Rethinking Poetry Commentary with Bergamalı Kadri’s Syntactical Approach

Abstract

The analysis method of poetry in old Turkish literature studies is a controversial issue. Despite the existence of works written on prose knowledge, poetry knowledge and literary arts from the pre-modern period, there were no systematic examples in which the theoretical knowledge in these books was applied. The only exception may be the commentary by Bergamalı Kadri in his Müyessiretüʾl-ʿUlūm. This commentary applies the method used in Quran and Arabic literatüre to analyze a Turkish poem. The modern commentary method includes various components of this method. However, sentence analysis, which is a part of Bergamalı’s method, is not commonly practiced in modern studies. This article explains and discusses Bergamalı’s sentence analysis using modern grammatical approaches and terms. The sentence analysis of the poem is reanalyzed and visualized with the dependency tree. The aim is to provide an academic basis for intralingual translation and to carry balagha studies beyond finding figures of speech. The emergence of some subtleties of meaning in sentence analysis, which are lost in intralingual translation, and Bergamalı’s basing some aspects of the poem’s interpretation on sentence analysis are important findings of the article. These findings confirm the importance of sentence analysis and its potential to address the methodological gaps in the field of old Turkish literature.

Ethical committee approval is not required for this research.

The author declares no conflicts of interest in this study.

This research received no external funding.