Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün

Ḳaddine benzetdigiyçün servi gülşende şehā
Bāġbān miskine otlar yoldurur bād-ı ṣabā
Nāme iki yüzlü ḫāme dü zebān ben bī-zebān
Bilmezem ne vech ile i‘lām edem ḥālim saña
Tīr-i kīn dā’im deler dil sīne içre ey perī
Ṭāli‘imde var imiş sehm-i sa‘ādet ġālibā
Rūy u mūyın fikri ẕikri baña vird olalı
Hiç görünmez olupdur gözüme aġ u ḳara
Ey Basīrī olmuşam bīgāne ‘aḳl u hūşdan
Tā ki ol şūḫ-ı sitemkār ile oldum āşinā

In English

1. O my king, because he likened the cypress in the rose garden to your stature, the morning breeze sets the poor gardener to pulling weeds. (The gardener's punishment is to be put to a lowly task such as pulling weeds. The wind bending and tossing the grass in the garden also joins this scene. The detailed meaning of the couplet is not entirely certain.)

2. The letter is two-faced, the pen two-tongued, and I am tongueless; I do not know by what means to make my state known to you. (Paper has two faces, and the tip of a reed pen is split in two; the expressions "two-faced" and "two-tongued" also denote hypocrisy.)

3. O fairy, the arrow of spite forever pierces the heart within the breast; it seems there was in my fortune the share (the arrow) of felicity. ("Sehm" means both arrow and share, portion.)

4. Since thinking of and recalling his face and hair became my litany, neither white nor black has been visible to my eyes. (The face is white, the hair black; to be unable to tell white from black is to be beside oneself.)

5. O Basîrî, I have become a stranger to reason and sense since I became acquainted with that cruel, playful beauty.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a ghazal (gazel) of five couplets in the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün"; the source does not state the metre, which emerges from scansion. The ghazal has no redif (refrain word); the rhyme rests on the sound "-ā / -a": şehā, ṣabā, saña, ġālibā, ḳara, āşinā. The Turkish words "saña" and "ḳara" join the rhyme with a short vowel; this shows that the rhyme is loosely kept. The pen name (mahlas) appears in the last couplet in the spelling "Basīrī".

This ghazal is not among the Turkish poems in Basîrî's divan manuscript. Ahmet Kartal gives it under the heading "Basîrî'nin Diğer Şiirleri" (Basîrî's other poems), from Cemal Kurnaz's book of 1999; Kurnaz's source is not stated in the article. The spelling of the text is close to modern orthography ("edem", "olmuşam"). To whom and when it was written is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first couplet tells a small story built with garden images. In divan poetry the beloved's stature is likened to the cypress; but in this couplet the comparison counts as an offence, because the cypress is no match for the beloved's stature. The gardener who likened the cypress to the beloved's stature is set to pulling weeds by the morning breeze. This way of turning the inadequacy of a comparison into a scene of punishment is close to the figure called hüsn-i talil (fanciful aetiology, giving a poetic cause to a natural event): the wind bending and tossing the grass in the garden is interpreted as the gardener's punishment.

The second couplet is the most skilful of the ghazal. The letter is "two-faced", because paper has two faces; the pen is "dü zebān", two-tongued, because the tip of a reed pen is split down the middle. But "two-faced" and "two-tongued" also denote hypocrisy, not keeping one's word. Against these two instruments the lover is "bī-zebān", tongueless. To make his state known to the beloved he can trust neither letter nor pen, and he himself cannot speak. Reading the words both as qualities of objects and as qualities of people builds a chain of double entendres (tevriye) in the couplet.

In the third couplet the word "sehm" is used in its senses of arrow and share. The beloved's arrow of spite pierces the lover's heart; the lover counts this arrow as the "sehm-i saadet" of his fortune, his share of felicity. Seeing the arrow that gives pain as a share of happiness shows the lover's attitude of counting everything that comes from the beloved as a blessing. In the fourth couplet face (rūy) and hair (mūy) form a rhyming pair; white and black in the second line answer these two words in order. This is a clear example of the figure of leff ü neşr (lapping and unlapping, pairing terms with their counterparts). The lover has thought so much of the white of the face and the black of the hair that he can no longer tell white from black. In the last couplet the contrast between "bīgāne" (stranger) and "āşinā" (acquainted) gathers up the ghazal: the lover who has become acquainted with the beloved has become a stranger to reason.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

  • Ahmet Kartal, "Basîrî ve Türkçe Şiirleri", İlmî Araştırmalar: Dil, Edebiyat, Tarih İncelemeleri 10 (2000), pp. 77-96, "Basîrî'nin Diğer Şiirleri", ghazal 4: p. 96 (note 24: Kurnaz 1999, pp. 142-143), https://acikerisim.fsm.edu.tr/xmlui/handle/11352/1033.
  • Cemal Kurnaz, Türkiye-Orta Asya Edebî İlişkileri, Ankara: Akçağ Yayınları, 1999, pp. 142-143 (from Kartal 2000's quotation; the book itself was not seen).

Online sources