This is the first in a series of articles I plan to write about translation of Ottoman poetry into English. They will serve as an introduction to reading the poetry and offer fruits of research new to scholarship. All writing is rooted in a certain metaphysics, and as with the oldest literary languages—Chinese, Sanskrit, and Greek—verse was for centuries the major site for philosophy in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. While the reimagining of a text in a new cultural setting has often been the norm for translation of literature, I argue that to face the challenge of a text’s metaphysics is primary and requires a mode of textual analysis that is cognizant of the historical context. I explain what I call “long meaning,” and review how categories that emerged from the European Enlightenment contributed to the loss of this way of thinking. I give the example of a mistake I made in translating a work of
mesnevi verse, and further explain my approach to translation through the example of a gazel lyric.
References
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———. “The Separation of Goodness and Beauty: Plato, Galip, Lacan.” In Challenging Conventions: Love in Early Modern Ottoman Poetry, edited by Christiane Czygan and Hatice Aynur. De Gruyter, 2025.
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