Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâʿilâtün fâʿilâtün fâʿilâtün fâʿilün (metre identified by us)

Âşık-ı şûrîde-hâlem kûy-ı yâre gelmişem
Ben bu gün Ferhâd-ı aşkem dağı taşı delmişem

In English

1. I am a lover in a distracted state, I have come to the beloved's quarter; today I am the Ferhad of love, I have pierced mountain and rock.

Literary and Historical Commentary

A Line Always on His Lips

Hüsameddin does not present this couplet as Deli Seyfî Bey's poem. He says that the man, who "şâ'irlenirdi", played at being a poet, had made the couplet his "vird-i zebân", something he never stopped repeating. Vird is the prayer a dervish recites a fixed number of times every day; the choice of word suggests that this Amasya bey, given to drink and remembered as an idler, repeated the couplet in the street and the tavern like a prayer. It may be his own, or it may have been heard from a folk song or a minstrel. We found no other record of it in the sources we searched.

Ferhad and the Dialect

The dialect of the couplet shows at once in the forms "hâlem, gelmişem, aşkem, delmişem". The first person singular formed with "-em" is closer to the dialects of Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia, and to minstrel poetry sung in aruz, than to the Turkish of Istanbul. Ferhad is the legendary lover who pierced Mount Bîsütûn for Şîrîn; in divan poetry he is the lover who undertakes the impossible and dies without union. The speaker presents himself as one who has finished Ferhad's labour, pierced mountain and rock and reached the beloved's door. Beside the ruined figure Hüsameddin draws, the claim reads like a bitter joke; the man who repeated it was on Mecnun's road rather than Ferhad's. This last remark arises not from the text but from setting the couplet beside the entry.

The four-generation story of his cavalry family is told in Deli Seyfî Bey (Yeğen Bekiroğlu).

Bibliography

Online sources