Quatrains of Many Receptions: A Survey of Perceptions of ‘Omar Khayyām in Ottoman and Turkish Translations

Abstract

This article explores the wide range of responses to Persian polymath and poet ‘Omar Khayyām (d. ca. 526/1132) in Ottoman and Turkish literary sources. A great number of intellectuals, past and present, translated Khayyām's famed quatrains into Turkish, albeit with differing motivations regarding subject, style, message, and literary reception. Social critics like Abdullah Cevdet employed Khayyām's quatrains as a vehicle for proving that liberal and progressive mindsets were accommodated in classical Islam. On the other hand, literary scholars like Rıza Tevfik [Bölükbaşı], Ḥüseyin Dāniş, and Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı chose to focus on the intellectual origins of Khayyām's thought, as well as on his connections to Islamic philosophical traditions. In the first decades of the Turkish Republic, there was another wave of interest in Khayyām's quatrains related to prosody, message, and what his legacy and poetic disposition represented with regard to the Islamic past. Whereas poets like Yahya Kemal and Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi regarded him as a paragon of libertine lyrics and Sufi mysticism, Turkish leftist intellectuals such as Nâzım Hikmet, Sabahattin Eyuboğlu, and A. Kadir set him as a socialist or materialist humanist who was a staunch critic of religious bigotry and fanaticism.