Türkiye’deki İlk İtalyan Edebiyatı Tarihi: Mehmet Rauf ve İtalyan Tarih-i Edebiyatı (1913) Üzerine

History of Italian Literature, written by Mehmet Rauf and published in 1913 in İstanbul, is the first book about Italian literature published in Turkey. Mehmet Rauf who specialized on the studies about Ottoman Studies, was a lecturers in Istanbul University. After having used some British, French and Italian sources, he wrote his book in an ornamental Ottoman Turkish. The samples given from the works of Italian poets and writers can be considered most probably, the first translations of their works in Turkish. While it was fashionable in Italian city-states to write about Turkish Language and culture between the XVI-XVIII Centuries, due to the westernization movements, starting from the XIX century, there was an inclination in the Ottoman Turkey towards the Italian culture. Bilingual Italian and Turkish dictionaries were prepared and printed. Mehmet Rauf’s History of Italian Literature, therefore, is not an unexpected and haphazardly prepared book. Though more books and translations may have been printed on the Italian literature in the Republican Turkey after 1923, Mehmet Rauf’s History of Italian Literature is the one and the only book worth being cited in the field of the such works.