The Drop That Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre

Paperback

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When the song-poems of Yunus Emre spread among the rural Anatolian Turks in the fourteenth century, the Turkish language, already rich in idiom and vocal harmony, began to express the deeper nature of the human spirit. An illiterate peasant with a modest vocabulary of perhaps several thousand words gave utterance to the kind of truths that had been the domain of classical Arabic and Persian. A great poet helped his people to say what they could not say before. While many of his contemporaries imitated Persian and Arabic forms and borrowed their vocabularies, Yunus sang in the language of the common man and used simpler poetic forms. No one has ever matched Yunus’s handling of the Turkish vernacular and its syllabic meters.

His words to this day express the deepest aspirations of the Turkish people, an independent, undogmatic, humanistic, and mystical race. His songs are quoted by peasants and scholars, shaikhs and diplomats, the old and the young. Yunus Emre’s work is both the beginning and the highest achievement of a poetic tradition that has spanned seven centuries. No other poet in the Turkish language has greater authority, and Yunus has been called “the most important folk poet in the literature of Islam.” (Talat Sait Halman) – from Yunus Emre: An Introduction

Contents

• The Dervish Way

• The Way of Love

• Necessary Lessons

• Presence and Unity

• Life and Death

• Appendix: Turkish First Lines