Bill Hickman's translation of Sheyyad Hamza's The Story of Joseph is written as primary course material for the fields of Turkish literature, Middle East, Islam, folklore, and comparative literature in translation courses. Considering this story's unique and prevalent role in world literature and the lack of available old Ottoman literary texts in English, Hickman's translation fills a gap direly needed. This is the first translation of the Joseph/Yusuf Story in the mesnevi genre (poetic romance novel). Western audiences might find the original text of the story in Genesis of the Hebrew Bible and in the twelfth chapter of the Qurʾan. It is interesting to see the details of Joseph's story in the Old Testament intertwined in a fourteenth century Ottoman literary text. Hickman's small volume of translation makes it available for western audiences to see the unique and diverse nature of a medieval morality play in Ottoman and Islamic Literature. This translation is a great contribution to the fields of literature and religious studies. Hickman worked on Hamza's Yusuf mesnevi for his Ph.D. dissertation as a graduate student. Since only a few examples of Ottoman literary texts were translated into English, he thought it would be a relevant contribution to world literature: “If modern readers are unfamiliar with the story in either of its sacred book settings, they may have encountered it as secular reformulations: modern novel, stage play, Broadway musical” (xv).
This romance has been the most mentioned, expanded, and conflated narrative in Islamic and world literature. The twelfth chapter of the Qurʾan is unique because, unlike other chapters, it focuses on a single character and narrates a chronological life story of the prophet Yusuf from an archetypal and metaphorical perspective relating it to anyone with human nature, full of weaknesses and strengths. It is a story of wisdom, and shows the transformation of its characters. This chapter is depicted as the best of the stories in the Qurʾan and had a great influence on Persian, Turkish, and Arabic literary traditions; it has over two hundred literary treatments in many different languages in the World literature.
Although similar in terms of plot, each version of Yusuf and Zeliha (as Hamza called it) differs both in detail and themes, reflecting the theological teachings and worldviews of religious and moral values. The story has been rewritten using a variety of narrative features in interpretive communities, both in post-biblical and post-Qurʾanic literatures. Since the beginning of Islam, Islamic communities considered Abrahamic traditions as common ground with Islam, and they continued transmitting stories from Christian and Jewish sources both orally and in written forms.
There are many retellings of Joseph's Story written between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth century in Ottoman literature. Şheyyad Hamza, who wrote one of the earliest forms of Joseph's Story in a poetic mesnevi genre, was an Anatolian poet who lived towards the end of the thirteenth century in Akşehir, Konya, Turkey. Yusuf and Zeliha is his only known work. Its language is simple and pure old Anatolian Turkish. His mesnevi was written in a simplified poetic scale of aruz form in its original Ottoman Turkish language.
Hickman in his translation kept a prose style summarizing the content to give access to the readers. Compared to the sizes of the original 1529 couplets into the small volume translation of eighty-three pages, it is clear that some poetic details are lost. It attempts primarily to deliver the content while giving an idea of an early manuscript and offers a different perspective to the audience with fictive imaginary details. Dehri Dilçin points out the possibility that the origin of this work might be traced back to an oral religious tradition before its written form. Its style and language show characteristics of old Oghuz Turkish (Dilçin, Şeyyad Hamza, Yusuf ve Zeliha, İstanbul: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1946, 7–8). It enriches the imagination with supernatural events, conversations between angels and people, and extraordinary occasions, and it uses an epic language of mesnevi genre similar to Dede Korkut's stories in Oghuz Turkish. This genre, at the same time, has characteristics of the stories of the itinerant dervishes and their priorities and concerns of enlightening the people in the regions where they traveled.
Sheyyad Hamza's mesnevi could be considered a fourteenth century poetic romance novel to an audience of oral literature in order to entertain with such embellishments from the Old Testament version of Joseph's story. Even though the details in Şheyyad Hamza's Yusuf and Zeliha differ from other Yusuf mesnevis, for example, Yusuf's separation from his father Yakub/Jacob is viewed as a fair treatment of predestination, which is an embellishment based on the text in Genesis. He mentions that Yakub previously sold the son of his concubine to provide breast milk for Yusuf. For Hamza, Yakub's injustice to this concubine brought him similar suffering as a result of the justice of Divine Determining. This and many other details are not relevant to the Qurʾan and we see how Hamza in the fourteenth century borrowed the details from the Hebrew Bible and embellished on it. Moreover, after the death of Yusuf and Zeliha, the famine begins, as predicted by Yusuf in his interpretation of the King's (Pharaoh in Biblical text) dream. He also describes how, in the Old Testament, when the Egyptians placed Yusuf's coffin into the Nile, the famine miraculously ended. Later, Moses finds the coffin and takes it to Jacob's/Yakub's tomb.
What makes Hickman's work significant is that it revives the Old Testament and the Qurʾan's Yusuf/Joseph for Western audiences in a new light. Anyone interested would be able to see how the Biblical and Qurʾanic Joseph/Yusuf is depicted in Ottoman Literature and resurrected to a new modern life. Through Hickman's translation, the modern audience is introduced to the worldview of a fourteenth century poet in order to understand an inter-religious and literary text and how it used archetypal characters to entertain and inspire.
