Burcu Alkan
In our book Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021), we brought together essays discussing the influence of Turkish literature on various world literatures. Studies of Nâzım Hikmet, which allowed us to consider many different issues in theory and practice, form an important part of the book. The section on the USA and Western Europe, examined by Mediha Göbenli, together with the case of Greece detailed by Kenan Sharpe, shapes the western part of the map. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, for his part, draws attention to a geographical relationship often overlooked in the field and discusses the poet’s influence on revolutionary Arabic poetry.
One of the contributors to our book, Professor Suçin is a translator who, in addition to his academic work on Arabic language and literature, has brought the poetry of figures such as Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish into Turkish. His translations of the mu‘allaqat, among the most fascinating examples of pre-Islamic (Jahiliyya) Arabic poetry, were published last year under the title Yedi Askı Şiirleri (The Seven Suspended Odes, Kırmızı Kedi, 2020). Writing that the poems of the period (the sixth century) were produced in song form and performatively, Suçin also mentions the existence of certain mechanisms (juries) that decided which of these texts was best. It is said that the name mu‘allaqa (“suspended”) comes from the best poems being hung on the wall of the Kaaba – though that is probably just a story.
The mu‘allaqat are poems written in the qasida form, made up of couplets. Those in the book range from 62 to 103 couplets, and each is quite interesting for revealing the values of the period. Of the mu‘allaqat included bilingually (Arabic and Turkish) in Yedi Askı Şiirleri, I particularly liked that of Imru’ al-Qays. Of course, the poet being something of a vagabond also influenced my preference. Suçin summarises his life as follows:
“From his youth he was known for his fondness for pleasure and hunting. Because he composed erotic poems about the girls of the tribe and led a bohemian life, he was expelled from the tribe by his father.” (33)
This expression, which Suçin applies to Imru’ al-Qays in a period when the bohemian style had not yet been invented, probably comes from the professor’s own courtesy. I would have said plainly: vagabond. I wonder what they called vagabonds in the sixth century? Anyway, having been expelled from the tribe and continued his adventurous, vagabond life, Imru’ al-Qays receives the news of his father’s death at a drinking and gambling session. He carries on with his game without any reaction, listens to the details once it is over, and says:
“The man threw me out of the house when I was young, and now, at this age, he loads the burden of his blood on my shoulders. But today we drink. No sobriety today, no drunkenness tomorrow. Today let us drink wine; tomorrow, to duty!” (33)
Imru’ al-Qays’s is one of those stories whose details and colour change from period to period but which always appears throughout history in different manifestations. But of course his life is not the only interesting thing in the book. To me, as someone looking at the field from outside, his mu‘allaqa – with its fragmented structure presenting the main themes one by one and its content, varied yet coherent – is one of the good representatives of the poetry of the period.
The persona of Imru’ al-Qays’s poem is a valiant young man weeping for a lost beloved. He longs for her skin, her scent; his friends tell him “don’t, stop it”, but in vain. The heart wants the one it loves.
Öyle çok döküldü ki gözlerimden sevdanın yaşları
Boynumdan aşağı aktı kılıcımın kını dahi ıslandı (35)
There is nothing new in weeping for a love that is gone. What may be striking, though, is that the one weeping is a valiant young man. In a way, it is even possible to trace here the feeling expressed among us by “arabesk”. Indeed, we should not overlook that the model of the tough young man who does not bat an eyelid even when suffering the pain of love is in fact a modern invention – a modern invention of masculinity. The “openness” with which love in general is treated, along with this particular love, is also surprising. The valiant lover in the poem is evidently quite a vagabond, too:
Kaç dilberin kimsenin ulaşamadığı çadırlarına ulaştım
Yumurta gibi pürüzsüz tenlerinden usulca haz aldım (39)
Our hero also recounts his meetings with his beloved in his couplets with great ease. Continuing behind the sand dunes with a lyrical eroticism of the kind that would excite orientalists, the poem nonetheless does not place love solely on the side of bodily pleasure. It seems that in sixth-century Arabic poetry, sensuality and feelings were not separated from each other.
And the poetry of the period is outspoken and authentic. The bodily state of love is expressed without hiding much behind similes, allusions and images. Nor is it so simple as to be reducible to physicality alone. The mu‘allaqat in the book stand out as the poetry of a human condition in which body and feelings are not torn apart in the grip of moralism – a condition that finds expression in the openness and clarity of nature and is part of it. In the introduction to the book, translated from Adonis, the following is said of Jahiliyya poetry, as opposed to the systematic perception of nature in Greek culture:
“In the Jahiliyya, nature is not a value; it rests on no morality and teaches nothing. On the contrary, the man of the Jahiliyya sees his terrible loneliness in nature and knows he has no friend but his valour. In the man of the Jahiliyya, nature creates the will to power, faith in his sword and in heroism.” (8)
From this point of view, it is possible to see a certain picture of primitivism in the mu‘allaqat: the culture “before civilisation corrupted it”, of the kind the moderns would later exalt. Adonis, too, speaks of the poetry of this period as a pure Bedouin poetry, far from the bad influence of urban culture (An Introduction to Arab Poetics). This purity comes from the harsh and powerful experience of existence in the desert creating its own aesthetic.
In Imru’ al-Qays’s mu‘allaqa, after love and longing, the subject moves on to another part of the hero’s life. The poem is now a eulogy to his horse, which carried him on its back in merciless times and witnessed his hunting and his battles. His is a magnificent steed:
İnce zayıf olsa da dolup taşar içindeki coşku
Gürledi mi fokurdar sanki sular kazanlarda (45)
The aesthetic with which he speaks of his horse’s legs and tail appeals to the senses to a degree that could be called erotic. The hunting scenes that follow evolve as a continuation of the same sensuality. In truth, the mu‘allaqat can be said to be very “masculine” poems, but on the other hand we see that they are built on an aesthetic of sensory sensibility different from today’s:
Tek hamlede bir damla ter bile dökmeden
Biri erkek biri dişi iki antilop yakaladı. (47)
For Adonis, the feeling of horsemanship is the liberating form of the struggle of life in the desert. In Jahiliyya poetry, courage, action and movement are directly related to the perception of freedom and selfhood. As is clearly seen in Imru’ al-Qays’s mu‘allaqa, the question of existence for the period is built not on contemplation but on tangible, concrete realities. With its many aspects far removed from today’s sensibilities, the world constructed by the mu‘allaqat may be foreign to us. But it is inescapable that when the physicality of the world, the bodiliness of the human being and the sensuality of love come together, they create, in all their rawness, an original perception of selfhood, freedom and existence. As Adonis says, Jahiliyya poetry is a poetry of testimony. Both the poet and the persona speak with their own reality and do not try to change it. They observe it, struggle with it, sometimes win and sometimes lose. After love, the horse and the hunt, Imru’ al-Qays’s mu‘allaqa ends thus:
Şimşeğin çakışına bak ey dostum, taç gibi yuvarlak
Şu bulut kümesinde parlayan iki elin çırpması gibi
[…]
Sabahleyin geniş vadinin hüthüt toygarları
Sabah şarabı içmişlerdi sanki halis baharatlı
Ada soğanının çamura bulanmış köklerini andırıyordu
O gece vadinin selinde boğulmuş dağ hayvanları (49–51)
Clearly, the mu‘allaqat are poems of an aesthetic that expresses, on the same calibre, a harsh and uncompromising nature – with its desert and its floods – and a human condition in harmony with it.
Source: SanatKritik, 15 June 2021. Translated from the Turkish for this site.