Neşāṭī was the pen name of an Ottoman poet. He was a Sufi, or Islamic mystic, of the Mevlevi Order, and his poetry is often considered exemplary of the "Indian style" of Ottoman poetry, a movement which flourished beginning in the 17th century.
Life
Though one source claims that Neşâtî's real name was Süleymân, the majority of sources give his name as Ahmed. He was born in Edirne, in the region of Thrace. It is not known exactly when he was born, though it is speculated that it was around the year 1600, on the evidence of a poem commemorating the winter of 1621–22, in which year the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul was known to be covered with ice: Neşâtî first become affiliated with the Mevlevi order as a disciple of the shaykh Ağazâde Mehmed Dede, first in Gelibolu in Thrace and then in Beşiktaş in Istanbul. After Ağazâde Mehmed Dede's death, Neşâtî went to Konya in central Anatolia, where he served for a time at the tomb of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi—the founder of the Mevlevi order—before finally returning, around the year 1670, to Edirne as the shaykh of the Murâdiyye Mevlevîhâne there. He died in 1674, and was buried in the courtyard of the Murâdiyye Mosque.
Work
Neşâtî was not as prolific as many other Ottoman poets, but is nonetheless considered to be among the masters of the gazel form of poetry. He was strongly influenced by, and a great admirer of, the Persian poet `Urfī of Shîraz, about whom he wrote a treatise, the Şerḥ-i Müşkilāt-i `Urfī. It was primarily through the influence of `Urfî, among other Persian poets, that Neşâtî's poetry took on certain aspects of the so-called "Indian style", which was characterized by extravagant conceits; a complex, Persian-derived syntax; and a high level of lexical and syntactic ambiguity. An example is the following beyit, or couplet, from one of Neşâtî's most famous gazels: The image used in the second line makes use of a double meaning—known in Ottoman Turkish as tevriyye —of the wordnāle : it can mean not only "lament" or "moan", but can also refer to a "reed pen", and specifically to the sound made by such a pen as it moves across the page in the act of writing. Despite his word play, however, Neşâtî was also a poet of high—if sometimes restrained—emotion, as present-day Turkish poet İlhan Berk points out in a short essay:
Above all, Neşâtî was a master of expression, a man of great precision and sensitivity. Not a shouter, hidden, quiet, sparkling, genuine. In his poems, one is always struck with a great and profound sensation. More importantly, despite his being a Mevlevî poet... he does not attempt to appear learned or to pretend to wisdom, but prefers in his poems to behave like a person, pure and simple. And like all great poets, he is humble.
The honest and undisguised expression of emotion that Berk's appreciation hints at can be seen, for example, in the opening couplets to one of Neşâtî's most often anthologizedgazels:
