Yahya bey DUKAGJINI
BIOGRAPHY
Yahya bey Dukagjini (ca. 1498-ca. 1582) was a sixteenth-century
poet of Albanian origin who wrote in Turkish. He is known in
Turkish as Dukagin-zâde Yahyâ bey or Taslicali
Yahyâ bey, i.e. Yahya Bey of Dukagjini or Yahya Bey
of Tashlidja (Pljevlja) A scion of the Dukagjini tribe inhabiting
the barren Albanian alps north of the river Drin, he was taken
as a child by the Ottomans, trained and sent to serve among the
Janissaries. He is known as a young man to have taken part in
the Battle of Chaldiran under Sultan Selim in 1514 and in the
Egyptian campaign of 1516-1517. Indeed, he seems to have spent
much of his early years on various Ottoman campaigns from Vienna
to Tabriz. Yahya bey was not oblivious to his Albanian origin.
He notes this in his verse, claiming that he stemmed from a land
of cliffs and crags. He also tells us that he studied with the
famed legal scholar, poet and historian Kemâlpâshâzâde,
and presented his verse to Ibrahim Pasha and to the sultan. In
the wake of the death of Prince Mustafa, who was executed in
Konya in 1533 by his own father Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent
(r. 1520-1566), Yahya bey Dukagjini was exiled to the Balkans
where he took up an estate (fief) near Zvornik in Bosnia. In
1565, at a ripe age, he served with the Yahyâli corps at
the siege of Szigetvar. It was there that he composed a qasîde
and presented it to his patron, Sultan Suleiman. He thereafter
withdrew from worldly affairs and turned to mysticism, dying
in his eighties around the year 1582.
Yahya bey Dukagjini is the author of a large divan
of poems written in Ottoman Turkish and of a group of five mesnevî,
long narrative verse-romances. The most popular of the latter
is Shâh u gedâ (The King and the Beggar),
which he tells us he finished in just one week. This much-appreciated
metrical romance idealizes the pure love for an Istanbul youth
of unequalled beauty (stylized as the king because he reigns
over the heart) by a pious lover (stylized as the beggar because
of his suppliant longing). |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Early
Authors (16th - 18th centuries)
