Abstract:

The first studies on the history of Turkish literature were made in Europe and the past of these studies dates back to the seventeenth century. One of these is the work titled The History of the Art of Ottoman Poetry written by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in 1836. The work was made known to the literary community for the first time by Mehmet Fuat Köprülü in No. 113 of the Hayat Mecmuası (Life Journal) dated 24 January 1929. In this article, Köprülü mentioned that the work by Hammer-Purgstall had appeared at the second-hand booksellers and moreover, the introduction had been translated to Ottoman Turkish by someone whose name was not revealed. The original name of the work titled The History of the Art of Ottoman Poetry, which was Geschichte der Osmanischen Dichtkunst bis auf unsere Zeit, was composed of four volumes and was published between 1836 and 1838. An important attribute of the book and from the aspect of also determining the scope of this study is the fact that within the work there is a methiye (laudatory poem) written in person by Hammer-Purgstall on 6 December 1835 for Sultan Mahmut II in the historical verse genre. The text, for which prosody was written with the pattern of mefâîlün mefâîlün feûlün, was composed of twenty-six couplets in the mesnevi (poem made up of rhymed couplets, each couplet being of a different rhyme) verse form and was written both in German and in Turkish. In this study, the subject work was evaluated from the aspect of content characteristics by comparing the German and Turkish sections.                                                       

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