Yusuf Meddah

He used the pen name Yusuf Meddah most commonly in his work, though he also used other pen names like Yusufi and Yusuf-i Meddah.[1][2]

Very little is known about the life of Yusuf Meddah. His birth date and place are unknown, but he is estimated to have lived at the beginning of the 14th century.[1][2] He was fluent in Azerbaijani and is considered one of the main representatives of the early development period of Azerbaijani literature.[3] From his works, it can be inferred that he was well-educated and fluent in Arabic and Persian, as well as knowledgeable in religious sciences. He spent his early years in Azerbaijan before moving to Konya and joining the Mevlevi Order. As can be inferred from the title Meddah, he travelled from city to city and recited poems in front of the public. He lived in various regions such as Erzincan, Ankara, Sivas, and Kastamonu and was well known in these places. He is believed to have lived a long life. His death date and place are unknown.[1][2]

Yusuf Meddah had a strong command of his Turkic language. He was familiar with divan literature of his time and enriched his poems with verses, hadiths, proverbs, and idioms. He was knowledgeable in aruz prosody and used folk sayings and expressions in his works, which also included literary arts.[1]

His most famous work is Varqa ve Gülşah, which consists of approximately 1700 couplets written in aruz form. The work was started in 1342–1343 in Sivas and is based on an Arabic folk tale. It is the first rendition of the folktale in the literature of Turkic languages. It tells the tragic love story of Varqa and Gülşah, who fall in love but are unable to marry due to various incidents. In the end, Gülşah marries a local king and Varqa takes his own life. Upon visiting Varqa's grave, Gülşah also takes her own life. The poem is divided into six parts, each called a meclis (lit. 'council'), and contains twelve ghazals that the heroes sing to each other.[1][2] The language of the work is simple. According to Orhan Aytuğ Tolu, Meddah wrote the poem "as if he were telling a story in a public assembly".[4]

In addition to Varqa ve Gülşah, Meddah has other notable works. These include Hâmûşnâme, a Persian mathnawi written in 1300 in Erzincan. Another work is Dâsitân-ı İblîs aleyhi’l-la‘ne, an Azerbaijani translation of an Arabic work with many additions by Meddah, consisting of 240 couplets. Meddah also wrote Maktel-i Hüseyn, a mathnawi with almost three thousand couplets, translated from the work of the same name by Ebû Mihnef, a 14th-century historian, and written in August 1362. [1][2]