The Poet Nefʿī, Fresh Persian Verse, and Ottoman Freshness

Abstract

Scholars have generally recognized the Ottoman poet Nefʿī (d. 1635) for his refinement of the panegyric in Turkish and his skill in its unflattering twin, the invective. They have thus paid little attention to the fact that he composed poems in Persian, and sufficient to compile a collection of them, simply viewing his output as a byproduct of his taste for the fresh style emanating from the East, particularly India, with no consideration of other factors at play. The article addresses this contextual gap by situating Nefʿī's engagement with the fresh style in relation to wider efforts at poetic renewal and also to literati disputes about the extent to which the fresh style and other currents from the East ought to be adopted and assimilated, in which differing formal and generic preferences, as well as linguistic and rhetorical concerns, were central. The article ultimately suggests that Nefʿī's overall work should be seen as part of those wider efforts that also aimed at making Ottoman practice distinctively fresh.