Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün

Nigâr-ı ḫâl-dâra öykünürsin
Nedür ey mâh bu yüzler ḳarası

In English

1. O moon, you imitate the beloved with the beauty spot; then what is this blackening of your face? (The dark marks on the moon's face are presented as a shame, a "black face", brought on by its attempt to imitate the beauty spot on the beloved's face.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The couplet is the last of those given under the heading "Velehu" (also his) in Latîfî's entry on Sâfî. Since its two lines do not rhyme, it must come from the body of a ghazal. The metre is from the hezec family of aruz (quantitative metre), "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün"; in scansion a further short syllable is counted after the long syllables of the words "ḫâl" and "mâh". To whom and when it was written is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet is short but rests on a two-layered conceit. In divan poetry the beloved's face is likened to the moon, and the mole on her cheek is counted an ornament that heightens her beauty. The moon's face, too, has dark marks visible to the naked eye. Sâfî attributes these marks to the moon's imitation of the beloved: the moon wished to look like the beloved with her beauty spot, but marks appeared on its face instead of a mole. This idea, which finds a poetic cause for an event in nature, is a fine example of poetic aetiology (hüsn-i talil).

The second layer lies in the idiom. In Turkish "yüz karası", blackness of face, means a shame or disgrace that dishonours a person. The moon's marks are both, literally, dark patches on the face and, figuratively, a disgrace: the penalty for presuming to imitate the beloved and to rival her beauty. Thus a contrast is drawn between mole and mark, beauty and shame, and the old comparison between "mâh", the moon, and "nigâr", the beloved, is overturned in the beloved's favour. Applying an everyday idiom to the heavenly bodies accords with Latîfî's description of Sâfî as a master of proverbs and idioms.

Bibliography

  • Latîfî, Tezkiretü'ş-şu'arâ ve Tabsıratü'n-nuzamâ, ed. Rıdvan Canım, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yay., 2018 (e-book), p. 322, entry on Sâfî. ekitap.ktb.gov.tr