babur and muḥammad shaybani: Fighting for Literary Pre-eminence in Early 16th-Century Central Asia
Benedek Péri1/ Eötvös Loránd University/peribenedek@gmail.com
Journal of Central Asian History
Abstract
Rival rulers of the Persianate Turkic cosmopolis often clashed not only on the battle field in the late 15th–early 16th centuries, but also competed with each other in the virtual space of literary accomplishments. Two outstanding Central Asian charac ters of the period, namely Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (d. 1530) and his nemesis, Muḥammad Šaybānī Ḫān (d. 1510) also fought each other both in bloody battles and on the literary sphere. As is well known, their political rivalry ended with Bābur’s defeat on the battlefield. It is less known, however, how these two individuals fared against each other on the literary scene. The present article seeks to offer a comparative analy sis of the two statesmen’s poetic accomplishments with the hope of showing how close attention to these two figure’s imitation ghazals can contribute to a better understand ing of their respective literary personalities.
Keywords
Bābur – Muḥammad Šaybānī – classical poetry – Chagatayliterature – ghazals Nowadays Turks are everywhere and it’s not wrong,
When
you let everyone hear your loud Turkish song.
Compose
melodies in the rāst and the hijāz scale,
Prepare
your yatuġan and šudurġan and don’t fail.
Play
the Turkish songs, well-composed and full of bliss,
Pluck
the strings of the qopuz, you should never miss.2
These lines by Ḫaydar Ḫvārizmī (fl. early 15th c.) a court poet working under the Timurid prince, Sulṭān Iskandar Mīrzā (d. 1415), attests to the emergence of an audience of Turkic origin receptive to classical art transmitted to them in a way that appealed to them. He speaks of Turkic consumers of music who wish to listen to classical melodies especially if they are played on Turkic instruments. Since these lines appear in an introductory chapter of a narrative poem com posed in Turkic and describes the poetic scene and the author’s own accom plishments, perhaps it is not far-fetched to suggest that the notion of classical music played on Turkic instruments can be interpreted also as a metaphor for the burgeoning classical literature in Turkic.
Texts
in classical Islamic literary genres had been written in Turkic in Central Asia since the late 11th century,3 but as Mīr
ʿAlī-šīr Navāyī (d. 1501) noted in the
following comments about Turkic literary works, the accession to power in Iran and Central Asia of Timurid dynasts
signalled the beginning of a whole new
era:
From
the time of Hulagu khan until the reign of Temür Küregen, the Lord of Auspicious Conjunctions, not a single
poet appeared who was able to produce a
text in Turkish that was worth describing or at least being recorded and no ruler authored anything
that would be worth mentioning. However,
from the time of Temür Küregen, the Lord of
Auspicious Conjunctions, until the last years of his son and
successor, Šāh-ruḫ Sulṭān, poets writing
in Turkish appeared on the scene such as
Saqqāqī, Ḥaydar Ḫvārizmī, ʿAṭāyī, Muqīmī, Yaqīnī, Amīrī and Gadāyī,
and [a number of] descendants of his
Majesty blessed with poetical talent
were born. [Nevertheless] compared to the Persian poets mentioned ear
lier there is only one Mavlānā Luṭfī and even he has only a few opening couplets (maṭlaʿs) that can be recited in
front of experts on poetry.4
Navāyī’s
observations indicate several new developments on a literary scene that was previously dominated by professional
litterateurs and other educated
intellectuals who produced texts mainly in Persian. First of all,
literary produc tion started being not only sponsored by the social élite,5 but
its members also started to actively
participate in the production of literary texts. Navāyī devoted the fifth and seventh chapters of his
biographical anthology titled Macālis
an-Nafāʾis (‘Congregations of Refined People’) to “noblemen and freemen
of Khurasan and other places” and “great
kings and their esteemed descendants”
who distinguished themselves with poetical accomplishments.6 Turkic mem
bers of the Timurid aristocracy, most of whom had semi nomadic traditions and were classified as belonging to the ahl-i
shamshīr, or the ‘people of the sword’
in Nasīr ad-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) division of Islamic societies,7 started
to aspire to compose poetry perhaps as a
display of their cultured status. Their
aim here may have been to demonstrate that they have something in com
mon with the sedentary Persianate society, especially with the learned and educated members of the ahl-i qalam, or ‘the
people of the pen’ and they were to be
distinguished from the uneducated and boorish Turkic semi-nomads the atrāk-i bī-idrāk, or ‘empty-headed Turks’ who
were sneered at from the Seljuk period
onwards,8 even as late as in the early 16th-century in Ottoman sources.9
As
a result of the emergence of a new Turkic audience and a cadre of authors of Turkic origin that included many
amateur poets of high status, who
produced a growing number of classical texts in Turkic, Central Asian
Turkic emerged as a potential rival of
Persian in the literary marketplace where classi cal texts in Turkic had
previously appeared only sporadically. All these changes led to an increasing demand of sophisticated
classical poems in Turkic that met the
expectations of literary critics and were the equal of works written in Persian. Writing artistically refined and
elegant poetry had become an essen tial part of the Timurid cultural ethos and
an integral part of a ruler’s skillset
by the second half of the 15th century. This development can be best
illustrated by Navāyī’s detailed
analyses of Ḥusayn Bayqara’s poems in which he seeks to make clear to the reader that the king of
Herat was an exceptionally talented and
highly skilful poet.10
The Timurid cultural model exerted a great influence on other Turkic dynasties including the Ottomans, Aq Qoyunlus, Qara Qoyunlus, Safavids and Shaybanids, and quite a few rulers and princes went to great lengths to show that they met the expectations set for an ideal king who was expected to be both a successful military leader – that is a ‘man of the sword’ – and a seden tarized and civilized, Persianized adīb.11 Thus, by the late 15th or early 16th century classical poetry also became an important part of the repertoire of royal propaganda seeking to project a favourable image of a sovereign. It also became a potential virtual battlefield where rival rulers could fight battles of words, as the propaganda war fought by the first Safavid shah, Shāh Ismāʿīl (d. 1524), who wanted to gain the support of Anatolian nomads with his poems written in Türkī-yi ʿAjamī and the Ottoman sultan, Selīm I (d. 1520), who targeted Persian intellectuals with his poems composed in Persian, clearly indicates.12
In
the Eastern part of the Persianate Turkic cosmopolis two contempo raries of
Shāh Ismāʿīl and Selīm I had a very similar rivalry. The Timurid prince Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur, who later laid
the foundations of the Mughal Empire,
and Muḥammad Šaybānī, the leader of the Uzbek confederation and the founder of the Shaybanid state, similarly
competed for superiority not only on the
battlefield but also in the poetic arena.
Bābur
had a disdainful opinion of Muḥammad Šaybānī, whom he viewed as uneducated, boorish and arrogant. In his
memoires he contemptuously relates that
after occupying Herat, a major cultural centre in May 1507, Šaybānī sought to impress locals and show off with
his expertise in various art forms by
correcting the handwriting of Ṣulṭān ʿAlī Mashhadī (d. 1520), an acknowl edged
master calligrapher, and the drawings of Kamāl ad-Dīn Bihzād (d. ca. 1535) a celebrated painter of his age. He
also made a public display of his skills
as a poet and “every few days when he composed some tasteless couplets
he would have them read from the pulpit,
hung in the Châr-su, and for it accept
the donations of the townspeople!”.13
Before
seeing whether Bābur was right in asserting that Muḥammad Šaybānī was a self-conceited bragger who produced
only bad poetry and whether Bābur fared
much better on this field, a few words should be said of the objec tive
criteria for identifying good poetry. As the main verse form and genre of this period was the ghazal, a short poem made
up of 5–11 couplets relying on a
distinct rhyme scheme and composed in quantitative verse, couplets from ghazals written by Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī
will be analysed here.
The picture pieced together from scattered data found in biographical anthologies (Pers., Chag. taẕkira, Osm. teẕkire), which were the main forum of literary criticism, suggests that the essential ingredients of a good ghazal were deemed to be unique poetic ‘ideas’ (Pers., Chag., Osm. maʿnā), colourful ‘word ing’ (Pers., Chag. adā or alfāẓ, Osm. edā or elfāẓ) and the skilful use of ‘rhetoric figures’ (Pers., Chag., Osm. ṣanāyīʿ).14 During the late Timurid period the focus shifted to technical refinery and success was perhaps measured by how creatively poets were able to use the technical repertoire of rhetorical devices and how many tropes they could work into a single couplet (Pers., Chag. bayt, Osm. beyt).15 The following opening bayt (Pers., Chag. Osm. maṭlaʿ) by Navāyī, first included in his collection Badāyiʿ al-bidāya (‘The Wonders of the Beginning’), compiled between 1470 and 1476, is a good example of a rhetorically sophisti cated couplet, though at first sight it seems to consist of two simple and perhaps a little silly-sounding hemistichs (Pers. Chag., Osm. miṣrāʿ):
Cism-i
vaṣlïn qïldïm ol zulf-i samansādïn ṭamaʿ
Ol
kiši yanġlïq ki qïlġay sīm savdādïn ṭamaʿ 16
I
longed for the body of being with that [beauty who has a] hyacinth-like braid of hair,
Like
a merchant who longs for silver from his trade.
Although the two similes at play in this couplet seem easy to understand at first glance, in reality they are not. Indeed, it is not entirely clear why the poet compares his sweetheart’s braid of hair to a hyacinth, and why the poet’s amo rous yearning is reminiscent of a merchant’s longing to obtain silver through business transactions. The explanation lies in the traditional tools of classical poetry. It is a topos, perhaps because of the physical similarity, that the braided plait of the beloved evokes in the poet the image of a hyacinth flower. Although the figure of the profit-hungry merchant is obviously meant to con vey the strength and intensity of the lovelorn poet’s desire, it is worth explain ing why the merchant wants to be paid in silver. The answer also lies in the traditions of classical poetry. In ghazal verse, the beloved embodies the ideal of beauty: her/his skin is fair, her/his hair black. In the Navāyī couplet, this poetic ideal is at play in the background. The word cism ‘body’ evokes the beloved’s skin, and with it the notion of ‘white’. The noun is linked to the word sīm ‘silver’ in the second hemistich through the concept of ‘whiteness’, and the two elements together form a tanāsub (‘congruency’). A similar pair is formed by zulf ‘plait’ and savdā ‘trade’, because the colour of hair is black, and the Arabic word savdā is etymologically related to the noun asvad denoting ‘black’. The related keywords (cism, sīm; zulf, savdā) occur in the same order in the first and sec ond hemistich and form the rhetorical figure laff u nashr-i murattab (‘folding and spreading arranged in an orderly manner’).
Besides
rhetoric versatility and the ability to use traditional elements of the mundus significans (signifying universe) of
classical poetry in a creative way,17
there was another poetic skill that was particularly valued in the
Timurid and post-Timurid period, the
presence or absence of which can serve to judge the characteristics and the value of a poet’s
output, his literary qualities, and his
personality: the capability to compose elegant poetic replies (Pers.
javāb, Chag. cavāb; Osm. naẓīre) to
earlier poetic texts.
Poetic imitation in general and the more specific instance where a para phrase uses the same poetic framework, that is the metre, rhyme and refrain (Pers., Chag. radīf, Osm. redīf) combination of the model poem, had always played an important role in the history of the classical poetical tradition. However, the canonization and consolidation of the Persian literary legacy that took place in the Timurid period brought with it an increase in the popularity of literary imitation.18 Though recent scholarly studies tend to view imi tation poems as texts that were by a single model, analyses of a quite a few cavābs indicate that the process of composing an imitation of or a reply to a model ghazal is of a more complex nature. When a number of poetic replies are inspired by a model, a set of imitations is formed. Ghazals within such a set are often related not only to the model poem but through a series of intertextual allusions to each other as well. The more poems there are in the set or the farther we get in time from the composition date of the original model, the possibility of such textual relations binding a freshly created text to its pre decessor poems increases. If many of the cavābs have connections to other poems within the set a paraphrase network is formed.19
Paraphrase networks tend to develop their own distinct signifying universe, which is a selection of a set of elements from the mundus significans of clas sical poetry, that can grow as time passes and more cavābs are added to the set. Each paraphrase network has its own “life-cycle”. Some of them go out of fashion very fast, others, like the “-ā-rā paraphrase network” in Persian and the “beklerüz paraphrase network” in Ottoman poetry can preserve their popularity for centuries and ultimately they can develop into a ghazal sub-genre of their own.20
From
poets’ point of view all this means that there are various strategies of composing a poetic reply. It can be modelled,
for example, on a single text, it can be
a poetic reply to several poems of a paraphrase network or it can reflect the faceless tradition of a whole paraphrase
network by rearranging traditional
elements of its mundus significans.
It mattered a little which approach poets chose. Imitation was in general perceived as an artistic process aimed at creating texts that were in constant discourse through a web of intertextual allusions with other texts previously produced and through them the freshly created imitations became immedi ately connected to the literary tradition itself. ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 1492), the last great poet of the “classical” period and a near contemporary of both Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī, described this process with a metaphor comparing the work of poets to constantly redressing the beauty of poetic ideas into newer and more stylish garbs:
A
fine poetic idea is like a beautiful person with a pure body, Who always
appears dressed in a different garment.
The
new dress becomes a cause for shame,
If
it does not enhance the beauty of the person who wears it. Thus it is a
virtuous deed to remove an old woollen robe,
And
exchange it for a dress of silk and brocade.21
Jāmī’s
words suggest that an important notion defining the relationship of a text with previously composed poetic works
was that of a competition. Imitation
poems were considered good if they equalled or surpassed their model or models in terms of artistic quality.
As well-written cavābs were highly
appreciated, composing imitation poems was an “easy” way to gain profes
sional acknowledgment and fame.
As
noted above, these two skills, the ability to use traditional rhetoric devices in a creative way and the ability to
compose successful poetic replies, can
help to evaluate a poet’s output and define his place in the poetic tradition.
Both
Muḥammad Šaybānī and Bābur yearned to be recognised by their contemporaries as poets of distinction.
Šaybānī, as previously mentioned,
expected the inhabitants of Herat to reward his poetic efforts with
gifts. Bābur chose another strategy when
he questioned and corrected Navāyī’s description of the rubāyīʿ metre and claimed that most of
the great poet’s Persian poems were
“flat”.22 Through these symbolic acts both of them were competing with Navāyī, their highly celebrated contemporary
who lived most of his life in Herat, who
was an acknowledged expert of poetics and who wrote fine poetry in Persian.
An
analysis of their poetic oeuvre shows that both of them were furthermore competing with Navāyī in the field of poetic
production, and both of them composed
poetic replies to Navāyī’s Turkic ghazals. However, there is only one Navāyī poem that seems to have inspired both
Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī.
The
poetic framework, which is to say metre and rhyme combination, used by all three poets had already been quite
popular in the pre-Navāyī period, and it
seems to have been developed by Persian poets because at least two of
them, both celebrated composers of
ghazals, Salmān Sāvajī (d. 1376) and Kamāl
Khujandī (d. 1401) have ghazals that draw on this model.23 This poetic
frame work consists of the metre ramal-i musamman-i maḥẕūf (- . - - | - . - - |
- . - - | - . -) and the rhyme -īb. All
the Persian and the Chagatay poems are composed in an amorous (Pers. ʿāshiqāna, Chag. ʿāšiqāna,
Osm. ʿāşıḳāne) tone and this defines the
topic of the ghazals: all of them are about the agony of unrequited love.
The
idea for this poetic framework very clearly came from the two Persian poets, whose ghazals are textually connected
to the first two Chagatay poems composed
by ʿAṭāyī and Gadāyī,24 two 15th-century poets.25 However, ʿAṭāyī, the author of the Chagatay model poem,
introduced an innovation: he real ized the poetic potential in -Ib verbal nouns
and started to use Turkic verbs as rhyming
words.26
As
the poetic framework in question gives great freedom to poets because the metre is one of the easiest metres to use
in Turkic poems and the set of available
rhyme words ending in -īb or -Ib provides authors with a vast range of choices, poems of the Chagatay paraphrase
network are only loosely connected.27
This also applies to Bābur’s poem and Šaybānī’s four ghazals28 as they are typical examples of cavābs inspired
by not a single model but by the whole
textual tradition of a paraphrase network. Though they rely mostly on traditional elements of the mundus
significans of the “-īb/-Ib paraphrase
network”, they are textually not connected to other poems and this means
that they are not modelled on Navāyī’s
ghazal.
Bābur’s
poem is a very simple piece of poetry. In the light of the potential inherent in the flexible poetical framework
and the rich mundus significans of the
paraphrase network, the rhetoric flatness of the text and the lack of any kind of cohesive force binding the two
hemistichs in most couplets and the fre quent use of “meaningless” lexical
items used only to fill the metrical pattern
suggest that this ghazal was authored by an unskilled beginner. Let it
suffice to mention one example here:
Tilba
bolmaqlïqdïn özge čāraī yoqtur manga
Ol
parī-rū nāgahān er čïqsa öydin yasanïb
Except
for becoming insane there is no other solution for me, When that fairy-faced
[beauty] suddenly steps out of the house in full finery.
Tilba (‘insane; mad’), the first word in the first hemistich, is an important key word of the couplet. Since a vast array of poetic images are attached to the notion of ‘madness’ in classical poetry, the adjective offers a variety of valences, and there are many possibilities to create semantic bonds with other key ele ments of the couplet. Nevertheless, Bābur opted not to make use of any of these and tilba is rhetorically not bound to any of the second miṣrāʿ’s key elements. The use of elements with “neutral” meaning is also very telling. The expla nation for the use of the Persian indefinite marker (yā-yi waḥdat) at the end of the word čāra ‘solution’ and also for the inclusion of the adverb nāgahān ‘unexpectedly’ is that the poet had to fill in the metrical pattern and since the poetic message was not long enough, he had to resort to include “meaningless” elements in the line, which a skilled poet would rarely do.
Despite
the poetical clumsiness of most bayts, the last couplet (Pers., Chag. maqṭaʿ; Osm. maḳṭaʿ) indicates that Bābur was
aware of the basic rules and cus toms of classical poetry, and he tried to
comply with them as much as he could:
Bāburā
hargiz qulaq šiʿiringġa ol gül salmadï
Gülgä
ne parvāy yüz faryād qïlsa ʿandalīb
Bābur! The rose [faced beauty] has never listened to your poem[s], Why should the rose worry if the nightingale wails?
Bābur
and Muḥammad Šaybānī 319
The
couplet is evidently pieced together from traditional elements of the signifying universe of classical poetry: the
poet’s ghazal complaining about the
agony of unrequited love is compared to the wailing of the nightingale
who longs for the love of the rose.
However, the rose doesn’t listen to the woeful
lover’s song, in the same way that Bābur’s beloved doesn’t pay attention
to his poem. In addition to this
metaphor (Pers., Chag., Osm. istiʿāra), the poetic cohesion force holding the two miṣrāʿs together
is increased by the inclusion of another
istiʿāra comparing the poet’s beloved to a rose and the semantic bind ing
(Pers., Chag. tanāsub; Osm. tenāsüb) of the notions ‘rose’ and ‘nightingale’. All the key elements of the couplet were
available in previous classical poetic
texts. The fact that Bābur was able to recognize and use the poetic
opportuni ties offered by his model, which in this case may have been
Khujandī’s clos ing couplet where ʿandalīb is the rhyming word and the noun gul
also occurs, and with the help of
carefully selected traditional elements he could formulate his own couplet, shows that Bābur had a flair
for composing poetry, he had already
acquired a good knowledge and understanding of the system of classi cal poetry
and he had a high potential of becoming a truly accomplished poet someday.
Muḥammad
Šaybānī’s four ghazals on the other hand, show a very differ ent picture. Two
of his cavābs were composed late in Šaybānī’s life,29 which is to say at a time when a poet might be
expected to possess all the poetic skills
needed to be recognised. However, these poems show only a superficial
knowl edge and understanding of classical poetry.
One
of them is a merdāne ghazal, a type of ghazal boasting of a ruler-poet’s triumphs and political accomplishments,
typical of 15th–17th-century Turkic
language classical poetry written by rulers and princes throughout the
Turkic cosmopolis,30 while a second is
also a very simple piece of poetry written in
simple Turkic without rhetoric embellishments. This is true also of a
third poem, which sticks out from the
other poems of the paraphrase network
because its set of rhyming words consists only of Turkic verbal nouns.31
Though
these poems use the same metre and rhyme as other ghazals of the “-īb/Ib” paraphrase network they
significantly differ from them because they
are written in simple Turkic style, and draw neither on the set of
rhymes nor the mundus significans of the
network.
 |
Šaybānī’s
fourth ghazal is the only poem that seems to fit well into the “-īb/ Ib”
paraphrase network.32 However, even this poem bears evidence of the poet’s inability to comply with the
conventions of classical poetry and use set
elements of its signifying universe in an informed way.
The
second couplet of the poem illustrates this point well:
Zulf
u ḫāl u nargising ġamzasïna tüšti köngül
Baḫt
u davlat ham-nišīn u fatḥ u nuṣrat ʿan-qarīb
[My]
heart has fallen for your curly lock, your mole and a wink of your eye[s],
Luck
and fortune are my partners and triumph and victory are close by.
Despite a metrical mistake in the third foot,33 the first hemistich could be part of any of the traditional “-īb/Ib” poems. It is composed in ʿāšiqāna mood prais ing the poet’s beloved for the beauty of her/his hair, mole and mischievous glance that captivate her/his lover. Huge semantic fields developed around these key-concepts/keywords in classical poetry, providing poets with a range of possibilities to semantically bind them to other elements in a couplet. Šaybānī, however, failed to exploit these poetic potentials and introduced concepts in the second miṣrāʿ that conventionally have nothing to do with the beloved’s beauty marks. The result is a typical Šaybānian couplet, which is very simple and lacks the poetic force that would connect the two hemistichs in any way. These kinds of couplets were regarded poorly in 15th–16th-century literary criticism and it is no wonder that the people of Herat, who were used to a repertoire of sophisticated poetic texts, were not very enthusiastic about Muḥammad Šaybānī’s poetry.
Šaybānī fared only slightly better when he tried to imitate a single model, which could have given him a less poetic freedom and thus a more secure sup port. Headings preceding three ghazals in the unique copy of Šaybānī’s col lection of poems (Pers., Chag. Osm. dīvān) indicate that they were meant as poetic replies to poems by Navāyī.34
Ghazal no. 111 in Karasoy’s edition follows closely the order of rhyming words in Navāyī’s ghazal, first included in his dīvān titled Navādir aš-šabāb (‘The Rarieties of Adolescence’).35 Quite interestingly a great number of Navāyī poems that inspired Šaybānī, are from this work that is part of Ḫazāʾin al-maʿnī (‘Treasurehouse of Poetic Ideas’),36 a collection of four dīvāns compiled between 1491–1498, which means that most of Šaybānī’s poetic replies were written in the 1490s, when he was a middle-aged man and might have been expected to have mastered his craft.
Navāyī’s
poem uses an easy metre, ramal-i musamman-i maḥẕūf, the rhyme -ūd, which gives poets access to a relatively
large set of rhyming words and a
flexible radīf, emäs (‘isn’t’). Šaybānī followed the order of the model
poem’s rhyming words, which suggests
that he aimed at composing a close copy of
Navāyī’s poem. His imitation strategy was a well-established method of
writing poetic replies mainly applied by
beginners or less talented poets. The author
of the cavāb selected keywords or key concepts of the model couplet and
he either replaced them with their
synonyms or put them into a slightly modified
poetic context.
Navāyī’s
penultimate couplet is a good example of this approach.
Navāyī
Mayda
ʿaqsïndur köz andan almasam saqïn ne tang
Tā
ki dīdār olsa mendin mastlïq maqsūd emäs
[As]
your reflection is in the wine, don’t think it is strange that I cannot take my eyes off it,
My
goal is to see you and not to get drunk.
Šaybānī
Yār
ʿaqsïn körär ermiš ol muṣaffā balda
Baldïn
ber Sāqīyā kim özgesi maqsūd emäs
The
beloved saw her/his reflection in that pure honey-wine, Cupbearer, give me from
that honey-wine because I don’t want anything
else.
The maʿnā of Navāyī’s first hemistich is that since the reflection of the beloved’s face appears on the surface of a cup of wine, the poet keeps watch ing it. Though Šaybānī tried to create a close copy of the miṣrāʿ by naming the beloved (yār), who is in the background in Navāyī’s line, by retaining the keyword ʿaqs ‘reflection’ and by replacing the word may, the most often used noun for wine in classical poetry with a near-synonym bal ‘honey; wine made of honey’. However, he could reproduce only half of the poetic idea, i.e. “wine reflects the beloved’s face”. Moreover, the line contains a serious metrical mis take. In classical Chagatay prosody an extra syllable is inserted after syllables containing a long vowel if they are followed by a word or a grammatical element with an initial consonant. As the Old Turkic vowel length had been short ened by this period, words of Turkic origin do not have long vowels and the rule is valid only for Arabic and Persian loans. Bal is of Turkic origin and thus inserting an extra syllable before the locative suffix balǝda ‘in honey-wine’ is wrong. The mistake is repeated in the next miṣrāʿ as well. Though the second hemistich clearly seeks to echo the poetic idea present in Navāyī’s couplet, it obscures the original message and it is difficult to understand if one doesn’t know the model.
The
third bayt of the same poem, which is modelled on Navāyī’s third cou plet, is
slightly better as a poetic reply.
Navāyī
Köksüm
ačtïm här ṭaraf qïldï gumān ol ṭifl kim
Lālalar
birlä bezäb men dāġ-ı ḫūnālūd emäs
I
uncovered my chest everywhere, and that child thought,
Those
are not blood-smeared wounds and I have decorated it [i.e. the chest] with a field of roses.
Šaybānī
Nāvakï
paykānïdïn yār ačtï könglüm gülšanïn
Lālazār
baġrïm qanïdïn rang alur ālūd emäs
[My]
beloved opened up the rose field of my heart with the tip of her/ his arrow,
The
tulip field takes its colour from the blood of my heart, it is not smeared.
The poetic idea behind Navāyī’s couplet counts as a topos in classical ghazal poetry: the pain of unreciprocated love causes open wounds (dāġ) to evolve on the sorrowful lover’s upper body, which are always associated with the notion of ‘blood’ and ‘red’ and tend to be compared to red flowers, such as roses and tulips. Šaybānī slightly modified the poetic image, when he transfered the focus of attention from the chest to the heart and combined it with another poetic topos saying that it was the beloved (yār) who opened it with her/his glances, which are conventionally compared to the iron tip of arrows.
Navāyī’s
second hemistich is dominated by a rhetorical figure called ḥusn-i taʿlīl or ‘fantastic etiology’ explaining the
origin of the imaginary love wounds on
the poet’s chest. Šaybānī also used this figure when he gave the reason
for the tulips’ red colour. He managed
to create a close copy of the model cou plet by retaining not only the basic
poetic ideas but also its keywords, such as
the verb ač- ‘open’, lāla ‘tulip’ and the rhyming word in the couplet.
However, the rhyming word Šaybānī uses
is problematic because ālūd, a word related
to the Persian verb alūdan (‘to stain’), is used only as part of a compound
like ḫūnālūd ‘stained with blood’, and
it cannot stand alone.
Quintilian, a Roman author of a much-used manual on the art of rhetoric, advised his reader “to consult his own powers when he shoulders his burden. For there are some things which though capable of imitation may be beyond the capacity of any given individual, either because his natural gifts are insuffi cient or of a different character”.37 Šaybānī was quite obviously unable to select poetic texts to which he could compose successful poetic replies and the mis takes he made in his poetry show the image of an amateur poet who knew the basics of versification but who was not very well-versed in the tradition of classical poetry.
Compared
to Šaybānī, Bābur composed only a few poetic replies to ghazals by Navāyī, perhaps because unlike his rival
who wanted to show off with his cavābs,
Bābur wished to demonstrate his ability to compose poetry on his own, without being evidently influenced by the
oeuvre of an acknowledged and cel ebrated poet.
Ghazal
no. 54 in Bilal Yücel’s edition is an exception and an excellent exam ple of
Bābur’s imitation skills and poetic talent.38 The model poem is con tained in
Navāyī’s collection of poems titled Favāʾid al-kibar (‘The Profits of Old Age’).39
As
is often the case with cavābs, Bābur’s maṭlaʿ makes it clear that the poem was meant as a poetic reply to Navāyī’s
ghazal.40
Navāyī
Sen
quyaš yanglïġ yarub subḥ-i šabāb ayyāmïda
Bizgä
tün-dek tīrelik qismat qarïlïġ šāmïda
You
shine like the Sun in the morning of the days of adolescence, Our fate is dark
like the night in the evening of old age.
Bābur
Çun
meni qoymas falak bir laḥẓa vaṣl ayyāmïda
Tang
yoq ay bī-mihr agar ölsäm firāqïng šāmïda
Since
the Sky doesn’t give [me] a minute of the days of being together [with my beloved],
It
is no wonder that without a sun I will perish in the night of separation.
It
is clear even at first glance that Bābur’s couplet is not a close copy of
Navāyī’s bayt. The ageing Navayi
describes the differences between youth and old age in poetic terms, while Babur’s lines lament the
fact that fate does not allow him to be
with his beloved. Seemingly, apart from the common rhyming words, noth ing
connects the two couplets.
However,
a rhetorical analysis can reveal that the two bayts have shared fea tures.
Navāyī’s couplet is rhetorically based on two similes, comparing youth to morning time, old age to night, two pairs
of opposite concepts (Pers., Chag. tazād,
Osm. tezāt), ‘light’ vs. ‘darkness’; ‘adolescence’ vs. ‘old age’ and
tanāsubs centered around the notions of
‘morning’ and ‘night’.41
Bābur’s cavāb is basically an imitation of this rhetorical structure. In his couplet only one simile is explicitly present, comparing separation to night, the other one stating that being together is like dawn remains tacitly lurking behind the words. The pairs of oppositeness are represented by the opposing notions of ‘union’ vs. ‘separation’ and ‘dawn’ vs. ‘evening’, with dawn appear ing through a wordplay (Pers. tawriya, Chag. tavriya, Osm. tevriye), as the “hidden” or “remote” meaning (Pers. muwarrā anhu, Chag., muvarrā anhu, Osm. müverrā anh) of the string of letters tang. The tanāsubs are provided by the semantic bondings of tang and mihr (‘dawn’, ‘Sun’) and falak and mihr (‘sky’ and ‘Sun’). Since the noun mihr has a double meaning, denoting ‘love’ as well, by including it, in addition to another tavriya Bābur managed to insert an extra tanāsub in the couplet as well, since mihr ‘love’, vaṣl ‘union’, firāq ‘separation’ all belong to the semantic field of ʿašq ‘love’.
Navāyī’s
second couplet inspired Bābur’s maqṭaʿ.
Navāyī
Tün
sevdādïda magar ḫuffāšlar parvāzïdïr
Mużṭarib
cānlar qušï šabrang zulfung dāmïda
Are
[those] bats flying in the blackness of the night?
[No.]
Birds of agitated souls [have been caught] by the snare of your curl ing lock.
Bābur
Bābur
ol gul zulfï astïda emästür ḫāllar
Cān
qušïn ṣayd eylär üčün dānalardur dāmïnda
Bābur,
those aren’t moles under her/his curling lock [, are they?] Those are seeds in
her/his snare to catch the birds of souls.
Rhetorically,
Navāyī’s couplet rests on the creative combination of semantic bonds connecting words that all belong to the
semantic field of ‘darkness’, a
rhetorical question feigning ignorance (Pers. tajāhul al-ʿārif, Chag.
tacāhul al-ʿārif, Osm. tecāhül al-ʿārif)
and two traditional metaphors: the curly lock of the beloved is a snare to her/his lovers and
the soul is a bird. In classical poetry,
which is in a sense the art of visuality, the hair of the beloved is
always black. The notion of ‘darkness’
dominates the couplet as it connects the words tün ‘night’, ḫuffāš ‘bat’,
šabrang ‘night-coloured’ and zulf, and these semantic bonds provide a strong rhetoric cohesion that holds
the two hemistichs together.
Bābur’s technique in composing a cavāb to the model bayt was necessarily somewhat different this time. He retained the rhetorical question but shifted the focus of attention from the darkness of the beloved’s hair to another fea ture of the curly lock, namely its shape. Traditionally, the curly lock and the mole of the beloved are often compared to a snare and the seeds in it. As both the hair and the mole are black in classical poetry, through using these concepts in the second hemistich Bābur also managed to save at least something from the semantic bonds of words belonging to the semantic field of ‘darkness’. Bābur’s creativity in producing excellent poetic replies to artistically refined poetry shows his talent and his knowledge of classical poetry very tellingly. He was able to grab the essence of the model couplet and through combining it with a new or slightly modified set of elements selected from the mundus sig nificans of classical poetry he was able to create a novel poetic text. His cavābs are not slavish imitations of his models but highly elegant emulations match ing or surpassing the original text, which would perfectly fit Jāmī’s standards of “redressing a poetic idea into a newer and more stylish attire”. It is obvious that Bābur was a poet in the best sense of the word, who in his prime time could use the poetic tools at his disposal with great ingenuity. Scattered pieces of data in his memoires and his cavābs inspired by outstand ing pieces of poetical craftsmanship indicate that literary competition was in his blood, and he competed with the texts of celebrated poets of the Chagatay classical tradition with great success.
 |
Compared to him Muḥammad Šaybānī was a mere poetaster even when he was relatively old, and was supposed to have acquired all the skills to com pose poetry. It seems, however, that writing poetry was a tool for him to show off his culture and brag about his erudition. Poetry for him served mainly political purposes both as an important tool for spreading his political agenda and also as part of the image he wished to project of himself, the image of the educated and cultured ruler. However, as Bābur’s description of the recep tion of Šaybānī’s poetry in Herat indicates his efforts proved counterproduc tive. ʿAhdī (d. 1593), an Ottoman literary critic and author of a biographical anthology, mentions in his Gülşen-i şuʿarā (‘The Rose Garden of Poets’) that a poet using the pen name Nisārī, who was seemingly able to write poetry in three languages – Arabic, Persian and Ottoman – “composed paraphrases to the complete Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ” but he adds that “I wish he had not written poetry in any language at all.” Though Muḥammad Šaybānī’s poetry truly has historical value, from the point of view of the art of poetry, these words very befittingly describe his literary efforts. The fight on the battlefield ended with Muḥammad Šaybānī’s victory, but the select couplets analysed above clearly show that Bābur was a much superior poet and he was the unquestioned win ner of duel of words.
Bibliography
Atoiy.
2008. Devon, ed. Sayfiddin Sayfulloh. Tashkent: Fan.
Bābur,
Zahiru’d-dīn Muhammad Pādshāh Ghāzī. 1990. Bābur-nāma. (Memoirs of Bābur), transl. Anette Susannah Beveridge.
New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Blake, Stephen. 2004. The Garden of the Eight
Paradises: Bābur and the Culture of
Empire
in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483–1530). Leiden: Brill. Butler,
Harold Edgworth (ed./trans.). 1922. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian with
an English Translation. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Eckmann,
János. 1966. Chagatay Manual. The Hague: Mouton & Co. Fodor, Pál. 2020. The
Formation of Ottoman Turkish Identity (Fourteenth to Seven teenth Centuries).
In Identity and Culture in Ottoman Hungary, ed. Pál Fodor and Pál Ács. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter: 19–54.
Gadoiy.
1973. Devon, ed. Erkin Ahmadxo’jaev. Tashkent: G’afur G’ulom. Greene, Thomas M.
1982. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven – London: Yale University
Press.
Güvâhî.
1983. Pend-nâme, ed. by Mehmet Hengirmen. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı. Ḫvārizmī, Ḥaydar.
2020. “Maḫzan al-asrār” – The Treasury of Secrets. An Edition of the Manuscript Preserved at the Oriental
Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Acad emy of Sciences, ed. and
transl. Benedek Péri. Budapest: Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences.
Jāmī,
Nūr ad-Dīn ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad. 1379 [2000]. Bahāristān wa rasāʾil-i
Jāmī, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād. Tehran:
Mīrās-i Maktūb.
Karasoy,
Yakup. 1998. Şiban Han Dîvânı. İnceleme-Metin-Dizin-Tıpkıbasım. Ankara:
Türk Dil Kurumu.
Khujandī,
Kamāl. 1372 [1993]. Dīvān, ed. Aḥmad Karamī. Tehran: Nashriyāt-i Mā. Navoiy,
Alisher. 1987. Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. Vol. 1. Badoyi’ al-bidoya, ed. Aziz Qayyumov. Tashkent: Fan.
Navoiy,
Alisher. 1989. Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. Vol. 4. Navodir ash
shabob, ed. Hamid Sulaymon. Tashkent: Fan.
Navoiy,
Alisher. 1997. Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. Vol. 13. Majolis un-nafois, ed. Suyima G’aniyeva. Tashkent: Fan.
Nevāyī,
ʿAlī Şīr. 1996. Fevāyidü’l-Kiber, ed. Önal Kaya. Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 1996.
Nevāyī, Mīr ʿAlī-şīr. 1996. Muḥākemetü’l-Luġateyn, ed. F. Sema Barutçu
Özönder. Ankara: TDK.
Péri,
Benedek. (forthcoming). Love poetry without love? Classical ottoman
amorous gazels in the early 16th
century.
Péri,
Benedek. 2017. ‘From Istāmbōl’s throne a mighty host to Irān guided I;/Sunken
deep in blood of shame I made the Golden
Heads to lie’: Yavuz Sultan Selim’s Persian poetry in the light of the Ottoman-Safavid
propaganda war. Archivum Ottomanicum 34:
183–192.
Péri,
Benedek. 2018. « … beklerüz ». An Ottoman Paraphrase (naẓīre) Network from the 16th Century. In An Iridescent Device:
Premodern Ottoman Poetry, ed. Christiane
Czygan and Stephan Conermann. Göttingen: V&R Unipress: 147–180.
Péri,
Benedek. 2020. Yavuz Sultan Selīm and his Imitation Strategies. The Case of
Four Ḥāfiẓ Ghazals. Acta Orient
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 73/2: 233–251. Péri, Benedek. 2021.
““Merdane” Ghazals And Rhetoric İn 16th Century Turkish Classical Poetry.” In Osmanlı Edebi Metinlerinde
Teoriden Pratiğe Belâgat, ed. Hatice Aynur,
Müjgan Çakır, Hanife Koncu and Ali Emre Özyıldırım. Istanbul: Klasik
Yayınları: 348–381.
Salmān
Sāvajī. 1371 [1992]. Dīvān, ed. Abū al-Qāsim Ḥālat. Tehran: Nashriyāt-i Mā. Ṣolaḳzāde
Meḥmed Çelebi. 1297 [1880]. Ṣolaḳzāde Tārīhi. Istanbul: Maḥmūd Beg Maṭbaʿası.
Subtelny,
Maria Eva. 1986. A Taste for the Intricate: The Persian Poetry of the Late Timurid Period. ZDMG 136/1: 56–79.
Subtelny,
Maria Eva. 1988. Socioeconomic Bases of Cultural Patronage under the Later Timurids. International Journal of Middle
East Studies 20/4: 479–505. Ṭūsī, Naṣīr ad-Dīn. 1346 [1967]. Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī.
Ed. by Adīb Tihrānī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Jāvidān.
Yücel,
Bilal. 1995. Bâbür Dîvânı. Gramer-Metin-Sözlük-Tıpkıbasım. Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi.
Foot
Notes
1
For Central Asian Turkic names and quotes from Chagatay texts Eckmann’s system
of trans literation will be used. János Eckmann, Chagatay Manual
2
Ḥaydar Ḫvārizmī, “Maḫzan al-asrār” – The Treasury of Secrets. An Edition of the
Manuscript Preserved at the Oriental
Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, ed. and transl. Benedek Péri (Budapest:
Library and InformationCentre of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, 2020): 178–180.
3
The earliest known classical text is the Qutadgu bilig (‘Wisdom of Royal
Glory’), a versified mirror for princes
by Yūsuf Ḫāṣ Ḥājib, composed in 1069.
4
Mīr ʿAlī-şīr Nevāyī, Muḥākemetü’l-Luġateyn, ed. F. Sema Barutçu Özönder
(Ankara: TDK, 1996): 188.
5
Maria Eva Subtelny, “Socioeconomic Bases of Cultural Patronage under the Later
Timurids.” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 20/4 (1988): 479–505.
6
Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. Vol. 13. Majolis
un-nafois, ed. Suyima G’aniyeva
(Tashkent: Fan, 1997): 135–142, 155–165.
7
Naṣīr ad-Dīn Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, ed. Adīb Tihrānī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i
Jāvidān, 1346 [1967]): 280.
8
Pál Fodor, “The Formation of Ottoman Turkish Identity (Fourteenth to
Seventeenth Centuries).” In Identity and
Culture in Ottoman Hungary, ed. Pál Fodor and Pál Ács (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020): 24.
9
Ṣolaḳzāde Meḥmed Çelebi (d. 1657) relates how Tīmūr’s troops besieged the
fortress of Nīksār saying that “on the
order of Tīmūr the army of the brainless Turks gathered and besieged the fort of Nīksār” (… firmān-i Tīmūr ile ḫayl-i
etrāk-i bī-idrāk cemʿ edüp Nīksār ḳalʿesin muḥāṣara etdiği …; Ṣolaḳzāde Meḥmed Çelebi, Ṣolaḳzāde
Tārīhi (Istanbul: Maḥmūd Beg Maṭbaʿası, 1297
[1880]): 83). An early 16th-century poet Güvāhī includes three stories
in his didactic narrative poem,
Pend-nāme (‘The Book of Advice’) written in 1526 to illustrate the boorishness
and stupidity of Turks. Güvâhî, Pend-nâme,
ed. Mehmet Hengirmen (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı,
1983): 166–168.
10
Navoiy, Majolis un-nafois: 166–205.
11
Stephen Blake, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Bābur and the Culture of
Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and
India (1483–1530) (Leiden: Brill, 2004): 136, 466. 12 See Benedek Péri, “‘From
Istāmbōl’s throne a mighty host to Irān guided I;/Sunken deep in blood of shame I made the Golden Heads to
lie’: Yavuz Sultan Selim’s Persian poetry in the light of the Ottoman-Safavid propaganda war.”
Archivum Ottomanicum 34 (2017): 183–192.
13
Zahiru’d-dīn Muhammad Bābur Pādshāh Ghāzī, Bābur-nāma. (Memoirs of Bābur),
transl. Anette Susannah Beveridge (New
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1990): 329. 14 For more on the topic see Benedek
Péri, “Love poetry without love? Classical ottoman amorous gazels in the early 16th century.”
(forthcoming).
15
For a detailed description of late Timurid classical poetry see Maria Eva
Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate:
The Persian Poetry of the Late Timurid Period.” ZDMG 136/1 (1986): 56–60.
16
Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlar to’plami, vol. 1, Badoyi’ al-bidoya, ed. Aziz
Qayyumov (Tashkent: Fan, 1987): 255.
17
For a detailed explanation of the term mundus significans coined by Thomas M.
Greene see Thomas M. Greene, The Light
in Troy. Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven – London:
Yale University Press, 1982): 20.
18
Riccardo Zipoli, The Technique of the Ğawāb. Replies by Nawā’ī to Hāfiz and
Ğâmī (Venice: Cafoscarina: 1993):14.
19
For the concept of ‘paraphrase networks’ in classical poetry see Péri
Benedek, “« … beklerüz ». An Ottoman
Paraphrase (naẓīre) Network from the 16th Century,” in An Iridescent Device: Premodern Ottoman
Poetry, ed. Christiane Czygan and Stephan
Conermann (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2018):147–180.
20
The most famous poem of the -ā-rā paraphrase network is a ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ that
starts with the well-known couplet about
the Shirazi Turk. For details on the “-ā-rā paraphrase network” and the “beklerüz paraphrase
network” and on how paraphrase networks can
develop into ghazal sub-genres see Benedek Péri, “Yavuz Sultan Selīm and
his Imitation Strategies. The Case of
Four Ḥāfiẓ Ghazals,” Acta Orient Hung. 73/2 (2020): 239–240; Péri, “« … beklerüz »”.
21
Nūr ad-Dīn ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad Jāmī, Bahāristān wa rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed.
Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrās-i
Maktūb, 1379 [2000]): 146.
22
Bābur, Bābur-nāma: 271–272.
23
Salmān Sāvajī, Dīvān, ed. Abū al-Qāsim Ḥālat (Tehran: Nashriyāt-i Mā, 1371
[1992]): Kamāl Khujandī, Dīvān, ed. Aḥmad
Karamī (Tehran: Nashriyāt-i Mā, 1372 [1993]): 30, 31.
24
Atoiy, Dīvān, ed. Sayfiddin Sayfulloh (Tashkent: Fan, 2008): 39; Gadoiy, Devon,
ed. Erkin Ahmadxo’jaev (Tashkent: G’afur
G’ulom: 1973): 27.
25
E.g. the noun phrase zunnār u ṣalīb ‘sacred thread and cross’ appearing at the
end of the second hemistich of ʿAṭāyī’s
maṭlaʿ is also present in Salmān Sāvajī’s poem (5th couplet) and the phrase miskīn ġarīb ‘miserable
stranger’ occuring in the fourth couplet of Gadāyī is also there in Khujandī’s first ghazal.
26
E.g. sändin ayrïlïb ‘separating from you’.
27
Navāyī for example inserts the phrase zunnār u ṣalīb and the name Masīḥ
(‘Messiah’) into one of his ghazals,
which together can be interpreted as intertextual allusions to ʿAṭāyī’s model poem, and his couplet ending with the
phrase yā naṣīb might have been modelled
on Gadāyī’s third bayt.
28
Bilal Yücel, Bâbür Dîvânı. Gramer-Metin-Sözlük-Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Atatürk
Kültür Merkezi, 1995): 142–143; Yakup
Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı. İnceleme-Metin-Dizin-Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 1998): 82, 84, 85, 86.
29
Ay dirīġā kim qarïlïq vaqtïda boldum ġarīb “What a pity that I became an
outcast in my old age” Karasoy, Şiban
Han Dîvânı, 86. In one of his other ghazals Šaybānī alluded to his successful campaign for the conquest of
Transoxania and his preparations to fight
with the Safavids for Khurasan, which suggests that the poem was
composed in the early 1500s: Bidʿat
ahlïnï savurdum Māvarāʾ an-nahr ara/Ušbudur išim Ḫurāsān mulkïda ham ʿan-qarīb “I scattered the heretics in
Transoxania/The same is my job in Khurasan in the near future” Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 82.
30
For a detailed description of the topic see Benedek Péri, ““Merdane” Ghazals
And Rhetoric In 16th Century Turkish
Classical Poetry,” In Osmanlı Edebi Metinlerinde Teoriden Pratiğe Belâgat, ed. Hatice Aynur, Müjgan Çakır,
Hanife Koncu and Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul:
Klasik Yayınları, 2021): 348–381.
31
Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 86–87.
32
Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 84.
33
According to the strict rules the second syllable of ġamzasïna cannot be
counted as long. 34 Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 144–145, 145–146, 180–181.
35
Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. vol. 4, Navodir
ash-shabob, ed. Hamid Sulaymon
(Tashkent: Fan, 1989): 171.
36
See e.g. ghazals no. 31, 47, 112, 163.
37
Haidd Edgworth Butler, (ed./trans.) The Institution Oratoria of Quintilian with
an English Translation (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996): 85.
38
Yücel, Bâbür Dîvânı: 150.
39
ʿAlī Şīr Nevāyī, Fevāyidü’l-Kiber, ed. Önal Kaya (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu,
1996): 22–23. This ghazal is preserved
only in one manuscript.
40
For more on the topic see Péri, “« … beklerüz »”, especially160.
41
‘Morning’ (ṣubḥ) is semantically connected to the words ‘Sun’ (quyaš) and the
verb yaru- ‘shine’ while ‘night’ (tün)
is semantically bound to ‘darkness’ (tīrelik).