An Iranian grandee once asked this reviewer if he had enjoyed a dish of braised sheep brains. I replied, quoting Sa’di, “a lenifying lie is better than an irksome truth.” Face saved on all sides. This incident illustrates an important aspect of Iranian and Persianate culture: the use of poetic language to shape and elevate reality. This use of poetry has existed in all cultures, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Pushkin’s compositions for ladies’ album books. Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues, in Occasions for Poetry, that this art form is the most important cultural element by which the Ottomans expressed themselves, more important than architecture, or history writing. Mustering an immense corpus of poetry from the turn of the 16th century, Aguirre-Mandujano successfully makes his case, though sometimes with the mass of citations he loses the forest from the trees.
Originally the Ottomans listened to bardic poetry, composed by the aşıq (minstrels) in simple, folk Turkish. This tradition of ballad singing survives to this day. Alongside this, the early Ottoman court attracted poets from Iran, who declaimed poems of great complexity and depth, full of allusions and symbols. This language was prized for its ability to describe “true” reality better than the vernacular speech. But as the Ottoman state grew in size and complexity, the people responsible for the state, from Sultan to judges, generals to muftis, felt a need to describe “true” reality in their native Turkish. They invented a new language, which we call “Ottoman Turkish”, as ornate and cultivated as Persian, and more reflective of the social codes and intricate protocol of the sultan’s court.
Contrary to what one might have expected, this new poetry did not exclusively consist of panegyrics (kaside), an overtly political genre where the poet might ask for money, or a new job, or even a stay of execution. The most prolific Ottoman poetic genre is the ghazal, the love lyric. These poems, resembling sonnets in their brevity and formalism, enabled the Ottomans “to signify specific moments in their lives, what I call occasions, and to live them meaningfully,” writes Aguirre-Mandujano.
This language emerged as poetry, but then penetrated into administrative, legal, historical and diplomatic writing. This is suggestive, says the author, of the importance of poetry in daily life. Writing poetry became a badge of membership in the Ottoman ruling class. It is one of the reasons why Turks today struggle to read Ottoman Turkish, even when transliterated from the Arabic to the Latin script: one still must penetrate the dense web of allusions, Quranic citations, echoes of other poems and esoteric symbolism.
In the early Ottoman period (pre-1453) poetry tended to be a profession, and poets often held only marginal positions in society. The growing Ottoman state, as it absorbed literary talent into its ranks of government servants, tended to turn poets into placeholders and placeholders into poets. Many of the writers cited in Occasions are judges and tax collectors. Yet, paradoxically this does not diminish the quality of their poetry compared to older poets. To be a good poet helped one advance in one’s profession. A man’s poetry signified his insight, wisdom, tact and taste, all indispensable qualities in a courtier.
What gives Ottoman poetry still appealing to modern readers is the pathos arising from the sense of vulnerability of these supposedly powerful men. I have always wondered why anyone ever wanted to become grand vizier of the Ottoman empire when over 50% of them were executed by their sultans (see The Lion House). Aguirre-Mandujano’s poets suffer exile, degradation and in several cases execution, at the whim of the monarch or because of the changing tides of court sentiment. Perhaps the most tragic example is Bayezid II’s brother Cem Sultan, who lost the contest between Mehmed II’s heirs for the throne, and found himself in exile in Italy. After Cem fled the country Bayezid executed Oghuz, his nephew and Cem’s son, prompting the banished prince to pen a masterful dirge, of which the radif, or refrain is felek, meaning “fate”.
You turned the light of the world Into darkness over my head,
you dark-faced Fate winged with rain and dark clouds.
O disloyal Fate, treacherous, unworthy, and cruel
and no error-loving Fate of troubles and accidents.
You that tyrannically drink the blood of the rulers of the age, o Fate
full of cruelty trouble pains and cries.
Since you threw me into the whirlpool of the land of the Franks
bloody tears flowed down my eyes like an ocean, o Fate.
Jacob did not shed this many bloody tears from his eyes
Alexander the Great did not suffer what I did in the land of darkness, o Fate.
How could I not tear my shirt and wail at your hand
the pain of Oghuz had thrown my soul to burn in the fire, o Fate.
My eyes have shed so many tears in the land of the Franks
that the sea of the West has overflowed and bubbles with them, o Fate
Although Cem’s exile and loss of his son is the most poignant of stories captured in poetry by Aguirre-Mandujano, few of his representative poets entirely escape humiliation and degradation. In another trenchant observation, Aguirre-Mandujano says, “ to imagine that all Ottoman subjects understood their present moment and all things Ottoman is a misunderstanding. It is likely that an Ottoman historian today knows far more about the inner workings of the palace than the average Ottoman.” So their poetry served as a talisman against disorientation, in the dizzy whirl of promotion and abasement. “Poetry not only offered a language to organize a life that would suddenly fall into chaos and disarray, it filled that life with meaning.”
The weight of argument favors Aguirre-Mandujano’s assertion that “Poetry is part and parcel in the life of every Ottoman elite for most of the duration of the empire in a way that is difficult to imagine today.” But perhaps because of his work in the Süleymaniyye Library, the greatest collection of Islamic manuscripts in the world, Aguirre-Mandujano pursues too many poets. Indeed he gives us a careful reading of the courtier-poets of the era 1453-1512 (from the conquest of Constantinople until the death of Bayezid II), introducing many unpublished texts. Fewer could have been left to express more of themselves, and more focus could have been given to specific poems.
Full of insights into the Ottoman mind, the text of the book is nevertheless diffuse, and suffers from repetition. One suspects a number of articles have been assembled to make a book, without a clear through-line. For example there is a chapter on letter writing and how epistolary manuals emerged—not really á propos of the thesis. Nevertheless Aguirre-Mandujano does make his case for the importance of Ottoman poetry to understand who the Ottomans were, and more importantly who they thought they were themselves. There is more than enough material for an anthology with facing translations, to make these poems available to a wider public.