A Style That Beautifies Death: 'views of Death' and 'ways of Signifying Death' in Ottoman Poet Biographies and Turkish Sairnames

Abstract

One of informations given for poets in classical Ottoman poet biographies is about deaths of these poets. The poets get involved in poet biographies after the period of writing their poems, so poet's birth dates are not important for biography writers. But poet's date of death has always written if known in these biographies. Writers or poets of these type of works, express the informations about deaths of the poets that they deal with, in the frame of prescriptive cultural approaches, in the parts which include this information of the biographies in question. These works also present significant aesthetic expressions in point of dimentions depend on form. In addition, to see the features of traditional aspect to the death in classical Ottoman poet biographies is also possible in sairname genre which can be accept as the equival examples of this classical genre. Of course, Turkish sairnames do not exact equivalent of Ottoman poet biographies in the Turkish folk literature. Because Turkish sairnames are products of oral culture whereas Ottoman poet biographies are products of written culture. For this reason Ottoman poet biographies show significant differences in terms of the information contained variety and reliability. However, there are important parallels between two genres in terms of 'views of death' and 'ways of expressing death'. The word patterns used when expressing the poet's death shows that poet biographies and sairname genre based on the same source in terms of basic approach determines forms of expression of death and perspective for death. Therefore, to demonstrate the similarities, along with examples of poet biographies, also selected examples from sairname genre were evaluated.