Original Persian Text

Metre: mef‘ūlü mefā‘īlü mefā‘īlü fe‘ūlün (hezec)

Eyyām-ı bahār āmed ü feryād hezārest
Yek gül be-murādem neşüküft īn çi behārest

In English

1. The days of spring have come, yet (what has come) is a thousand laments; not one rose has bloomed as I would wish, what kind of spring is this? ("Hezār" in Persian means both "a thousand" and the nightingale; the first line can also be understood as "the days of spring have come and the nightingale's lament has risen". Filiz Kılıç's translation takes the sense "a thousand laments".)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The couplet is in Persian, and since its two lines rhyme "hezārest / behārest" it is a matla (opening couplet); the rhyme is "-ār", the redif (refrain word) the suffix "-est" (is). The metre is the hezec family of aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "mef‘ūlü mefā‘īlü mefā‘īlü fe‘ūlün"; the biographical anthology (tezkire) does not state the metre, which emerges from scansion. Since Basîrî's Persian divan has not been published, the couplet is known today only from Âşık Çelebi's Meşâ'irü'ş-şu'arâ. Âşık Çelebi gives it at the end of the Basîrî entry with the words "Ve lehu" (and this too is his), after two Turkish couplets and another Persian opening couplet. The rest of the ghazal is not known. Filiz Kılıç translated the couplet into Turkish in a footnote to her edition; the translation here takes her interpretation as its basis and shows the word's second sense separately.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The subject of the couplet is the discord between the joy of the season and the lover's grief. Spring has come; in divan poetry spring means the rose, the nightingale and the gathering. But for the lover spring is not a joy but a "feryād", a lament. In the second line the poet says that while the whole garden blooms, not a single rose has opened as he would wish, and asks: what kind of spring is this? "Gül" here is both the rose of the garden and the beloved; the rose that does not bloom as he wishes is the beloved who shows the lover no favour.

The subtlest point of the couplet is the word "hezār". In Persian it denotes both the number "thousand" and the nightingale, believed to utter a thousand kinds of song; the nightingale is also called "hezār-dāstān", the bird of a thousand tales. Kılıç's translation says "there are a thousand laments"; on the other reading the line becomes "the days of spring have come, there is the nightingale's lament". Both senses suit the couplet, and the poet probably means to suggest both at once: the nightingale laments for the rose with the coming of spring, and the lover too seeks, with a thousand laments, his own rose that will not bloom. This is a fine example of double entendre (tevriye). The words "bahār" and "behār", two spellings of the same word, standing at the beginning and the end of the couplet, also frame it.

Historical Context

According to Âşık Çelebi, Basîrî was a poet who had been in the circle of Sultan Hüseyin Baykara, Ali Şîr Nevâyî and Câmî in Herat and came to the Ottoman lands in the time of Bayezid II with their letters. His Persian divan, whose only known manuscript is in the poet's own hand, contains twenty-three qasidas and 121 ghazals. The poetic examples Âşık Çelebi gives in his Basîrî entry consist of two Turkish couplets and two Persian opening couplets; the tezkire writer thus shows his poetry in both languages together. Latîfî too says that Basîrî had admired Persian and Turkish poems. Until the Persian divan is published, this couplet remains one of the few that represent Basîrî's Persian poetry.

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 1914). 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. 148, entry on Basîrî. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr

Academic studies

Books

Online sources