Original Persian Text

Metre: mef‘ūlü fā‘ilātü mefā‘īlü fā‘ilün (muzâri)

Tā ḫāk-i pāyet ez naẓar-ı ehl-i derd reft
Çendān girīst dīde ki deryā be-gerd reft

In English

1. Since the dust of your feet went from the sight of the people of pain, the eye has wept so much that... The end of the second line has been understood in two ways. According to the translation in Filiz Kılıç's edition of Âşık Çelebi, "the sea turned to dust and was gone", that is, beside the tears the sea shrank to the size of a speck of dust. According to Rıdvan Canım's translation of Latîfî and Mustafa İsen's of the Künhü'l-ahbâr, it "became a sea and flowed away", that is, the tears turned into a sea and ran off.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The couplet is in Persian, and since its two lines rhyme "derd reft / gerd reft" it is a matla (opening couplet); the redif (refrain word) is "reft" (went), the rhyme the sound "-erd". The metre is the pattern "mef‘ūlü fā‘ilātü mefā‘īlü fā‘ilün" of the muzâri family of aruz (quantitative metre); the anthologies give no metre, and the pattern emerges from scansion. Since Basîrî's Persian divan has not been published, the couplet is known today only from the biographical anthologies of poets (tezkire): Latîfî gives it under the heading "Maṭla‘-ı Fârisî" among Basîrî's sample couplets, Âşık Çelebi with "Ve lehu" together with two Turkish couplets and one more Persian couplet, and Gelibolulu Âlî in Arabic script in the anthology section of the Künhü'l-ahbâr. Its presence in three anthologies shows that it was counted among Basîrî's well-known Persian opening couplets. The rest of the ghazal is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The subject of the couplet is separation. In divan poetry the dust of the beloved's feet (ḫāk-i pā) is a precious thing; lovers wish to put it on their eyes like kohl. The beloved no longer passes before the "people of pain", the lovers; once her footprint is gone from sight, the eyes begin to weep. This link between the dust leaving the eye and the tears flowing from it binds the first line of the couplet to the second.

The phrase "deryā be-gerd reft" in the second line has been understood in two ways. In Kılıç's translation "gerd" means dust: the eyes have wept so much that beside these tears the sea has turned to dust and become very small. In this reading there is a congruence of images (tenasüp) between the two lines: "ḫāk" (dust, earth) in the first and "gerd" (dust) in the second call to each other, and the departure of the dust of the feet is answered by the sea turning to dust. In the translations of Canım and İsen, on the other hand, the eye "became a sea and flowed away", that is, the tears became a sea and ran off. In both readings the figure on which the couplet rests is hyperbole: the lover's tears are greater than the sea. Kılıç's reading has been followed here, and the other reading is also shown in the translation.

Historical Context

According to the biographical anthologies, Basîrî was a poet who had been in the circle of Sultan Hüseyin Baykara, Ali Şîr Nevâyî and Jâmî in Herat and came to the Ottoman lands in the time of Bayezid II with their letters. His Persian divan, whose only known copy is in the poet's own hand, contains 23 kasides (qasidas) and 121 ghazals; his Turkish poems stand at the end of this divan. Latîfî says that he had admired poems in both Persian and Turkish; Âlî too notes that, although Persian, Basîrî handled Turkish idioms well. This couplet is one of the few examples the anthologists chose from his Persian poetry, and until the Persian divan is published it remains one of a handful of couplets representing this side of Basîrî.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ'irü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Filiz Kılıç, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yay., 2018 (e-book), p. 182, entry on Basîrî (translation: note 1913). ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
  • Latîfî, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ ve Tabsıratü'n-nuzamâ, ed. Rıdvan Canım, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yay., 2018 (e-book), p. 149, entry on Basîrî. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
  • 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