Dadaloğlu
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Dadaloğlu is one of the literary titans of the Turkish oral tradition. He is a nomadic Turkish warrior minstrel who is thought to have lived approximately between the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in the region of Taurus mountains. He is famous for his poems against Ottoman Empire's forced settlement policies directed at the nomadic tribes. His poems give insight to the nomadic Turkish life, the fights among tribes, and the rebellion of tribesmen.
The poems below are called "koçaklama", which is a form of epic folk poem that focuses on heroism and gallantry in combats (Başgöz, p. 331).
[The Roads that Cross the Sublime Mountain are Ours]*
Kalktı göç eyledi Avşar elleri
Ağır ağır giden eller bizimdir
Arap atlar yakın eyler ırağı
Yüce dağdan aşan yollar bizimdir
Belimizde kılıcımız kirmani
Taşı deler mızrağımızın temreni
Hakkımızda devlet etmiş fermanı
Ferman padişahın dağlar bizimdir
Dadaloğlu’m yarın kavga kurulur
Öter tüfek davlumbazlar vurulur
Nice koç yiğitler yere serilir
Ölen ölür kalan sağlar bizimdir
The Avşar tribes have struck camp and taken to the road,
Those who move at a stately pace are ours
Arabian horses draw the far near,
The roads that cross the sublime mountain are ours.
The swords at our waists are of kirmani,
The tips of our spears pierce stone.
The state has issued its decree against us,
The decree is the Sultan's, but the mountains are ours.
Dadaloğlu says, tomorrow brings battle,
Muskets will sing, the war drums will resound,
Many a valiant warrior will be laid upon the ground.
Those who die, die; the living who remain are ours.
English: Hüseyin Alhas
Translator's note: I wish to comment briefly on three elements of the poem whose significance in Turkish exceeds what my translation has been able to carry into English. The kirmani of the second stanza names a type of curved blade associated with the Persian city of Kirman, functioning in Turkish much as "Damascus steel" does in English, that is, as a metonym for craftsmanship, prestige, and inherited martial honour, and its appearance at the warrior's waist marks him as the bearer of a tradition rather than merely as an armed man. The "ferman", the Ottoman imperial decree, refers here specifically to the nineteenth-century policy of forced settlement, iskân, by which the central state, particularly under the Fırka-i İslâhiyye expedition of 1865, sought to sedentarise the Avşar and other Turkmen tribes of the Taurus and Çukurova regions, dismantling a pastoral way of life that had persisted for centuries. The closing line, "ölen ölür kalan sağlar bizimdir", has long since passed into Turkish as a proverbial formulation of defiant survival, invoked well beyond its original tribal and historical setting whenever speakers wish to assert continuity in the face of loss, and its presence at the end of Dadaloğlu's koçaklama gives the poem its enduring afterlife in modern Turkish memory.
[Surrendering a Horse]
Yara yara bir kavgaya girmedik
Sağa sola kılıçları vurmadık
At üstünde döğüşerek ölmedik
Ok değmeden gözlerimiz kör oldu
Birden kapıştılar kulunu, tayı
Kanı garrah oldu yoksulu, bayı
Böyle sağ gezmeden ölmemiz iyi
Mahşerece söylenecek şor oldu
Bütün iskan oldu Avşarlar, Kürtler
Yürekten mi çıkar ol acı dertler
Mezada döküldü boynu uzun atlar
At vermemiz iskânlıktan güç oldu.
Öğüt versen öğütlerden almayan
Çağırınca mencilise gelmeyen
Yurtlarının kıymetini bilmeyen
Her birisi bir kötüye kul oldu
Der Dadaloğlu’m da sözün sırası
Yara biter bitmez dilin yarası
Mağırıbınan maşırığın arası
Size bol da bizim ele dar oldu
We did not cut our way into a fight,
We did not strike our swords to right and left,
We did not die fighting on horseback,
Our eyes were blinded before an arrow ever touched them.
All at once, they swarmed upon the foal and colt,
The poor and the rich were plundered.
It was better to die than to live like this;
Thus we faded into a song to be sung till the end of days
The Avşars and the Kurds were all forced into settlement,
Can such bitter sorrows ever depart the heart?
The long-necked horses ended up at auction,
Surrendering a horse was harder than the settlement itself.
Those who would not heed the counsel offered them,
Those who would not come when summoned to the council,
Those who did not know the worth of their own homeland,
Each became servant of a wicked man
Dadaloğlu says, it is time to speak:
Wounds may close, but the wound strby the tongue will not.
The span between the west and the east
Was wide enough for you, yet too narrow for our people.
English: Hüseyin Alhas
Translator's note: I would like to indicate that the phrase "Mağırıbınan maşırığın arası," which I have rendered as "the span between the west and the east," draws on the Arabic-derived terms Maġrib and Maşrik, the place of the sun's setting and the place of its rising, which together denote not merely the cardinal directions but the entire inhabited world from Morocco to the eastern limits of the Islamic oikoumene. The line therefore carries a cosmographical breadth that the plain English "west and east" can only suggest: the speaker is saying that the whole compass of the known world, vast enough to contain those who issued the decree, has nevertheless been made too narrow for his own people, and the rhetorical force depends on the sudden contraction from the universal to the tribal.
* The titles of Dadaloğlu's poems throughout this page are my own, since the poems of this oral tradition are conventionally untitled and are identified instead by their opening lines or refrains.
Source: Başgöz, İlhan. "Turkish Folk Stories about the Lives of Minstrels." The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 65, 258. (2022): 331-39. JSTOR.
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