Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa Dîvânı (İnceleme – Metin – İşlevsel Sözlük)

Abstract

Divans constitute the principal corpus of classical period. It is also known that certain poets employed the term mecmuʿa to denote notebooks in which they compiled their poems prior to arranging them into a formal divan. The subject of this thesis is the compilation of the poems of Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa, compiled in his own handwriting and preserved in a manuscript collection entitled Mecmûʿa- Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa. The poet’s corrections, deletions, and revisions within the manuscript indicate that many of the poems remained in draft from. Furthermore, annotations such as “tahrir (fair copy)” and “yazıldı (written out)” appearing above certain poems suggest that these drafts were later transcribed into a clean copy and assembled into a divan. Despite extensive research, however, no extant a divan attributed to Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa has been identified. This study aims to recover the poetic oeuvre of the eighteenth-century poet Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa and to construct a divan. The thesis consist of an introduction and four chapters. The introduction provides and overview of eighteenth-century Ottoman classical literature. The first chapter examines the life, official duties, and personality of Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa. The second chapter analyzes all verse forms represented in the reconstructed divan, together with the poet’s use of prosodic and harmonic devices, thereby elucidating his stylistic features, linguistic preferences, thematic concerns, and literary influences. In doing so, it seeks to illuminate the literary identity of Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa, which has remained overshadowed by his political career as a statesman. The third chapter presents the transcribed critical text of the Divan. The fourth and final chapter contains a functional glossary appended to the edition. Through this study, the poems of a poet praised in the tezkires have been brought to light. By examining the reconstructed Divan, the thesis endeavors to situate Râʾif İsmâʿil Paşa within the tradition of eighteenthcentury Ottoman classical poetry. The functional glossary is designed both to facilitate scholarly engagement with the text and to reveal the particular semantic nuances the poet attributed to specific lexical items.