XVIII. YÜZYIL ŞAİRLERİNDEN SAFÎ MUSTAFA VE RUBAİLERİ

The 18th century was a period, when the Ottoman Empire began to lose power and many social and cultural changes took place. We witness some differences and innovations in the art and literature of this period, though not on a scale to change the trends in the previous century. In the 18th century, during which a higher number of poets came to the fore and so the century is named as the “age of poets and poetry”, a high number of the poets were seen to prefer walking in the valley of miracles due to the problems in the social structure. In this period, when more than a thousand poets’ names are mentioned in memoirs, one of the poets struggling to exist in the literary and poetic world was Safi. As his name is not mentioned in the memoirs, Safi has remained obscure up to the present. Therefore, the secret curtain shed over Safi, deserving to be regarded as one of the important obscure values among those having remained unknown in our literary history, will partly be illuminated when his poetry collection titled “Eş’ar” (Poems), to be found in the National Library, is examined. In the above mentioned poetry collection, he can be calculated to have lived between the last quarter of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century due to the fact that his probable close friend Hüseyin and his son Hasan are mentioned in the collection to have been killed in 1711/1712 and that a special emphasis is made upon the year 1715, which marks the Martyr Ali Pasha’s (death: 1716) re-conquest of Mora. These findings serve only to consolidate the documentations in the library and no further knowledge has been found regarding Safi’s life. However, as a result of our reasearch in the light of these findings, we have concluded that Safi mihgt have been the writer of “Gülşen-i Pend”, a work on morality. In the copy of the collection found in the library, none of which could be found anywhere else, the poems are categorized as follows as regards their poetic structure; 7 kasides, one terci’ bend, 2 muhammes, one kıt’a (historic), 2 mesnevis, 243 gazelles, 287 rubais, 46 müsteazat rubais, 129 kıt’as and 330 müfreds. In his religious-transcendental poems composed in the valley of miracles, Safi focuses on concepts such as not to be much expectant from the World, keeping away from passion and greed, staying away from avarice, cleansing of the heart from evils and attaining true divine love by transcending humanly love; therefore, he can be regarded to have a wise personality. In his poems, where his philosophical ideas are conveyed, Sufi points out to the religious, moral, scientific and social degeneration witnessed in his age, and some traces of local and classical styles can be found. In the same way, the innovative style Nedim created in the classical poetry can also be felt in the poems composed in minstrel/heroic air by Safi. He also sometimes prefers a way composition akin to that found in ordinary speech, enriched with proverbs, sayings, idioms and phrases with a philosophical and local/folkloric style. It is almost impossible to find original dreams/imagination or a powerful voice in Safi’s poetry, and there can be found some technical faults. Those faults, which he himself mentions in his collection, are compensated with the usage of letters without points/signs. In the collection, 4 gazels, 5 kıt’as and 89 müfreds are composed with letters witout any signs, and five of the müfreds are presented in uncombined letters. The rubais and müstezads, which have a high proportion in Safi’s poetry in terms of numbers, have no high literary value, and so they can be categorized in the same way. The 287 rubais in Safi’s collection, are the secong most frequent type of structures after the müfreds. His over-emphasis on the rubais, which “are based on thought and ideas, where artistic considerations cannot precede meaning”, shows that he had a private interest in philosophy and miracles. In his rubais, the “philosophical depth expected in poetry” cannot be found. His rubais, therefore, are both lacking in terms of literary value and technically at fault. However, despite his qualitative shortcomings as a poet, the high number of rubais and müstezats producad in the form of rubais makes him an important figure. Regarding the 46 müstezat he composed, he is the most prolific poet to have produced this poetic form in the Divan literature. These müstezats produced in the form of rubais are also remarkable in that they outnumber all the others in the same literary genre. In addition, although he composed rubais technically defected, he is also the fifth prolific poet in Divan literature. Upon the examination of the poetry collection, Safi can be regarded a powerful, significant poet among his contemporaries due to his talent of composing rhymed and rythmical poetry with philosophical and moral depth. His poems are based on giving advise in content, and they are mostly defected technically, but his main attraction is the high number of poems he composed. In terms of literary evaluation, his high productivity should be taken into account instead of his qualitative aspect. In this regard, it is possible to say that Safi is an important enough literary figure to be mentioned in the history of Turkish literature.