Abstract
Poetry Mecmua in Number 212 in Cairo National Library
Mecmuas serve as important sources contributing to our literature on various fronts. Opening the doors to the unforeseen, each mecmua has the potential of providing more than what is initially anticipated. Poetry mecmuas are among the mecmuas that can be often found on the shelves of libraries. They consist of poems of different types and forms collected by the poets themselves or poetry lovers. These poems might be the unknown works of famous poets or might belong to rather unknown poets. Moreover, they constitute quite valuable resources for the history of our literature by providing a comparison to detect different versions or missing pieces of a variety of poems. These new insights render a better assessment about the nature of these literary works. Aside from poems and similar texts, especially in their derkenar, mecmuas accommodate more information regarding the social life of the time or the subjects such as religion, medicine, music and astronomy. With this motivation, in this work we consider a poetry mecmua that, in our opinion, would significantly contribute to our literary collection. This mecmua, registered in The Egyptian National Library and Archives in Cario under number 212, includes “Ali es-seyyid” who is thought to be either the writer or the compiler. We also present a table following the guidelines of the Project of Systematical Categorization of Journals (Mecmuaların Sistematik Tasnifi Projesi MESTAP).
Keywords
Mecmua, Cem poets, gazel, matla, makta.