Aziz Efendi's Muhayyelât: Adaptation and Literary Modernity

Muhayyelât (c. 1796), a collection of mystical and fantastic tales by Giritli Ali Aziz Efendi (d. 1798), is a title often mentioned in scholarship aiming to trace the beginnings of Turkish literary modernity before the Tanzimat period. Today commonly considered a proto-novelistic narrative heralding some of the formal transformations of the second half of the nineteenth century,¹ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Muhayyelât was considered a somewhat objectionable and outdated work. As such, its reception and appraisal over the centuries have been intimately tied up with developing conceptualizations of literary modernity in the Ottoman-Turkish context. In the following article, I will briefly introduce Aziz Efendi and his Muhayyelât, and then I will underline and discuss a few moments from the history of this text's reception which I believe embody these evolving conceptualizations of literary modernity. Even as the value attributed to the text is revised, the "modernity" of the text is often ascribed to its "local color" or partial realism, and its original innovations in form and content. This, ultimately, serves to overshadow its relationship to a dense network of texts that are the translations, adaptations and pastiches of "Oriental" tales, following Antoine Galland's translation of The Thousand and One Nights into French in the early eighteenth century. In what follows, I will touch briefly on the history of these translations, and will ask whether, in the era of "world literature," we can say something new about both Muhayyelât and literary modernity as a whole by discussing its status as adaptation; that is to say, by regarding Muhayyelât as part of a vast world of texts, rather than a singular moment that is only meaningful in the context of Turkish literature.

Giritli Ali Aziz Efendi was an Ottoman official who was appointed as the empire's first permanent emissary to Prussia in 1796. He died in Berlin in the fall of 1798. Muhayyelât, his best-known work, was probably completed around 1796 (H. 1211). It consists of three independent chapters, each of which is called a "hayal," with the first titled "Hayal-i Evvel" and so on. Each hayal consists of a frame story and several embedded tales. The stories contain many supernatural elements as well as religious (specifically Sufi) themes and motifs, but they also contain multiple instances of realistic dialogue, and descriptions of contemporary settings.² According to Andreas Tietze's 1948 article, from among the twenty or so tales (including the frame stories) included in Muhayyelât, four are from Antoine Galland's translation of The Thousand and One Nights, and eight are from François Pétis de la Croix's Les Mille et un Jours, or The Thousand and One Days, another collection of "Oriental tales" that appeared shortly after the success of Galland's translation, in 1710.³

Preserved in manuscript form for several decades after the author's death, Muhayyelât first appeared in print in 1852. Its subsequent popularity in the latter half of the nineteenth century is evidenced by the several references Tanzimat-era intellectuals made to the work. Muallim Nâci (1850–1894), for example, states that his pseudonym "Nâci" was inspired by the character Nâci Billah in the third hayal, even though as a youth he did not admire Muhayyelât because he considered it a mere collection of made-up stories (mevhumattan, as quoted in Duymaz).⁴ Scottish Orientalist E. J. W. Gibb (1857–1901), who translated the second hayal into English in 1888, asserts in his preface that "the collection seems to have been made with the view of exalting the Occult Sciences as practiced by the Dervishes," and unfavorably compares its language, which he views as outdated and bombastic, to that of Tanzimat-era writers.⁵ Note how both commentators are concerned with the truth value of the stories and the supposed real-life effects they have on real people, and seem to believe these tales are meant to be taken...