Denis Ferhatovic

on translating Mostarli Hasan Ziyâî

I wished to preserve some of the form of the ghazal because often only their meaning is translated which flattens them. This type of translation obscures much of the poets’ signature interplay of restriction and liberation. I preserved the redif (repeating word) while not attempting the kafiye (rhyme). To make up for the loss of rhyme, I played with internal rhyme in lines three and seven, introduced some word play in line six (“soul/solace”), and added alliteration in a few places. The addresses I kept as they are, including the tehallus (the poet’s self-naming). Müberra Gürgendereli, whose edition of Ziyâî I use, praised the poet’s relative simplicity of expression, so I strove for a measure of plainness. Still, I needed to indicate that this is a very refined verse that uses the full stylistic range of sixteenth-century Turkish. In line three, Ziyâî used two synonyms, ‘ahd and peymân, of Arabic and Persian origins respectively, which I rendered into an old-fashioned native word and a medieval French borrowing.

Turkish like Persian lacks grammatical gender. It has a single third-person singular pronoun instead of he or she, much like the singular they in English. The translation into a gendered language has to decide the gender of the beloved. I have imagined him as male to balance the constant feminization (and thus heterosexualization) in, for instance, an otherwise excellent Bosnian rendition of Ziyâî’s divan by Alena Ćatović. Related to this question of beloved’s gender is their or her or his ontological status: human or divine? Ghazals deal with both. Languages written in the Arabic script do not have capital letters, but those using Roman letters do, and can thus distinguish between a person and God. The beloved for me here is human and male, but of course he does not have to be.