Imagining the Ottoman Classics: Politics of Muslim Libertine Lyrics

The earliest modern biographical account of Khayyām appeared in an encyclopedia in Turkish, Ḳāmūsü’l-a‘lām, prepared by the celebrated Ottoman Albanian philologist and lexicographer Şemseddīn Sāmī (1850–1904). He described Khayyām as a scholar of the rational sciences, a philosopher, and a Sufi.Footnote ¹⁰ Apart from this entry, Khayyām was not included in any other significant late nineteenth-century Ottoman histories of Persian/Islamicate literature.Footnote ¹¹ This fact led Islamist-nationalist authors Necip Fazıl Kısakürek and Cemil Meriç to regard Khayyām as a figure who won plaudits from the so-called late Ottoman “imitator-intellectuals” under the influence of Western Orientalists, including the case of Abdullah Cevdet (1869–1932).Footnote ¹² The designation implies a reductionist assertion that overlooks the efforts of early translators who committed their work to rigorous source criticism, such as Ḥüseyin Dāniş (1870–1943), Rıza Tevfik, and Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı (1900–82).

One of the earliest books of Turkish translations (tercüme) of Khayyām was by Mu‘allim Feyżī Efendi (1842–1910), an instructor at the prestigious imperial high school Mekteb-i Sulṭānī (today the Galatasaray Lisesi).Footnote ¹³ Encouraged by poet-critic Mu‘allim Nācī (1849–93), Feyżī decided to translate Khayyām due to the international attention that the poet gathered after FitzGerald's renderings.Footnote ¹⁴ Feyżī's prose translations were initially serialized in littérateur Aḥmed Midḥat's newspaper Tercümān-ı Ḥaḳīḳat in 1303/1885–86 along with Khayyām's original quatrains in Persian. According to the note of appreciation (taḳrīz) penned by Nācī, the selection focused in particular on Khayyām's acute observations on the human condition.Footnote ¹⁵

Another early selection was prepared by Müstecābīzāde ‘İsmet Bey (1868–1917), a scribe of the Sultan ‘Abdülḥamīd II (r. 1876–1909), who was sent into exile on the island of Midilli (Lesbos), having been accused of maintaining close ties with the Young Turks.Footnote ¹⁶ With the intention of serializing his prose translations in his short-lived literary journal Ḫıyābān, ‘İsmet Bey mailed his translations and glosses to his close friends, including the calligrapher Su‘ūdü’l-Mevlevī (1882–1923), who transcribed the work for preservation.Footnote ¹⁷ This unpublished manuscript contains 170 quatrains. There are two extant copies in Turkish manuscript libraries, MS Balıkesir and MS Millet Library Ali Emîrî 221. ‘İsmet Bey also incorporated his own poems in his long explanatory notes after each verse.Footnote ¹⁸ Besides this copy, there also exists a previously unstudied manuscript in the personal archive of Professor Mustafa Çiçekler, which includes 142 translations by Niğdeli Hakkı Eroğlu.Footnote ¹⁹

A leading Turkish freethinker, publicist, and physicist, Abdullah Cevdet, who is also noted as the first translator of Shakespeare's tragedies into Turkish as well for his political opposition during the reign of ‘Abdülḥamīd II, published two editions of prose translations of Khayyām in Turkish. The first, published in 1914, went out of print after a few years, and the second edition was published in 1926 (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).

Figure 1.

‘Abdullāh Cevdet, Rubā‘iyyāt-ı Ḫayyām ve Türkçe'ye Tercümeleri, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Maṭba‘a-ı Şirket-i Mürettibiye, 1926).

Figure 2.

“Ah! Ṭoprağa münḳalib olmadan evvel, ḥayāttan ne ḳadar çoḳ istifāde itmek mümkünse o ḳadar çoḳ istifāde idelim” (Before transforming into soil, we shall enjoy life as much as we can). ‘Abdullāh Cevdet, Rubā‘iyyāt-ı Ḫayyām ve Türkçe'ye Tercümeleri, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Maṭba‘a-ı Şirket-i Mürettibiye, 1926), 207. The drawing is taken from Herbert Cole's illustrations of Edward FitzGerald's English rendition.

A complex figure in Turkish political and cultural history, Abdullah Cevdet was disillusioned with religious reasoning and saw orthodox Islam as a hindrance to social progress. Rather than rejecting the category of religion altogether, he utilized arguments from Islamic history and literature to advocate modernization and Westernization in Ottoman politics.Footnote ²⁰ He had taken an anticlerical stance and promoted works challenging the official Islamic historiography, most prominently the nineteenth-century Dutch Orientalist Reinhart Dozy (1820–83) and his highly controversial book in its French translation by Victor Chauvin, Essai sur l'histoire de l'Islamisme (1879). The work attempted to give an alternative (but reductionist) narrative of Islam through the social conventions of early Arabia. Cevdet's annotated translation Tārīḫ-i İslāmiyyet created a huge uproar in the Ottoman world, a case, as Murat Belge suggests, arguably comparable to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.Footnote ²¹ Many scholars penned refutations against the positivist method of the work, especially its theses concerning the unsoundness of the ḥadīth and the Prophet Muhammad's alleged epilepsy.Footnote ²² In the section “Islam in the West,” which references Abū’l-ʿAlāʾ Maʿarrī (d. 1057), a poet-philosopher who was deemed irreligious by certain other scholars, Cevdet included a footnote comparing him to Khayyām based on the scholar Georges Salmon's Un précurseur d'Omar Khayyam (Paris, 1904).Footnote ²³

The “classics debate” of 1897 initiated by Aḥmed Midḥat's urgent call for the translation of European classics was the main impetus for the Ottoman interest in translation studies.Footnote ²⁴ This debate led the late nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectuals to believe that the West could be best approached by perceiving the significance of works that had assumed classical status.Footnote ²⁵ In a paper presented at the Paris International Congress for Social Education, Cevdet argued that translating the great works of the Western canon, such as the tragedies of Shakespeare, was a way to elevate the cultural level of the Turks, putting them into contact with other civilizations for further intellectual advancement.Footnote ²⁶ Later in life, Cevdet produced some significant literary translations from a wide range of poets and writers from East to West, including, as mentioned above, the first translations of Shakespeare into Turkish, but mostly from French. His only direct translation from English, Antony and Cleopatra, included a subtle political commentary.Footnote ²⁷ Cevdet's Khayyām translations can be seen as in the service of creating a “nativist” canon, which demonstrated that certain sensibilities in European classics also existed in the Perso-Ottoman world.

Cevdet's first edition of his Khayyām translations in 1914 included a brief introduction with notes on Khayyām's life and early translations in the West, highlighting the role of Austrian historian Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) in making the poet known in the West with the epithet “Voltaire of the East.”Footnote ²⁸ For Cevdet, Khayyām was neither a denier of God nor a dissolute libertine. On the contrary, he upheld certain moral virtues, including a belief in God's unicity. Khayyām also should not be perceived as a libertine rogue, since otherwise later American utilitarian pragmatists would not have praised the poet for manifesting a virtuous and contemplative nature.Footnote ²⁹ For Cevdet, Khayyām was not a dipsomaniac either, but a dilmest (or dil-i āteşnāk), a particular Sufi designation that employed the intoxication of wine as an analogy for attaining “divine, rejuvenating growth and awakening” (‘ulvī ve müteceddid bir neş’et ve tenebbüh).Footnote ³⁰ Khayyām's drunkenness was therefore an outcome of his contemplative attainments.

Cevdet's extended second edition included prose translations of 575 quatrains based on the 1867 French edition of Jean Baptiste Nicolas (1814–75), the chief interpreter at the French legation in Tehran, along with a long preface that evaluated Khayyām's life and works, with cross-references to a wide range of poets:Footnote ³¹ Persian and Turkish poets such as figures ʿUrfī of Shiraz, Nedīm, and Qāʾānī, as well as the Roman epicurean poet Lucretius, various European Romantic poets, along with the French botanist writer Jean-Henri Fabre and the Chilean lyrical poet Gabriela Mistral. The second edition opens with a congratulatory note in Persian sent by the editor of the Khāvar newspaper along with an additional telegraph from the Persian embassy in French signed by Eḥtishām-al-Salṭana Mīrzā Maḥmūd Khān Qājār Davalū (d. 1354/1935), the ambassador to Turkey during World War I.Footnote ³² The latter's note praises Cevdet's efforts in presenting Khayyām to the Turkish audience in a fresh and rejuvenating voice, loyal to the poet's philosophical and literary premises.Footnote ³³

Cevdet's second edition classifies Khayyām's poetry according to its content and meaning, including a long introductory note that critiques previous translations in European languages. For Cevdet, Nicolas’ translations were not sufficiently precise in meaning and, similarly, Edward FitzGerald (1809–83) was not faithful to the original. One of the highlights of Cevdet's foreword discussed the problem of “quatrains with contradictory meanings” (naḳīż rubāʿiler) in Khayyām, which had been an obstacle to deducing a coherent worldview from his poetry. Cevdet found this a faulty criterion for evaluating his work, since every poet could convey mixed emotions, contradicting at times ideas expressed in certain other poems.Footnote ³⁴ Cevdet construed Khayyām as a freethinker who went against religious fanaticism and bigotry, an essentializing form of religion, which, for him, was foisted on the Persians by the Arab sword. Khayyām's voice, in this sense, should be taken as a reaction against the procrustean bed of Arab-centered Islam and Sunnī orthodoxy.Footnote ³⁵

Another lengthy section in Cevdet's foreword concerns the perceptions of Khayyām's oeuvre by previous translators. For Cevdet, Ḥüseyin Dāniş regarded the poet as a naturalist philosopher, whereas Charles Grolleau (1867–1940), who translated 158 quatrains of the poet into French, deemed him to be a thorough pessimist in the tradition of Hamlet.Footnote ³⁶ Cevdet, on the other hand, noted that Khayyām was a materialist freethinker who did not fall into the trap of European Vulgarmaterialismus, which crudely explained every physical phenomenon through positivist-materialistic means. Instead, he was a materialist with spiritual leanings, who was ready to embrace the unknown with a sense of nihilistic fatalism, a sensibility that had also influenced a line of French Romanticist, Decadent, and Symbolist poets. For Cevdet, Khayyām should not be reduced to a mere pantheist in belief either. Instead, he should be regarded as a deist with a firm faith in the one true God. With the aim of modernizing Islam (mu‘āṣırlaşmaḳ), he tried to promote a liberal and progressive form of religion to address the conditions contributing to the decline in the Islamic world—a project that also fostered his interest in doctrines in certain offshoot Islamic contexts, including Bahai pacifism.Footnote ³⁷ In 1922, Cevdet's advocacy of more recent communities such as the Bahai's led him to become the last person to be imprisoned for blasphemy in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ³⁸

As ideologues of the Young Turk Revolution, Cevdet and his milieu had an early interest in the German Vulgarmaterialismus, especially in the works of philosopher-physician Ludwig Büchner (1824–99), who had resorted to materialist, scientific, and Darwinian principles to explain physical phenomena, denying the binary opposition between mind and matter.Footnote ³⁹ His books provided him with the gateway to reconcile the spiritual through the expression and study of the material—justifying materialist biology with Islamic religious principles deduced from the Qur'an or the ḥadīth.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a response to the critics who had labeled him a “radical vulgar materialist,” Cevdet might have included the above-mentioned section about Khayyām's religiosity to assert that his own perception of materialism did not ignore spiritual sensibilities either. Khayyām's life was a proof that Islam could also accommodate various aspects of a progressive and secular lifestyle, a scientific and liberal outlook that would not necessarily go against religion. In fact, Cevdet was neither a denier of Islam nor of religion per se, but an intellectual who argued that there was no single prescribed sense of Islam limited to strict orthodoxy and orthopraxy.Footnote ⁴¹ His sense of materialism did not make him fall into sheer positivism but opened some leeway to the unknowable. That is, Cevdet endorsed materialism in Islamic terms by using figures like Khayyām as a vehicle for proving that there existed other forms of Muslim lifestyle and aesthetics—arguably on par with those expressed in the French libertine lyrical tradition.Footnote ⁴²

Khayyām's influence went far beyond pedantic concerns or religious history. For Cevdet, he could even be considered a forerunner of certain European poets who, in a parallel universe, penned poems inspired by him (Ḫayyām'dan mülhem); such poets included figures ranging from Pierre de Ronsard to the Symbolists Théophile Gautier and Jean Lahor (Henri Cazalis), and the Parnassian Leconte de Lisle.Footnote ⁴³ In the words of Cevdet, these poets covered similar themes, oscillating between carpe diem and nihilist fatalism, as evidenced in his Khayyām-inspired verses “Homme! Ou Yavroum Dinle!” in Fièvre d'Ame, a poem that was devoted to the “pessimist-naturalist” Jean Lahor. This poem has some thematic parallels with Khayyām's thought, as in the line “Oui, pense, transforme, et sans être ruineux” (Yes, think, transform, and without being ruinous), as well as the American translator Nathan Haskell Dole's views on Khayyām's poetry.Footnote ⁴⁴

In Search of Khayyām's Historicity: Early Efforts in Designating the Poet's Authentic Vision

Another significant publication was a joint effort by a Turco-Persian poet, scholar and diplomat, Ḥüseyin Dāniş, and Ottoman philosopher and statesman, Rıza Tevfik, in 1340/1922, both of whom were known for their close contact with the Cambridge Orientalist Edward G. Browne (1862–1926).Footnote ⁴⁵ In particular, Dāniş was one of the main sources of motivation and impetus behind the completion of certain works by both scholars, especially Browne's voluminous A Literary History of Persia.Footnote ⁴⁶ In his informative and detailed foreword, Dāniş, who also worked as a Persian instructor at Galatasaray, having replaced Khayyām's earlier translator Mu‘allim Feyżī, aimed to contextualize Khayyām's life through personal anecdotes, authentic quatrains, and extant passages from various Muslim historians and poets, along with long passages describing his reception and influence in the West. He based his prose translation on MS Ouseley 140 at Oxford's Bodleian Library, and divided the poet's poems into common themes and designations, labeling their content as agnostic, skeptic, pessimist, fatalist, etc. Dāniş's previous publication on the history of Persian poetry had drawn criticism from the Turkish historian and statesman Fuad Köprülü (1890–1966), who penned essays problematizing Dāniş's lack of breadth in selection and “Iran-centered,” proto-nationalist canonization, which, for him, contained neither substantial source criticism nor textual basis.Footnote ⁴⁷ Dāniş's scholarly rigor in source criticism and classification in his later Khayyām volume could be perceived as a response to Köprülü's earlier criticism that his assessments were like those present in the tezkīre (dictionaries of poets) tradition, being subjective, arbitrary, and lacking historicity and rigorous methodology.Footnote ⁴⁸

Before this joint effort, Dāniş also published one of the earliest studies of Khayyām's life and works in his Serāmedān-ı süḫan, an Ottoman Turkish course textbook prepared for the departments of literature and theology at Dārülfünūn (today's Istanbul University), and the literature branch of Dārülmu‘allimīn, the vocational school for high school teachers.Footnote ⁴⁹ The book includes contextual information and analyses about the lives and works of sixteen Persian poets, employing recent scholarly works by European Orientalists, as well as close readings by the author himself (It is highly probable that this study could have shaped and inspired Rıza Tevfik's later interpretations regarding Khayyām's thought). Dāniş described Khayyām as a Graeco-Arabic philosopher (ḥakīm) from the East in line with the thoughts of Ibn Sīnā/Avicenna (d. 1037), as well as a freethinker who developed a unique perspective on life.Footnote ⁵⁰ Dāniş did not follow Cevdet's later anachronisms of equating the poet with various other non-Muslim thinkers of the past, such as Lucretius. Instead, he asserted that the poet was neither a materialist nor someone who believed in the transmutation of souls (metempsychosis), but an Arabic philosopher with a strict code of morality and a belief in the Necessarily Existent (al-wājib) that did not clash with the basic Sunnī tenets taught at the Seljūq madrasas during Khayyām's lifetime.Footnote ⁵¹ For Dāniş, Khayyām probably never drank wine, therefore the wine imagery could be interpreted as a metaphor for the freedom of expression and conscience (ḥürriyet-i fikr ve vicdān), the firsthand knowledge of divine love (zevḳ-i ‘aşḳ-ı rabbānī), and an inclination toward carnal desires and animal instincts (meyl-i şehvānī ve ṣafā-ı ḥiss-i ḥayvānī).Footnote ⁵²

Dāniş's revised second edition was a solo effort published in 1346/1927 without Tevfik's participation. Dedicated to the memory of E. G. Browne, the book opens with an epigraphic poem in Turkish by the translator with the title ^“‘Ömer Ḫayyām,” which seeks an answer to the question of what message can be deduced from Khayyām today. The translations from Khayyām's original Persian were a pressing need for Dāniş because Cevdet had not only based his translations on Nicolas's random selection in French, but he had also distorted certain nuances of meaning.Footnote ⁵³ Dāniş took a different approach, making certain changes in the foreword and translations, as well as amending the main thrust of Tevfik's section on Khayyām's philosophy—albeit arguably incorporating some of Tevfik's references and points as his own.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet there were some radical differences between the approaches of the two authors. Tevfik was often unmethodical and inattentive in his scholarly pursuits due to his political ambitions, which prompted both Browne and Dāniş to frequently amend his research.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rıza Tevfik argued that the intellectual sources of Khayyām could be traced to Neoplatonism and Sufi thought and compared to the philosophical ideas of Persian Illuminationism as well as to European thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza and poets like John Milton.Footnote ⁵⁶ Dāniş, on the other hand, did not assign the poet to any particular school of thought, and argued, instead, for his uniqueness and originality by showing that, strictly speaking, his ideas could not be reconciled with the premises of Islamic mystical or rational philosophy.

In the initial joint edition, Rıza Tevfik appears to regard Khayyām primarily as a thinker, and never as a Sufi per se.Footnote ⁵⁷ For Tevfik, he was a metaphysician who in his poems covered problematic philosophical subjects, such as absolute existence, the reality of things, the nature of souls, as well as generation and corruption.Footnote ⁵⁸ Contrary to Dāniş’ claim that wine was part of Sufi discourse, Tevfik saw it as nothing other than everyday wine, not as a metaphor.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his analysis, Tevfik aimed to assert the universality of Khayyām's thought as a precursor to the great intellectuals of modern European thought, and long passages in Dāniş's second edition, discrediting these labels, seem to be an implied criticism of Tevfik's (and Cevdet's) abundant anachronistic references.Footnote ⁶⁰

In his introduction to the second edition, Dāniş noted that the discovery of Khayyām as a poet coincided with the rise of philological rigor and analysis in nineteenth-century scholarship, thanks to European Orientalists.Footnote ⁶¹ According to Dāniş, due to the various aspects of Khayyām's thoughts, such as freethinking, materialism, nihilism, and the audacity of his libertine moral righteousness, many Western critics (along with Cevdet) made certain analogies between Khayyām and past philosophers like Epicurus, Abu'l-ʿAlāʾ Maʿarri, and Voltaire, as well as poets including Lucretius, Goethe, and Heine, along with Shakespeare's Hamlet, concluding that these comparisons were simply reductive labels.Footnote ⁶² Dāniş linked Khayyām's thought to the Avicennan school, emphasizing that scholars like Ibn Sīnā and Fakhr-al-Dīn Rāzī also crafted agnostic poems around the same time, but he later ruled out the possibility of this philosophical lineage after acknowledging Khayyām's fierce rejection of immaterial souls, as well as the transmigration of life.Footnote ⁶³

For Dāniş, Khayyām's message was concerned with the obscurity of death, as well as the preciousness of life, as a way of reaching truth and dispelling unhappiness. If one needed to designate a name, Dāniş suggested that it would more likely be oscillating between fatalist materialism and the Sufi allegory.Footnote ⁶⁴ Also, for him, Khayyām probably never consumed wine but merely used this imagery through the prism of Sufi metaphors (arguably similar to Nicolas's thesis), a perennial inspiration for lyrical poetry from Dionysus and Zoroaster to Ḥāfiẓ.Footnote ⁶⁵ Dāniş's collected verse Ḳārvān-ı ‘Ömr included two poems that summarized Khayyām's disposition in life along with translated lines from his original poems, as well as a quatrain titled “‘Ömer Ḫayyām ve Şeykspir,” comparing Khayyām's thought to Shakespeare's conception of the “inevitability of death.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Dāniş set Khayyām as a pessimist freethinker who emphasized the overwhelming quality of the universe, human mortality, and the futility of life, also boasting his exactitude in collecting words of wisdom like a pearl-diver.Footnote ⁶⁷ In his comparison to Shakespeare, Dāniş makes a direct allusion to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. Holding a skull in his hands, Dāniş (or Khayyām) addresses it directly, asserting that intelligence only exists on borrowed time, so one should rather fill one's cranial cavity with wine before being drenched in soil.Footnote ⁶⁸

Rıza Tevfik published a solo edition of his Khayyām translations in 1945, with a dedication to his son Saîd, as well as to the memory of Dāniş, who had passed away a year earlier. In a note to his readers, Tevfik wrote that it took him only forty days to complete his introduction, whereas he worked for ten months straight on the edition itself to select the genuine quatrains of the poet. He needed to identify the authentic Khayyām so that he would be able to comment on the general features of his philosophy. In addition to his utilization of the study by Arab scholar Aḥmad Ḥāmad al-Ṣarrāf in 1931, Tevfik also introduced a newly discovered work in his chapter on Khayyām's source critique, a compilation of 393 quatrains housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris that had been studied and edited by Hungarian scholar Barthélemy Csillik.Footnote ⁶⁹

Tevfik's interest in Khayyām went back to his early years of teaching, yet his earlier analyses lacked details about the poet's life or social circle. It was through Dāniş that he received a more contextual outlook, which brought him a new perspective over the years. Having quoted the designation of Khayyām by the Sufi Najm-al-Dīn Rāzī (d. 573/1177) in his Mirṣād al-‘ibād min al-mabda‘ ilā’l-ma‘ād as a “naturalist materialist” (tabī‘iyūndan dehrī), Tevfik came to the conclusion that the poet's work reflected a synthetic array of thoughts from Islamic philosophy (ḥikmet), Illuminationism (İşrāḳiyye), and Sufism (taṣavvuf)—a view problematically conflating all three schools into interchangeable categories—to various other schools, such as nihilism, agnosticism, determinism, spiritual pantheism, and naturalism, along with Schopenhauer's pessimism and a weaker form of materialism fused with Epicureanism.Footnote ⁷⁰ These designations can be deemed problematic in terms of historicity since they refrain from assigning specificities to Khayyām's thought. As a conclusion, Tevfik underlined that the poet was neither a Sufi nor an ascetic, and that he was not a true believer either, but a Hedonist philosopher with a sense of panthéisme spiritualiste.Footnote ⁷¹

In another work, Tevfik wrote about the crossovers between Khayyām and French Symbolist poets, arguing that the poet should be regarded as a Symbolist par excellence since his verse did not fall into the trap of meaninglessness and strangeness (ma‘nāsızlıḳ ve garābet), two defective aspects that the French critic Max Nordau (1849–1923) claimed to have invaded French Symbolism.Footnote ⁷² It should be further added that a poem that Tevfik wrote during exile in Amman, Jordan, “Issız İllerde” (also translated into Arabic as “Mudun ṣāmeta”), might have been influenced by Khayyām, with regard to content and disposition toward life.Footnote ⁷³

Another translation that did not see Khayyām as a mere poet but as a philosopher-mystic was the Mevlevī author Muṣṭafā Rüşdī's “Ravżatü’l-‘uşşāḳ ve nüzhetü’l-müştāḳ” (MS Atatürk Kitaplığı 530/1), a miscellany with six parts that includes 101 prose translations of Khayyām's quatrains along with accompanying anecdotes, commentaries, and translations by the author, as well as select works attributed to Rūmī and Shams-i Tabrīzī. Rüşdī wrote that the lack of interest in Khayyām was mostly motivated by bigotry and fanaticism (ta‘aṣṣub), and that Khayyām never attacked ritual worship and fasting but criticized the religious hypocrisy of those who covered their real intention behind a display of piety.Footnote ⁷⁴ Since the section on Khayyām refers to the early books of Cevdet and Dāniş-Tevfik, the manuscript should be dated after 1927. Muṣṭafā Rüşdī was a practicing Mevlevī who set Khayyām's poems in a Persianate background based on his readings and spiritual experiences as someone who engaged in the Persianate or Persian-speaking literary canon (Fārsī ile mütevaggıl olanlar).Footnote ⁷⁵ In his case, Persian would be regarded as more than a linguistic medium, but a shorthand for a mystical-philosophical field, which acquired a nonlegalistic symbolic meaning.Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet Rüşdī had another vision: he argued that, unlike in the case of ‘Aşḳnāme, a work that he attributed to Rūmī, one should not look for Sufism in Khayyām's quatrains, because they were rather literary and philosophical from head to toe.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the vignettes dispersed among his Khayyām translations, it could be observed that Rüşdī closely associated Khayyām with ḥikma in its more general sense, that is, “philosophical wisdom,” instead of referencing Aristotelian-Avicennan philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁸

Configuring the Prosody: Linguistic Nationalism and the Rubaiyat in the Early Republic

Starting in the 1920s, there was a new wave of Khayyām translations by writers who, in place of prose renderings, chose to use meter—whether the classical Arabic prosody (ʿarūż) or the more popular Turkish syllabic verse (hece ölçüsü)—in their translations and renderings. In this context, the translation efforts during the early republic seem to be more concerned about finding a true national prosody to translate the works of Muslim poets, rather than assigning forefathers to his thought.

Poet, journalist, and humorist Hüseyin Rifat (1878–1954) was the first figure to translate Khayyām in verse based on the ʿarūż.Footnote ⁷⁹ The work includes 158 translations along with appreciatory notes written by Dāniş and Cevdet, although the latter found Rifat's choice of the ʿarūż unsuitable for the authentic voice of the quatrains.Footnote ⁸⁰ As for the method employed, having ignored the first two lines of the quatrain, Rifat first set the last line into the ʿarūż, then recreated the previous parts based on the meter he chose for the last line.Footnote ⁸¹ As a reply to the criticism that he did not retain the traditional quatrain conventions but simply created his own, Rifat defended his choice with an allegory, noting “a beauty was always a beauty no matter where, and whether her eyes were green or blue made no difference,” thereby suggesting that the corresponding form should not be considered the overriding criterion for the quality of a translation.Footnote ⁸²

Setting Khayyam into the ʿarūż when translating him into Turkish was indeed a hard task. In a frequently cited anecdote, Rıza Tevfik expressed his admiration for the translations of poet-satirist Hamâmîzâde Mehmed İhsan (1885–1948) into Turkish based on Khayyām's original prosody.Footnote ⁸³ More than 336 translations by İhsan were published posthumously by his son Orhan, along with the masterful calligraphy by Kemal Batanay,Footnote ⁸⁴ an apprentice of the Ottoman ta‘līq master Hulusi Efendi (Fig. 3). The preface by professor of Persian literature Ali Nihad Tarhan praises İhsān's selection as being more encompassing and diverse than previous works, including those of Dāniş and Tevfik.Footnote ⁸⁵

Figure 3.

Kemal Batanay's Ottoman ta‘līq and Hamâmîzâde's translation (right). “Amad saḥarī nidā za mayḫāna-yi mā (At dawn came a calling from our tavern),” in Hamâmîzâde İhsan, Ömer Hayyam Rubaîleri (Istanbul: Altın Kitaplar, 1966), 12.

Another early translation in verse was by the mufti of Kırklareli, Mehmed Bahâeddin (1870–1941). His Ḫurde-i Eş‘ār (1927) included thirty-one quatrains in verse translated originally from Persian. The translations were primarily inspired by Khayyām, so they were not verbatim but selected at random, rendered by meaning, and rephrased in verse (gelişigüzel, me'alen ve nazmen), with only six being translated corresponding to the original meter. Bahâeddin avoided literalism, but placed a specific emphasis on the meaning.Footnote ⁸⁶ The majority of the quatrains in the selection focus on the love of life and wine as central themes.Footnote ⁸⁷

A Turkish poet, bureaucrat, and translator, Feyzullah Sacit Ülkü (1892–1970), who is remembered for his nationalist approach to poetry, reflected in his choice of purely Turkish vocabulary and themes, published the first volume of Khayyām translations in verse based on the syllabic verse (hece ölçüsü), which he claimed to be “Turkey's national prosody.” In his youth, Sacit composed poetry under the influence of the ideologue Ziya Gökalp's attempt at creating a “Nationalist Literature” (Millī Edebiyāt) and “New Language” (Yeñi Lisān) in the journal Genç Ḳalemler (1909–12). Later on, he supported the early republican policies of linguistic purity, which promoted “nationalization” (millîleşme) in literature, as well as the syllabic verse over the Arabic prosody. And it may not have been pure coincidence that Sacit's Khayyām translations came out in 1929 in Latin script immediately after the Turkish language reform. Around the time of Sacit's fixation with the “national meter,” there was an early republic trend in translating Khayyām with a purist Turkish (öz Türkçe) reflex, as in the cases of Aḥmed Rif‘at, İsḥāḳ Refet, Ahmet Hayyat, and Necmi Tarkan.Footnote ⁸⁸ This tendency was in line with the policies of Turkish language purification and nationalism of the 1930s, which were also effective in later decades. Translating quatrains in syllabic meter is still popular today, 7 + 7 being the most common form.Footnote ⁸⁹

Sacit's volume includes 591 quatrains in syllabic meter and 101 in Khayyām's original ^ʿaruż prosody, along with the Persian text. Sacit reduced the poet's philosophy to sheer nothingness (nihil, Lat.) having claimed that the poet equated the ultimate truth with philosophical nihilism.Footnote ⁹⁰ Following Cevdet's designation of “drunk with the love of God,” that is, dilmestî, Sacit further defined this term based on Rūmī's definition as a way of creating a “divine wine language of infinity and beauty” (nihayetsizliğin ve güzelliğin lâhutî şarabı).Footnote ⁹¹ In his long preface, Sacit included a section that critiqued past translators, arguing that Dāniş's highly Perso-Arabized prose was antiquated and Cevdet (along with FitzGerald) did not retain the original composition and thematic unity.Footnote ⁹² As a response to these attempts, he took a more literalist approach (kelime kelime tercüme) by introducing Turkish vocabulary with a rhythm based on the spoken language.Footnote ⁹³

A Philosopher or a Mystic? Contextualizing the Historic Khayyam

One of the earliest attempts at establishing the historical Khayyām was through the editions prepared by Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı (1900–82), a scholar of Oriental literatures and Sufism at Istanbul University, who published the first scholarly Khayyām studies in Turkish based on extant manuscripts. In 1953, Gölpınarlı printed a bilingual selection of 481 quatrains in prose translation and a philosophical treatise attributed to Khayyām called Silsila al-tartīb, on the knowledge of the universals (kulliyāt), as well as Ibn Sīnā's treatise on the metaphysics of God, the Tamjīd, along with Khayyām's commentary.

Gölpınarlı's introduction includes historical accounts of Khayyām along with a detailed list of early extant works containing his verse. Besides Ẓahīrī Samarqandī's compilation Sinbād-nāma from the year 566/1060–61, Gölpınarlı based his edition on an anthology of Khayyām's quatrains compiled by Yār-Aḥmad al-Tabrīzī's Ṭarab-ḫāne found in an anthology (majmūʿa) in the Istanbul University Library (see Farsça Yazmalar MS 593, dated around 895/1489–90).Footnote ⁹⁴ Dāniş was the first scholar to introduce this compilation in his solo edition (1346/1927), yet neither describing the content nor noting the manuscript's history. This lack of detail led Gölpınarlı to conclude that the copy was probably defective.Footnote ⁹⁵

The miscellany (majmuʿa, MS 593) contains treatises on Sufi doctrine and etiquette composed by different poets including Nāṣir-i Khusraw, Rūmī, and Fakhr-al-Dīn al-Irāqī, along with a selection of quatrains attributed to Afżal-al-Dīn al-Kāshānī, and Khayyām.Footnote ⁹⁶ By identifying that certain quatrains belonged to other historical figures, such as Afżāl-al-Dīn al-Kāshānī and ‘Ubayd-i Zākānī, Gölpınarlı aimed to identify the authentic quatrains through academic source criticism.Footnote ⁹⁷ One of the main intentions of Gölpınarlı's edition was to reconstruct an accurate profile of Khayyām from extant biographical and literary sources. Gölpınarlı portrayed him as a prototype of a Muslim philosopher (ḥakīm) akin to the image of Ibn Sīnā, depicting him as a premier scholar of felsefe (philosophy, mainly in Arabic), ḥikmet (postclassical Avicennan philosophy), and heyʾe (theoretical astronomy). Yet, on the other hand, for Gölpınarlı, Khayyām also wrote poetry, having acknowledged certain beliefs derived from experiential/gnostic knowledge (‘irfānī imān) that had reflections in Sufi expressivity of gnomic paradoxes (şaṭḥiyāt), and the blame-seeking disposition of Qalandarī dervishes (melāmet).Footnote ⁹⁸ This did not, however, imply that Khayyām was a genuine Sufi, rather, he was an intellectual who achieved a sense of synthesis between Sufism and philosophy, sometimes ending up betwixt and between.Footnote ⁹⁹ As an analogy, Gölpınarlı cites the works of Ömer Ferid Kam (1864–1944), a professor of Persian literature at the Dārülfünūn, saying that, similar to Khayyām's ups and downs, Kam found himself changing sides between Sufis and philosophers on a daily basis, not being able to decide which side had the most sound argument.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The second edition of this bilingual volume appeared in 1973. It included prose translations of 348 quatrains along with a commentary, but without the appendices of metaphysical treatises. However, Gölpınarlı's introduction linked Khayyām's verse more closely to classical Sufi works by associating him with the disposition of blameworthiness and the genre of shaṭḥiyāt, a point which was further developed in this new edition. Gölpınarlı's introduction also includes a specific section dispelling doubts on Khayyām's so-called “anti-religiosity” and “apostasy,” followed by translations divided into creative thematic titles that probed the gist of Khayyām's outlook.

During the same years of Gölpınarlı's efforts, poet Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi (1907–58), who is remembered for his lyrics incorporating diverse religious cultures ranging from Buddhism to Sufism, was a celebrated littérateur who emphasized the importance of intuition and mystical union in search of pure poetry. For Çelebi, the divine union, a moment of effusion and eternal contemplation, was a possibility that could be explored in poetic aesthetics. For him, the most genuine form of poetry was that which touched one's inner spiritual world by transcending physical reality.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In its purest sense, poetry should be “contemplative,” and never anecdotal—breaking loose from the confines of this world and leading one to dissolve into the greater consciousness, which he termed “nirvana.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Çelebi's early translations from Khayyām were included in a volume of select quatrains from classical Persian masters by the author, including quatrains by Naṣīr-al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Afżal-al-Dīn al-Kāshī, Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ, and Jāmī. The work is dedicated to Turkish abstract painter Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid in acknowledgment of her courtesy and favor, and includes a sketched figure by another Turkish abstract painter who belonged to the Paris School, Selim Turan (1915–1994) (Fig. 4).Footnote ¹⁰³ The introduction of the selection focuses on the history and technicalities of the quatrain form, praising Cevdet's Khayyām translations for their textual aptness (metne muvafık bir terceme), as well as the skills of poets Yahya Kemal and Orhan Veli in ʿarūż-based adaptations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Figure 4.

Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi, Seçme Rubâîler (Istanbul: Yokuş, 1945). Cover illustration by Selim Turan.

Çelebi's second volume, published in 1954, included 400 quatrains solely by Khayyām, with an introduction presenting his life, work, thought, and translation history. The introduction began with a discussion on the nature and uses of the quatrain form, focusing again on its prosodic features and historical significance. Çelebi suggested that the quatrain was the most suitable form for ideation, and especially the most powerful tool for disseminating philosophical ideas, refraining from assigning a Sufi character to Khayyām's use of wine and love imagery.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For Çelebi, Khayyām was a philosopher who consciously produced these quatrains with a tint of cynic skepticism to show the inadequacy of human knowledge in grasping the universe.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He was never a “drunken sloth,” rather a “freethinker” who dedicated his life to learning and teaching.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

A Sufi Rogue? Yahya Kemal's Self-Righteous Designation and the Critics of the Image of the Unorthodox Khayyām

A leading nationalist neoclassical poet and writer, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (1884–1958), who is mostly remembered today for crafting a unique voice of Ottoman/Turkish nationalist identity in poetry, prepared highly original renderings (söyleyiş) and adaptations (bāzserāyi) from Khayyām during his later life.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These were collected posthumously in 1967 under the title Rubâîler ve Hayyam Rubâîlerini Türkçe Söyleyiş, along with forty-one quatrains composed by him. Most of Kemal's original quatrains were dedicated to the memory of his friends, often recalling cherished moments and conversations. The volume includes an introductory epigraph in verse explaining his motives for the translation, asserting that the best way to learn about Khayyām's craft and views was to render (söylemek) or put his verse (nazmetmek) in Turkish, as suggested by the last two lines of the book's epigraph, derdim ki rubâîsini nazmetmelisin / Hayyam onu Türkî’de nasıl söylerse (I used to say that you should write your quatrain / the way Khayyām would write it in Turkish).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Besides his own translations in the original prosody, Kemal often expressed his admiration for Aḥmed Rif‘at's unpublished versions, and based his selection on Dāniş's 1927 edition.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Along with novelist Yakup Kadri (1889–1974), Yahya Kemal led a short-lived literary movement called Nev-Yunânîlik (Neo-Hellenism).Footnote ¹¹¹ Under the influence of the École romane of ex-Symbolist neoclassicist Jean Moréas (1856–1910), Kemal sought to revive classical forms and themes. This later led him to develop an interest in the canonization of Islamic classics as a way of establishing a historical basis for Ottoman/Turkish culture and civilization.Footnote ¹¹² Informed by Moréas’ neoclassicist vision, Yahya Kemal developed his own poetry as an expression of Ottoman nationalism and identity.Footnote ¹¹³ Moréas saw in Greek and Latin literature not only the origins of Mediterranean civilization but also the indispensable languages to be employed and imitated in French poetry to achieve a pure and sublime form of thought and lyrics in poetic culture.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Kemal regarded this exploration for one's own classics as a search for Turkey's “white language” (beyaz lisan), a term inspired by the “pure poem” (la poésie pure) of French priest Henri Brémond (1865–1933) , which Kemal equated with the essentializing identification of Turkey's “national soul.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The search for the essential poetic characters of pristine Turkish (hâlis şiir) enabled Kemal to coin the term derûnî âhenk, an interior rhythm (rythme intérieur) based on a language's own intonation contours.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The discovery of Greek and Latin classics as the fount of Western civilization during his formative years in Paris helped Kemal formulate a general theory of Mediterranean civilization and culture, which shifted his interest from the Greeks to the Persians. In search for the classics of Turkish civilization, Kemal saw Persian culture as one of the significant steps in the formation of Ottoman/Turkish civilization. For him, the Turks became sedentary and civilized especially thanks to Persian cultural influence, and great classical poets, such as Khayyām, Saʿdī, and Ḥāfiẓ, were a testimony to such influence because they were able to create a persona with a universalizing voice that was later embraced by European intellectuals.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Kemal first read Khayyām in Franz Toussaint's French translations, which he found inadequate and flawed. Having been inspired by Moréas’ acclaimed volume Les Stances, he synthesized the sensual and intellectual aspects of both poets by reaching for a sense of rhythm and poetic harmony in his Khayyām quatrains.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Kemal initially had the aim of recreating Khayyām's voice in modern Turkish, which he could not make work in prosody. His prosodic preference rather lay in the akhrab form of ʿaruż that included twelve variations starting with the pattern maf‘ūlu, and this form also had been praised by Rıza Tevfik as the most fitting in terms of harmony and concord (âhenk) in quatrains.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Having switched to Ottoman Turkish, Kemal found a unique voice in his Khayyām renderings and later decided to publish them in newspapers and journals such as Akşam, Salon, Resimli Hayat, Akademi, and Varlık in the 1940s.

Depicting Khayyām as a universalist with a clear ethical vision, Kemal was mostly interested in the poet's self-righteous and dissolute lifestyle, as well as his Sufi rogue (rind) image and disposition, linking both traits to Greek Epicurean philosophy.Footnote ¹²⁰ He picked up the form quatrain again during his residency in Madrid from 1929–32 as the minister plenipotentiary (ortaelçi), a period in his life when he took to drink. Due to the scandals caused by his inappropriate behavior, as well as his alcohol-fueled absenteeism and poor health, Kemal resigned from his post and moved to Paris in March 1932 to stay at Hôtel Celtic in Rue Balzac on the Left Bank, where he composed dissolute (rindâne) quatrains from 1933 onward (see his famed cycle of poems Rindler).Footnote ¹²¹ Kemal's interest in the Malāmatiya as well as Bektaşism shared a common ground with his preoccupation with Khayyām's religious expressivity, in the way that all three proved the possibilities of certain other religiosities within Islam.

In response to Khayyām's prevailing image of a dissolute Sufi, there have also been certain reactionary works written to discredit the poet's reception based on a libertine lifestyle and irreligious behavior, including drinking. Many interpreters, who did not wish to see Khayyām associated with atheism and disbelief, interjected lengthy introductory notes asserting that, when read between the lines, the poet could not be regarded as an unbeliever (mülhid/dinsiz), a denier (münkir), a religious impostor (müra’î), or an apostate (zındık). Contrary to such common perception, the Muslim apologists asserted that the authentic Khayyām believed in one true God—whether transcendent or pervasive—upholding certain rules of religious propriety.Footnote ¹²²

Kurdish Islamist poet and scholar Abdürrahim Zapsu (1890–1958) penned a refutation of Khayyām's irreligiosity in the form of rhyming couplets in syllabic prosody (based on irregular fourteeners). He referred to Khayyām's Islamic virtues and moral uprightness, contrary to the image of a libertine lifestyle. Zapsu noted in his poem that the poet never argued against the Qur’ān, and he was actually neither a Sufi nor insubordinate to God. His misconstrued image, as well as later misattributions, endowed him with the notoriety of irreligion and moral perversion.Footnote ¹²³

Another curious work was by a local religious scholar from the town of Ödemiş near İzmir, Ruhi Tok, who penned a refutation against the libertine and irreligious image created around the poet. Rejecting the authenticity of some views and poems ascribed to him, Tok has argued that the poet's rationalism and scientism conformed to religion, claiming that the real Khayyām neither denied the afterlife nor was he a nihilist pessimist who excessively drank alcohol.Footnote ¹²⁴ To prove that the afterlife existed according to the current scientific research, Tok highly ironically resorted to certain pseudoscientific proofs based on Spiritualism, mediums, conjuring spirits, and UFOs in his defense, arguing that if life in space was a possibility, then an afterlife or the otherworld was also feasible.Footnote ¹²⁵ What made this collection unique was that Tok included tens of modified renderings inspired by Khayyām, which arguably expressed Khayyām's correct views in religion and life, also strangely and anachronistically making him a poet who recited anti-Darwinian verses.Footnote ¹²⁶

The Humanist Discovery of the Vernacular: Khayyām's Universalism and the Intellectual Left

Orhan Veli Kanık, together with the poets Oktay Rifat (1914–88) and Melih Cevdet Anday (1915–2002), was the founder of the Garip Movement and one of the most innovative poets of the early Republic of Turkey, publishing poems that promoted the use of simple language in a radical break from the elevated rhetoric of the past classical Ottoman poets. The Garip poets discarded meter, rhyming structure, and metaphoric imagery from their poems, and wrote simple lyrics in the vernacular about ordinary details in the lives of common people, bringing everyday lightness and randomness into their verse.Footnote ¹²⁷ Orhan Veli's posthumous volume that collected all his translations included eight quatrains in translation from Khayyām, some of which were published in journals and newspapers such as Tercüman, Vatan, and Yeni Sabah in 1946, as well as posthumously two days after his passing in 1950 and also later in 1953.Footnote ¹²⁸ Although Orhan Veli eschewed the use of prosody and rhyme in his own poems, he was known for his skillful translations in the Arabic ‘aruż—while not necessarily setting Khayyām's quatrains into a more accessible language as in his poems.

The greatest efforts at setting Khayyam in free verse and accessible language can be attributed to Sabahattin Eyuboğlu (1909–73), a Turkish socialist writer, critic, and translator, who developed a penchant for Khayyām after coming across Gölpınarlı's prose renderings. Mostly remembered for his translations from French literature and philosophy, as well as his affiliation with the literary movement “Blue Anatolia” (Mavi Anadolu), Eyuboğlu was part of a group of Turkish intellectuals who envisioned the Anatolian culture as a continuum, from prehistory to the present. This group also promoted the study of the past sources of Anatolian civilizations as a way of discovering the pre-Islamic Anatolia and finding a fresh voice that would foster a new form of cultural humanism in Turkey and abroad.Footnote ¹²⁹

Eyuboğlu was not well versed in Persian. Having consulted with Gölpınarlı regarding certain Persian expressions, he initially prepared a selection of 160 quatrains in 1961 under the title Dörtlükler (not Rubailer) with two short notes introducing his method and intentions. The second edition of the text came in 1969, with 162 additional quatrains and a new introduction, and the tenth edition of this work has been arguably the most read and published translation of Khayyām in Turkish, with tens of editions to date.

According to the initial preface, when Eyuboğlu read Khayyām for the first time in Turkish, he was led to believe that the poet's language had an overly elaborative style with an abundance of bombastic words. This, he later realized, was due to the stylistic preferences of previous translators. Moreover, having discovered Gölpınarlı's edition, he concluded that Khayyām also cherished everyday vernacular language.Footnote ¹³⁰ Those earlier interpreters who had opted for an excessively ornate style were similar to French translators in the past who had made the mistake of making Homer (a figure like Dede Korkut) speak with the voice of a Sorbonne professor. Therefore, Eyuboğlu ascribed a new mission for the new generations of Anatolian Turks: refraining from hyperbolic language like the aforementioned Garip poets, a fresh new simplicity should be the main thrust of translations from poets like Khayyām, Saʿdī, and Ḥāfiẓ, so that their universal wisdom would be accessible to all. To be true to the original Khayyām, Eyuboğlu decided, instead, to translate him with an abundant use of vernacular Turkish vocabulary (halk dili) and a specific emphasis on the simplicity of expression (sadelik), transmitting Khayyām's universal message in a language intelligible to the common man.Footnote ¹³¹

Eyuboğlu described his translation effort as a way of reinterpreting Khayyām while rendering him into modern Turkish—yet without undermining the trends and sensibilities that existed in modern Turkish poetry. As an untitled epilogue to his translations, he even vernacularized an Arabic poem attributed to Khayyām (with some changes) as the poet's ars philosophica.Footnote ¹³² Thanks to Eyuboğlu's efforts to vernacularize Khayyām, a new wave of vernacular Turkish translations began to appear from the 1980s onward, by amateur researchers and poetry enthusiasts, who set the poet's verse into modern lyricism by expressing certain secular aspects of his “philosophy of life,” turning Khayyām into a people's poet. By this way, people of all walks of life in Turkey was able to respond to Khayyām's message and quatrains by assigning him ever-changing social and cultural roles.

In the second preface, Eyuboğlu argued that the East-West dichotomy was a sociopolitical construct. Culturally speaking, there existed no such division, and Khayyām's fame in Europe was a proof of his universal humanism.Footnote ¹³³ Furthermore, Eyuboğlu developed an interest in Khayyām's libertine lifestyle, skeptical rationalism, and criticism against religious dogmatism. Known for his preference for vernacular Turkish vocabulary over Arabic and Persian loanwords, he was a staunch supporter of the language reform, secularism, humanism, and leftist politics, which made him associate Khayyām's revolutionary language with Anatolian figures such as the thirteenth-century Alevite poet and mystic Pir Sultan Abdal (executed c. 1560).Footnote ¹³⁴ Similar to the poetic personae of the legendary Anatolian figures Yunus Emre and Köroğlu, Khayyām, in the words of Eyuboğlu, became a public figure whose memory has transcended linguistic and cultural boundaries throughout centuries—by way of gaining a special personality in the cultural consciousness that gave voice to anonymous masses who felt the same way.Footnote ¹³⁵ This attitude was also taken up by the socialist poet Enver Gökçe (1920–81) who integrated the language of the Bektaşî-Alevî poetry into the Khayyāmian revolutionary and materialist worldview.Footnote ¹³⁶ Through the image of Khayyām, Turkish humanists found a new venue to promote freethinkers of the Islamic world, establishing him as a perennial classic who achieved a universal humanist voice in world poetry with a timeless wisdom of realism.Footnote ¹³⁷

Eyuboğlu's third preface problematizes the question of language games and textual correspondence in Khayyām's famed quatrain that ended with “kū kū kū kū,” a double entendre that meant both the question word “where?” and the sound of a collared dove.Footnote ¹³⁸ Based on the variety of Turkish translations of this specific quatrain, contemporary poet Enis Batur (b. 1952), who was known for his experimental texts of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, prepared a set of essays along with a leading group of composers and littérateurs about the possible ways to approach this verse through music, hermeneutics, and word choice in translation.Footnote ¹³⁹

Besides Eyuboğlu, Khayyām's universal humanism and materialism influenced a group of leftist Turkish poets and intellectuals, inspiring them to write quatrains with similar content and style. In his quatrains, the famed socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet did not particularly follow the rules of prosody, but used quatrains as a medium for employing philosophical criticism or expressing love and longing ([Piraye'ye] Rubailer, 1966). Hikmet's early quatrains, for instance, included a Marxist-Leninist materialist critique of philosopher George Berkeley's subjective idealism (i.e., the poem “Berkley,” 1926, which starts with the address “Behey / Berkley”), an acknowledgment of Rūmī's Neoplatonist Sufism as reflected in Hikmet's version of the story Ferhad ile Şirin (1948), reminiscent of Khayyām's image.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

A socialist poet and translator, A. Kadir (1917–85), started to work on the quatrains prompted by a request from poet Hüseyin Karakan (b. 1931) for his 1962 anthology of Khayyām quatrains in Turkish translation. At the time, Kadir had already immersed himself in translating the Odyssey with another Blue Anatolia scholar and classicist Azra Erhat (1915–82) and could not devote his full time to the project, yet the translations flowed naturally after a few months. Having identified certain parallels with his own worldview, Kadir described the poet as a freethinker, who believed in egalitarianism and human freedom.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Similar to the leftist poets Gökçe and Kenan Sarıalioğlu (b. 1946), he also rendered Khayyām's voice in the lyrical vernacular mode, making the quatrains new (yenileştirerek) while also benefiting from past versions by Cevdet, Çelebi, and Gölpınarlı.Footnote ¹⁴²

What the Quatrains Say: Prevalent Themes, Style, and the Message

Assigning a consistent philosophical perspective to Khayyām's quatrains has been a much discussed question, a problem closely linked to the questions of source criticism and textual authenticity. There has been an open-ended debate among Khayyām's Turkish translators as to whether he had a unique sense of systematic philosophy or whether his views could be viewed as a blend of various syncretic doctrines. There have been those who saw Khayyām as a rationalist (usçu/akılcı) scholar par excellence in Islamic philosophical tradition, that is, a Muslim philosopher (ḥakīm), who has been sometimes anachronistically associated with today's “scientific positivism” due to his interest in mathematics and astronomy.Footnote ¹⁴³ In addition to this group, there also have been those who saw Khayyām simply as a freethinker who had a syncretic outlook, blending an array of sometimes contradicting worldviews, including rationalism, naturalism, pessimist realism, subjectivism, humanism, nihilism, Epicureanism, and materialism, yet never linking him to idealism (with the notable exception of Orhan Veli).Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Defining Khayyām’s poetry is not indeed an easy task to undertake. On the one hand, each quatrain seems to have a clear message concerning the fleetingness of life and worldly ambitions, as well as agnosticism about the knowability of God and the universe. And, on the other, his poems follow previous models and discourses, such as asceticism, the romantic genre of the Sufi chaste love, carpe diem, divine intoxication, and nihilistic materialism. In his 1932 book, the Turkish encyclopedist and educator İbrahim Alâettin gave an outline of common themes and ideas, arguing that Khayyām's poetry held a wide variety of views, which could be deduced to themes, such as (1) the beauty and uniqueness of life; (2) carpe diem or joy of life; and (3) the universe's being beyond comprehension and reasoning; as well as two doctrines from classical Arabic philosophy: (4) the rejection of afterlife; and (5) the material transformation of the body as a way of uniting with earth after death.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Scholars such as Dāniş, Gölpınarlı, Çelebi, historian Harold Lamb (1892–1962) (through Islamist writer and journalist Ömer Rıza Doğrul's 1944 translation), and a historian of mathematics, Hamit Dilgan (1901–76), assessed Khayyām's extent of scholarly output through the contextualization of his scholarly engagements, often associating him with classical Arabic philosophers. Yet, there are certain other translators who saw him simply as a “reason-first” positivist who argued for strict rationalism, often acting against religious pretension, dogmatism, and bigotry.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Having realized the diversity of topics included in Khayyām's quatrains, most translators have identified certain traces of perennial attitudes and beliefs in his philosophy, arguing for Khayyām's unique syncretism.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Most readers in favor of syncretism also underlined that his rationalism did not deem him irreligious per se, although strictly speaking he should never be regarded as a Sufi.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Besides rationalism, the pervasiveness of Sufi discursivity in Khayyām has been the subject of debate by many interpreters. As well as a few figures who have read his language through the prism of Sufism, many interpreters of Khayyām saw him rather as a “rationalist freethinker” or a “Muslim philosopher” who also had Sufi leanings or, at least, opened some leeway for Sufi discursivity.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The most controversial aspect of Khayyām's poetry is indeed his extensive use of wine imagery in a favorable light. Most interpreters do not associate him with excessive consumption of wine or alcoholism, yet with regard to the imagery of wine there have been various positions acknowledged in the secondary literature, such as (1) wine was simply a symbol/metaphor—whether literary or Sufi; (2) the use of wine was sometimes real and sometimes metaphoric; or (3) wine was simply real, with no Sufi connotations.Footnote ¹⁵⁰