Some Remarks on the Prosody of Yunus Emre

Celnarová, Xénia
Slovac Academy of Sciences

35^th Meeting of the PIAC, Taipei 1992

Individual experts on Turkish poetry are divided over the character of prosody of the famous Turkish mystic poet Yunus Emre (approximately 1241–1321), which is reflected in transcribed editions of his work and its translations. One group sees his poems as four-line verses with a syllabic metre which is typical of original Turkic poetry. They are inclined to see Yunus Emre as a man of the people, a self-made talent. Those of the other view, see him as an educated man who exclusively used classical Arabic-Persian quantitative prosody.

The poems of Yunus Emre were some of the first Turkish literary works to be used in connection with Islamic literary tradition. It is necessary to approach Emre’s work not a priori, but to analyse each of his poems in detail and also pay attention to all circumstances accompanying the origin of the work in oral form and its spread in oral and hand-written forms over the course of centuries, mainly with regard to the changeable intensity of influences from both Turkish, folklore and Islamic literary tradition.