Mevlânâ Celaleddin-i Rumi’s world-renowned work, despite being written in Persian, Masnavi, is one of the most important sources that deeply influenced Turkish culture and literature with its literary and artistic aspects as well as its content. Although there were various attempts to translate the Masnavi into Turkish, aside from the commentaries that include translated sections, the complete translation of this voluminous and artistic work was only realized by Süleyman Nahîfî, an 18th-century poet. The poetic translation, completed in 1730, also served as an example for subsequent Masnavi translations. As stated in the preface of the work, Nahîfî’s translation method can be described as an effort to create a poetic text by preserving the meaning expressed by each couplet as much as possible rather than translating the source text word for word. This situation inevitably makes it necessary for the poet to reflect on his personal discretion and the style and expression he was influenced by while constructing the source text. In this article, Nahîfî’s highly acclaimed poetic Masnavi translation, known for his didactic poems in the Sebk-i Hindî style, which developed in different branches in our classical poetry, has been examined in terms of the linguistic and verbal characteristics of Sebk-i Hindî. The effects of the style identified in the examples have been indicated and presented in the study.

Keywords
Nahîfî, Masnavi Translation, Sebk-i Hindî