Many years ago I became interested in Ali Ufki, a Polish-born Reformed Christian who in his youth was abducted by Tatars, sold to the Ottoman Sultan, nominally converted to Islam, and became treasurer, translator, and musician to the Sultan's court. Among his brilliant accomplishments, he translated the Bible into Turkish (which is how my late father knew him) and also the first 14 of the Genevan Psalms.
I have just discovered the Kitab-ı Mukaddes Şirketi (Bible Society of Turkey) YouTube channel, which contains performances of all 14 of Ali Ufki's Psalms: Ali Ufkî Bey’in Bestelediği Mezmurlar. Hearing this seemingly exotic music, one would scarcely believe that it had originated with the Reformation in western Europe. Here is one such performance below:
Intriguing, no? Do listen to the entire playlist. And just imagine if Ali Ufki (born Wojciech Bobowski) had had the opportunity to translate all 150 of the Psalms! Might the history of the eastern Mediterranean have been utterly different? Could the gospel have spread throughout the Ottoman Empire?
7 comments:
How sad more could not have been done.
Fascinating! Who would have guessed?
This guy was really awesome.
Not only did he translated some of the genevan psalms, he also translated the entire bible and the anglican cathecism into Ottoman Turkish!
Unfortunately, he converted to Islam.
Indeed, but I continue to wonder whether his conversion was genuine. Anyone so dedicated to putting the Bible, the C of E Catechism, and the Psalms in Turkish must have retained something of his childhood faith.
Agreed at least in part. However, in an era when books were scarce and not widely distributed, it was necessary for people to translate things in order to rebut and refute them.
We in the English-speaking world often take for granted today that pretty much everything of importance is available in English or soon will be. That wasn't the case in the 1500s or 1600s.
I'd want to know if he translated Christian documents into Turkish so the Turkish leaders would understand what they were fighting, or if he did so to promote what those documents were teaching -- and when dealing with the realities of underground Christianity and persecution, sometimes those questions are unanswerable because people under persecution don't leave written evidence that could have gotten them killed or thrown into prisons.
What a wonderful website, congratulations and thank you for your hard work! If you are interested in Wojciech Bobowski/Ali Ufki you might want to read my recent articles and book about him (one - about the Ottoman version of the Genevan Psalter is here: https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/ba/article/view/14575 and about his biography: https://journals.pan.pl/dlibra/publication/150675/edition/132001/content ).
There is no evidence that he was born in a family of Reformed faith. Lviv-branch of the Bobowscy family were actually officially Catholics at that time, but it still does not rule out the possibility of Bobowski's being a "protestant" in his youth. We probably will never know.
His translations of religious texts were commissions (in case of the texts mentioned here, commissioned by Dutch (Bible and probably psalms) and English (catechism) diplomats and scholars) and it was simply his job to translate them. Was there any "spiritual" or "ideological" agenda in his mind when he did the work? Perhaps. Levinius Warner and his colleagues, who commissioned the Bible translation for sure hoped and believed that this work will help with spreading the reformed faith in the Ottoman Empire (the idea known today as 'calvinoturcism'). Bobowski himself was a spiritual-oriented intellectual and his transcultural identity impacted his musical and translational output deeply. But I believe that he didn't have to be ideologically involved in calvinoturcism to provide these well thought-through tranlsations. He was simply good at his artistic- and intellectual job ;)
Thank you so much for these articles!
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