The Turkish language was the lingua franca of the substantial group of Sephardic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and Turkish immigrants who had arrived in New York before the demise of the Ottoman Empire. With these people as my teachers I acquired the Turkish language in my late teens. With my prior knowledge of the Arabic script and grammar, and some exposure to Persian, I was able to make my way through written Ottoman. After completing a Ph.D. on poetry in the related Uzbek/Chaghatay language (Columbia, 1980), I was teaching the language at Princeton University between 1981 and 1984.
I found knowledge of Ottoman poetry indispensable to my study of Ottoman music. After first researching and publishing on the popular Sufi poetry used in the ceremonies of the Halveti dervishes in Istanbul—with whom I had studied since the mid-1970s—in the course of my perusal of musical manuscripts I stumbled upon what was perhaps the most significant poetic movement in the history of Ottoman literature. I came to realize that this poetry had been directly antecedent to what I now describe as the Ottoman “musical renaissance” of the later 17th century.
In sharp contrast to the panegyric court poetry of the Ottoman “Golden Age” (15th-16th centuries), this poetry was inward-turning, mixing Sufi mysticism with worldly pessimism, in a language replete with references to current Persian poetry in India. It is now becoming clear that the incipient modernity of the Mughal civilization—which had consciously attempted to blend the Muslim and Hindu cultures of the sub-continent—was a model for the Ottoman intelligentsia of the 17th century. But since it had little support from the court, the movement was largely ignored by “official” historians of Turkish literature in the 20th century.
Soviet scholars had written more about it, since they understood that it led to “democratic” literary changes in the 18th century, but their Russian language work was almost unknown in Turkey. The actual heirs of the Ottoman civilization held this poetry in esteem, but by the later 20th century, none could be considered experts. I was therefore fortunate in having access to one of the leading scholars of Indo-Persian poetry, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in Allahabad, India. With his support I obtained an NEH grant in 1998, after organizing an international symposium on the topic of “Imitation and Interpretation” in 1996. Having published several articles and translations of this “Indian-style” Turkish poetry, I hope to integrate it further into my future book on Ottoman music.