime and up to the nineteenth century, then rediscovered in the twentieth.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.