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Autoreferentiality in Qasidas of Ahmed Talib Bosnevi

Abstract

The aim of this work is to present the two qasidas that are part of the poetic work a little known 17th century Bosnian diwan poet, Ahmed Talib Bosnevi. In the first part of this work we will present two qasidas, as the poems written to the highest Ottoman officials, in the context of the qasida as a poem written with a specific goal, most often to obtain certain monetary or different material gain, and about the attitude of the sultan towards such an act of poet’s addressing, and the institution of the patronage in the Ottomans. Given that the period of the classical Ottoman literature is considered extremely conventional, just as the European Medieval literature, we will shortly address the inexpressibility topoi and the outdoing topoi. We will present the transliteration and the integral translation of Talib’s qasidas in this work. In the second part of this work we will analyze these two qasidas from the aspect of autoreferentiality, as a way in which the author refers to himself in his speech. We have found a certain number of verses in the qasidas where Talib speaks about his poetics and the way of its reception.