Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün

Derzioġlı gök durur cān pāresi
Döne döne olmışam āvāresi

In English

1. The tailor's son is a "gök" piece of my soul; turning and turning, I have become his vagabond. (The meaning of the word "gök" here is not certain. In its senses of sky and blue it may liken the beloved to the heavens; since in Turkish it also means fresh, unripe, it may describe a very young beauty. "Pâre" means both piece and a tailor's piece of cloth.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

Since its two lines rhyme "pāresi / āvāresi", the couplet is a matla (opening couplet). The rhyme is the sound "-āre", the redif (refrain word) the suffix "-si". The metre is the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün"; the edition does not state the metre, which emerges from scansion. It stands in Ahmet Kartal's edition under the heading "Matla" as number LV and is the last of the single couplets at the end of the divan manuscript. It may have been composed as the opening couplet of a ghazal and left unfinished; the rest of the ghazal is not known. For whom the couplet was said is not known either; "Derzioġlı" may be a nickname, or a young beauty who really was a tailor's son.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

In divan poetry it is a familiar manner to refer to the beloved as a craftsman's apprentice or a craftsman's son; the beloved's trade supplies the material for the similes. Here the beloved is a tailor's son, and the words of the couplet carry allusions to the world of tailoring. "Cān pāresi", piece of the soul, is a common term of endearment for the beloved; but "pāre" is also a piece of cloth, a patch. That the tailor's son is a "piece of the soul" thus also links him with the pieces of cloth in the tailor's shop. This usage may count as a double entendre (tevriye). The word "derzi" itself derives from the Persian "derz", seam; all the words of the couplet circle around this shop.

The meaning of the word "gök" is not clear. Read in the sense of sky, it forms a congruence of images (tenasüp) with "döne döne", turning and turning, in the second line: in divan poetry the firmament, the dome of heaven, turns without rest; if the beloved is the sky, the lover is a vagabond forever circling round him. The word also denotes the colour blue; in that case it may point to one of the tailor's cloth colours. Since "gök" is also used in Turkish for raw, unripe fruit, it may be saying that the beloved is very young. Which meaning is intended cannot be drawn from the text with certainty; this is indicated in the translation.

In the second line the doubled "döne döne" expresses the lover's wandering round the beloved and his remaining "āvāre", homeless and adrift. The lover roaming the beloved's quarter is a familiar scene of divan poetry. With its plain Turkish words and a type of beloved taken from everyday life, the couplet is an example in keeping with the tezkire judgements that Basîrî used Turkish expressions well. Gelibolulu Âlî writes that, although a Persian, he grasped Turkish phrases and the idioms of spoken language well.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, Künhü'l-ahbâr'ın Tezkire Kısmı, ed. Mustafa İsen, Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 1994, p. 152, entry on Basîrî.

Academic studies

Books

Online sources