Nedim

Ahmed Nedim was one of the most celebrated Ottoman poets of the early 18th century, the age later called the Tulip Era, a period of peace, luxury and garden-pavilion culture in Istanbul. He wrote the courtly ghazel and became librarian and boon-companion of the Grand Vezir Ibrahim Pasha.

He died in October 1730, when the palace was stormed in the uprising that overthrew Sultan Ahmed III. E. J. W. Gibb, whose History of Ottoman Poetry gives the first sustained English account of him, warned that Nedim's delicate verbal music could scarcely survive translation. The poems below are Gibb's renderings of ghazels from the fourth volume of that history.