Merâkî

The Twilight of the Divan Literature in Bosnia

Abstract

The paper presents selected poems written in Ottoman Turkish by a 19th century Bosnian author who used the pen name Merâkî. They are found in two manuscripts – a personal miscellany (mecmua) from the National and University Library in Zagreb, and a codex comprising diverse treatises which is kept at the Oriental Collection of the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade. The codicological and paleographic examination of the manuscripts, one of which belonged to the Sarajevan kadı Mustafâ Muhibbî (d.1854), and the other to the Sarajevan müftü Mehmed Šakir Muidović (d. 1859), together with the contents of some poems, lead to the conclusion that Merâkî was a contemporary of these prominent citizens of Sarajevo and most probably close to the ülema circles. As for the poems, they display inconsistency in the use of metre and deflection from canonical elements of the classical Ottoman Divan poetry. For example, some of them could be considered ghazals and qasidas on the basis of their lenght and rhyme, but their contents do not comply with the traditional concepts of ghazal as a predominantly love poetry and kaside as a panegyric. Furthermore, the style is rather rough and with the exception of a fairly original poem about the entertainment with friends, abounding in realistic descriptions, the poems give the impression that they were (sometimes unskillfully) composed by mere combination of established motifs and poetic images. For all these features we consider Merâkî a typical representative of the late, creatively barren period of the Divan poetry in Ottoman Bosnia.