Abstract
PROFILE OF A COPYIST ACCORDING TO SEMİH TEZCAN’S NOTES
Before the invention of printing when books were copied by the copyists (called mustansihs meaning ‘transcriptionist’), there was a phenomenon of autograph copy or copies by the hand of the author. The fact that the business of copying was due to “the human hand” made a copyist’s physical and mental intervention in the text inevitable. Given this, as an attempt to address the question how and in what way one would make philological excavations and investigations in order to reach to a text by the hands of an author/poet without any intervention by the copyist, this study aims to provide a specimen of methods and arguments followed and made by Semih Tezcan while he was working on a 17th century copy of the 14th century mathnawi work Ferruh u Huma by Muhammed. While he was preparing a new edition of the work, Semih Tezcan tried to establish the most definite, sound and “authentic” text by not only focusing on the manuscript and its author but also by criticizing its copyist. By doing so, Tezcan managed to demonstrate the role and function of the copyist - that human being whom today’s text-oriented readers usually tend to forget to take into account.
Keywords
Mathnawi, Old Anatolian Turkish, Ferruh u Huma, copyist, copyist’s error, copyist’s fallacy.
