Mercimek Ahmed

Mercimek Ahmed (Ottoman Turkish: Merjümek Ahmed ibn Ilyas; died after 1432) was an Ottoman author who flourished in the first third of the 15th century. He is principally known for translating the Persian Qabus-nama, written by the Ziyarid ruler Keikavus in 1082, into Old Ottoman. Mercimek's translation, which he completed in 1432, was simple, based on the spoken Turkish vernacular, and consisted of a mainly Turkish lexicon, but was written at a time when the Persianisation of Ottoman literature was underway. By the beginning of the 18th century, Mercimek's translation had come to be viewed as archaic and unsophisticated. As a result of 20th-century Turkish nationalist waves, which augmented the interest in the Turkic aspects of the Turkish language, his translation gained renewed appreciation.

Life

In his translation, Mercimek mentions his own name three times. However, he is not attested in the pre-modern biographical and historical Ottoman literary works. In his translation, only very little information can be found regarding his life. He flourished in the first third of the 15th century and appears to have been a servant or courtier of Ottoman Sultan Murad II (r. 1421–1444). He was well educated in traditional religious and secular education by the standards of his own time. He is viewed as a person who was moderate in his habits; in his writings, he states that he never indulged in the "calamitous" practice of wine-drinking in the morning. The work contains no information on how he obtained his unusual name, from Persian Marjumak, meaning "lentil". He died after 1432.

Qabus-nama translation and legacy

Keikavus' Qabus-nama, originally written in 1082 and belonging to the mirror for princes genre, held a prominent place in Ottoman akhlakh literature of the 14th and 15th centuries. During this period, at least five separate prose version translations were produced of the Persian original, of which Mercimek's is the latest and best preserved. Mercimek completed his Old Ottoman translation on 26 April 1432 and wrote that while he was in Sultan Murad's company at Philippopolis (modern-day Plovdiv, Bulgaria), he saw that Murad was reading the Qabus-nama in its Persian original. According to Mercimek's writings, when Murad complained that the existing Turkish translation was of low quality, he promptly started to write a new translation. In Mercimek's words: "complete, without omitting a word; to the best of my ability explaining the more difficult words in it by extended comment so that the readers might enjoy its [full] meaning". It was copied after publication and circulated widely. Mercimek's translation has no independent title. Its manuscripts are labeled by headings such as Qabus-nama-yi Türkī or Terjeme-yi Qabus-nama.

Mercimek's writing skills are deemed much higher quality than his predecessors. Unlike his predecessors, Mercimek's writings attest to a writer who was neither imitatively literal nor would give in to offhand omission. Numerous explanatory comments accompany his translation, as he vowed or decided to paraphrase when meticulousness might have concealed his purpose. Mercimek, on occasion, further animated his translation by spontaneously inserting suitable Turkish proverbs, or even verses of his own composition, in surplus to his trademark habit of rendering Kaykavus' illustrative verses of the Persian original into his own Turkish verse.

Mercimek's translation contrasts with other literary works of his time. At the time, literary Turkish, as the Ottomanist and Turkologist Eleazar Birnbaum calls it, was "at a crossroads". Some writers were creating a complex and pompous high insha style of literary Turkish, packed with Persian literary artifices, with a low amount of Turkish lexical material in favour of Arabic and Persian loanwords. Mercimek's translation differed, as his literary style was quite simple and relied on the spoken Turkish vernacular, with its lexicon being mainly Turkish as well. Although some writers continued to choose simple Turkish for writing during the following centuries, the bulk of Ottoman literature would become increasingly ornate and Persianised. By the beginning of the 18th century, Mercimek's style and use of vocabulary had come to be viewed as obsolete and unsophisticated, with the renowned stylist and historian Nazmizade Murtaza of Baghdad being commissioned to revise Mercimek's Qabus-nama translation to make it fit in with contemporaneous literary taste.

As a result of 20th-century Turkish nationalist waves, which augmented the interest in the Turkic aspects of the Turkish language, his translation gained renewed appreciation.

Copies

Mercimek's translation can be found in several important manuscript collections, including:

• Ankara Milli Kütüphane nr. H. 941
• Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, Hazine, nr. 1153
• Nuruosmaniye Kütüphane, nr. 4096
• BL, Turkish MSS, Or. 1181

Sources

• Birnbaum, E. (1991). "Merd̲j̲ümek". In Bosworth, C. E.; van Donzel, E. & Pellat, Ch. (eds.). The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Volume VI: Mahk–Mid. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-08112-3.
• Sobers-Khan, Nur (2014). "Fİrāsetle Naẓar Edesİn: Recreating the Gaze of the Ottoman Slave Owner at the Confluence of Textual Genres". In Faroqhi, Suraiya; İnalcık, Halil; Ergene, Boğaç (eds.). Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History. Brill. ISBN 978-9004274686.
• Yazıcı, Tahsin; Özgüdenlı, Osman G. (2000). "PERSIAN AUTHORS OF ASIA MINOR PART 2". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). Encyclopædia Iranica, Online Edition. Encyclopædia Iranica Foundation.