A Poetry Translation by an Annotator: Şem’î’s Terceme-i Kasîde-i Emâlî

Abstract

Kasîde-i Emâlî, written by Ûşî in 569/1173, have attracted notable interest to the present day and been translated into and annotated in many languages including Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Şem‘î Şem‘ullâh, an acclaimed annotator of the 16th century, is among the translators of this eulogy, dealing with basic considerations of the Islamic catechism. The present study firstly provides a critical evaluation of this translation, which consists of 72 quadrant and penned in a prosodic (aruz) versification called “müzdevic murabba” (i.e. rhyming four lines), and then offers some formal and contentual information. One of the prominent characteristics of this work, standing out among the Turkish translations of the eulogy with its peculiar features, is its loyalty to the source text’s metric and rhyming properties. There are few Turkish translations of the eulogy having observed these two features. It was found out that Şem‘î, as a translational style, chose to provide details in several couplets rather than preserve the couplets as they are. In other words, he translated each couplet in two couplets. One of the interesting features of the work is the fact that the translator refers to its practice as both a “translation” and an “annotation” in the epilogue, thusly uses these two terms as synonyms. Relatedly, this study reveals the facts concerning this characterization by discussing the underlying reasons.