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Epic tradition

 Orhon  Korkut  Köroğlu

Folk tradition  Folk literature 

Ottoman era 

Republican era  Poetry  Prose

 V

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 E

A page from the Dîvân-ı Fuzûlî, the collected poems of the 16th-century Azerbaijanipoet Fuzûlî. Turkish literature (Turkish: Türk edebiyatı or Türk yazını) comprises both oral compositions and written texts in the , either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of today. The language, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, was influenced by Persian and and used the Ottoman . The history of the broader Turkic literature spans a period of nearly 1,300 years. The oldest extant records of written Turkic are the Orhon inscriptions, found in the Orhon River valley in central and dating to the 7th century. Subsequent to this period, between the 9th and 11th centuries, there arose among the nomadic of a tradition of oral epics, such as the of the —the linguistic and cultural ancestors of the modern —and the Manas epic of the . Beginning with the victory of the Seljuks at the in the late 11th century, the Oghuz Turks began to settle in , and in addition to the earlier oral traditions there arose a written literary tradition issuing largely—in terms of themes, genres, and styles— from Arabic and . For the next 900 years, until shortly before the fall of the in 1922, the oral and written traditions would remain largely separate from one another. With the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the two traditions came together for the first time.

Contents [hide]

 1 The two traditions of Turkish literature  2 Folk literature o 2.1 The epic tradition o 2.2 Folk poetry o 2.3 Folklore  3 Ottoman literature o 3.1 Divan poetry o 3.2 Early Ottoman prose o 3.3 The 19th century and Western influence  4 Early 20th-century Turkish literature o 4.1 The New Literature movement o 4.2 The Dawn of the Future movement o 4.3 The National Literature movement  5 Republican literature o 5.1 Prose o 5.2 Poetry  6 Book Trade  7 Important works of fiction: 1860–present  8 See also  9 Notes  10 References  11 External links o 11.1 In English o 11.2 In Turkish

The two traditions of Turkish literature[edit] Throughout most of its history, Turkish literature has been rather sharply divided into two rather different traditions, neither of which exercised much influence upon the other until the 19th century. The first of these two traditions is , and the second is Turkish written literature. For most of the history of Turkish literature, the salient difference between the folk and the written traditions has been the variety of language employed. The folk tradition, by and large, was oral and remained free of the influence of Persian and , and consequently of those literatures' respective languages. In folk poetry—which is by far the tradition's dominant genre—this basic fact led to two major consequences in terms of poetic style:

 the poetic meters employed in the folk poetic tradition were different, being quantitative (i.e., syllabic) verse, as opposed to the qualitative verse employed in the written poetic tradition;  the basic structural unit of folk poetry became the (Turkish: dörtlük) rather than the couplets (Turkish: beyit) more commonly employed in written poetry. Furthermore, Turkish folk poetry has always had an intimate connection with song—most of the poetry was, in fact, expressly composed so as to be sung—and so became to a great extent inseparable from the tradition of . In contrast to the tradition of Turkish folk literature, Turkish written literature—prior to the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923—tended to embrace the influence of Persian and Arabic literature. To some extent, this can be seen as far back as the period in the late 11th to early 14th centuries, where official business was conducted in the , rather than in Turkish, and where a court such as Dehhanî—who served under the 13th century Ala ad- Kay Qubadh I—wrote in a language highly inflected with Persian. When the Ottoman Empire arose early in the 14th century, in northwestern Anatolia, it continued this tradition. The standard poetic forms—for poetry was as much the dominant genre in the written tradition as in the folk tradition—were derived either directly from the م س نوى(, mesnevî naisreP hguorht yltceridni ro غزل; Persian literary tradition (the gazel eht ق ص يده(. from the Arabic (the kasîde smrof citeop eseht tpoda ot noisiced eht ,revewoH wholesale led to two important further consequences:[1]

 the poetic meters (Turkish: aruz) of Persian poetry were adopted;  Persian- and Arabic-based words were brought into the Turkish language in great numbers, as Turkish words rarely worked well within the system of Persian poetic meter. Out of this confluence of choices, the Ottoman Turkish language—which was always highly distinct from standard Turkish—was effectively born. This style of writing under Persian and Arabic influence came to be known as "Divan literature" (Turkish: divan being the Ottoman Turkish word referring to the collected works of a (ناويد( edebiyatı), dîvân poet. Just as Turkish folk poetry was intimately bound up with Turkish folk music, so did Ottoman Divan poetry develop a strong connection with Turkish classical music, with the poems of the Divan often being taken up to serve as song lyrics.

Folk literature[edit] Main article: Turkish Folk Literature

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Turkish folk literature is an deeply rooted, in its form, in Central Asian nomadic traditions. However, in its themes, Turkish folk literature reflects the problems peculiar to a settling (or settled) people who have abandoned the nomadic lifestyle. One example of this is the series of folktales surrounding the figure of Keloğlan, a young boy beset with the difficulties of finding a wife, helping his mother to keep the family house intact, and dealing with the problems caused by his neighbors. Another example is the rather mysterious figure of , a who often plays jokes, of a sort, on his neighbors.

An aşık performing in Anatolia, from an 18th-century Western engraving

Nasreddin also reflects another significant change that had occurred between the days when the Turkish people were nomadic and the days when they had largely become settled in Anatolia; namely, Nasreddin is a Muslim . The Turkic peoples had first become an Islamic people sometime around the 9th or 10th century, as is evidenced from the clear Islamic influence on the 11th century Karakhanid work the ("Wisdom of Royal Glory"), written by Yusuf Has Hajib. The religion henceforth came to exercise an enormous influence on Turkish society and literature, particularly the heavily mystically oriented Sufi and Shi'a varieties of Islam. The Sufi influence, for instance, can be seen clearly not only in the tales concerning Nasreddin but also in the works of , a towering figure in Turkish literature and a poet who lived at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, probably in the Karamanid state in south-central Anatolia. The Shi'a influence, on the other hand, can be seen extensively in the tradition of the aşıks, or ozans,[2] who are roughly akin to medieval European minstrels and who traditionally have had a strong connection with the Alevi faith, which can be seen as something of a homegrown Turkish variety of Shi'a Islam. It is, however, important to note that in Turkish culture, such a neat division into Sufi and Shi'a is scarcely possible: for instance, Yunus Emre is considered by some to have been an Alevi, while the entire Turkish aşık/ozan tradition is permeated with the thought of the Bektashi Sufi , which is itself a blending of Shi'a and Sufi concepts. The word aşık (literally, "lover") is in fact the term used for first-level members of the . Because the Turkish folk literature tradition extends in a more or less unbroken line from about the 10th or 11th century to today, it is perhaps best to consider the tradition from the perspective of genre. There are three basic genres in the tradition: epic; folk poetry; and folklore. The epic tradition[edit] The Turkish epic has its roots in the Central Asian epic tradition that gave rise to the Book of Dede Korkut; written in Azeri - and recognizably similar to modern Turkish - the form developed from the oral traditions of the Oghuz Turks (a branch of the Turkic peoples which migrated towards and eastern Europethrough Transoxiana, beginning in the 9th century). The Book of Dede Korkut endured in the oral tradition of the Oghuz Turks after settling in Anatolia.[citation needed]. is an earlier epic, translated into English and available online.[3] The Book of Dede Korkut was the primary element of the Azerbaijani-Turkish epic tradition in the and Anatolia for several centuries[when?]. Concurrent to the Book of Dede Korkut was the so-called Epic of Köroğlu, which concerns the adventures of Rüşen )"Köroğlu", or "son of the blind man") as he exacted revenge for the blinding of his father. The origins of this epic are somewhat more mysterious than those of the Book of Dede Korkut: many believe it to have arisen in Anatolia sometime between the 15th and 17th centuries; more reliable testimony,[4] though, seems to indicate that the story is nearly as old as that of the Book of Dede Korkut, dating from around the dawn of the 11th century. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that Köroğlu is also the name of a poet of the aşık/ozantradition. The epic tradition in modern Turkish literature may be seen in the Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin (Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı), published in 1936 by the poet Ran (1901–1963). This long poem — which concerns an Anatolian shaykh's rebellion against the Ottoman Sultan — is a modern epic, yet draws upon the same independent-minded traditions of the Anatolian people as depicted in the Epic of Köroğlu. Many of the works of the 20th-century novelist (1923– ), such as the 1955 novel Memed, My Hawk (İnce Memed), can be considered modern prose epics. Folk poetry[edit]

Yunus Emre (1240-1321) has exercised immense influence on Turkish literature, from his own day until the present.

The folk poetry tradition in Turkish literature, as indicated above, was strongly influenced by the Islamic Sufi and Shi'a traditions. Furthermore, as partly evidenced by the prevalence of the still existent aşık/ozan tradition, the dominant element in Turkish folk poetry has always been song. The development of folk poetry in Turkish—which began to emerge in the 13th century with such important writers as Yunus Emre, Sultan Veled, and Şeyyâd Hamza—was given a great boost when, on 13 May 1277, Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey declared Turkish the official state language of Anatolia's powerful Karamanid state;[5] subsequently, many of the tradition's greatest poets would continue to emerge from this region. There are, broadly speaking, two traditions of Turkish folk poetry:

 the aşık/ozan tradition, which—although much influenced by religion, as mentioned above—was for the most part a secular tradition;  the explicitly religious tradition, which emerged from the gathering places (tekkes) of the Sufi religious orders and Shi'a groups. Much of the poetry and song of the aşık/ozan tradition, being almost exclusively oral until the 19th century, remains anonymous. There are, however, a few well-known aşıks from before that time whose names have survived together with their works: the aforementioned Köroğlu (16th century); Karacaoğlan )1606?–1689?), who may be the best-known of the pre-19th century aşıks; Dadaloğlu )1785?–1868?), who was one of the last of the great aşıks before the tradition began to dwindle somewhat in the late 19th century; and several others. The aşıks were essentially minstrels who travelled through Anatolia performing their songs on the bağlama, a mandolin-like instrument whose paired strings are considered to have a symbolic religious significance in Alevi/Bektashi culture. Despite the decline of the aşık/ozan tradition in the 19th century, it experienced a significant revival in the 20th century thanks to such outstanding figures as Aşık Veysel Şatıroğlu (1894–1973), Aşık Mahzuni Şerif (1938–2002), Neşet Ertaş (1938–2012), and many others.

Kaygusuz

The explicitly religious folk tradition of tekke literature shared a similar basis with the aşık/ozan tradition in that the poems were generally intended to be sung, generally in religious gatherings, making them somewhat akin to Western hymns (Turkish ilahi). One major difference from the aşık/ozan tradition, however, is that—from the very beginning—the poems of thetekke tradition were written down. This was because they were produced by revered religious figures in the literate environment of the tekke, as opposed to the milieu of the aşık/ozantradition, where the majority could not read or write. The major figures in the tradition of tekke literature are: Yunus Emre (1240?–1320?), who is one of the most important figures in all of Turkish literature; Süleyman Çelebi (?–1422), who wrote a highly The Means of Salvation", but more" ةاجنلا ةليسو( popular long poem called Vesîletü'n-Necât commonly known as the Mevlid), concerning the birth of the Islamic ; (1397–?), who is widely considered the founder of Alevi/Bektashi literature; and Sultan Abdal (?–1560), whom many consider to be the pinnacle of that literature.