Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün

Göňül her naġme kim çeng-i ġamıňda iḫtirâ‘ eyler
Ḳoyup elden felekde Zühre sazazın istimâ‘ eyler

In English

1. Whatever melody the heart invents on the harp of grief for you, Venus in the heavens lays down her instrument and listens to it.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The couplet is the opening couplet (matla) of a ghazal and is written in the hezec pattern "Mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün"; the identification of the metre is ours. The refrain (redif) is "eyler" (does), and the rhyme is the sound "-â'" in the words "ihtirâ'" and "istimâ'". Because Hakverdioğlu's article gives only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, only this couplet could be published here. The spelling "sazazın" in the article must be a typesetting error; the correct form is "sâzın" (her instrument), and the rendering follows this reading. The text has been left as it stands in the article.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet is built on images of music. The "çeng" is a stringed, triangular instrument held in the lap; in divan poetry it is a symbol both of the music of gatherings and of the lamenting lover, because its bent posture and moaning sound are likened to the lover. Here Bâkî forms the phrase "çeng-i gam", the harp of grief: the lover's heart plays the sorrow the beloved gives like an instrument and invents a new melody each time. In the second line the scene moves to the sky. In old astronomy and legend the planet Zühre, that is Venus, was held to be the musician of the heavens, seated in the third sphere and playing the harp or the saz. That the most skilful musician of the heavens should lay down her own instrument and listen to the melody of grief rising from the lover's heart says, through poetic aetiology (hüsn-i talil) and hyperbole, that the lover's pain is more moving than the finest music. There is a strong congruence of images (tenasüp) from the field of music among the words çeng, nağme (melody), saz and istimâ' (listening).

Historical Context

The couplet is on page 94 of the Merzifon Cönkü, introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019. Hakverdioğlu shows that the poem is on page 151 of Sabahattin Küçük's edition of the Bâkî Dîvânı; the full text of the poem is there. Since the article gives only the opening couplet, it is not known whether the ghazal is recorded in the cönk in full or in part. That Bâkî's ghazals entered a Merzifon collection, in the same notebook as the minstrels' koşmas, some three centuries after sixteenth-century Istanbul shows that divan poetry reached its readers in the provinces. For the poet's life and his other ghazals in the cönk, see the page on Bâkî.

Bibliography

  • Metin Hakverdioğlu, "Merzifon Cönkü", idil, 8(57), 2019, p. 555 (Cönk, p. 94). https://www.idildergisi.com/makale/pdf/1552911669.pdf
  • Sabahattin Küçük (ed.), Bâkî Dîvânı, Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1994, p. 151 (as cited by Hakverdioğlu 2019).

Online sources