Beyond Eurocentric Turkology
Résumé
This chapter aims to re-establish the logic of the treatises that Nawā’ī (1441-1501) and Babur (1483-1530) authored in order to explain how to apply Arabo-Persian metrics (‘arūẓ) to Turkic poetry. When scholars, such as Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, turned their attention to these works their reactions were symptomatic of a Turkology that has difficulty going beyond a Eurocentric understanding of Central Asian classical literature. Using these treatises only to distinguish Turkic poetic forms that were as little influenced as possible by the canons of Persian prosody, they did not investigate how Nawā’ī and Babur, in spite of creating a new system, tackled the issue of adopting a prosodic framework that was ill-suited to their native language. Addressing these lacunae, this chapter discusses the consequences of such an approach, with regard to the definitions of poetic genres and to the composition of poetry itself.