Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11'li hece ölçüsü

Yâr neden ṭatlanır neden ḫoşlanır
Bilmem bu yâr neniň mübtelâsıdır
Gâh sögünür gönül gâh ateşlenir
Ne çâre çekmeyem ‘aşḳ belâsıdır

In English

1. What makes the beloved grow sweet, what pleases her? I do not know what this beloved is so taken with. The heart now dies down, now flares up again; there is no help for it, I cannot but bear it, for this is the affliction of love.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The quatrain is the beginning of a koşma on page 24 of the Merzifon Cönkü. Since Metin Hakverdioğlu gives only the first stanza of each poem in the cönk, the number of quatrains and the closing stanza with the pen name are unknown. The lines have eleven syllables with a caesura after the sixth; the syllable count is ours. The second and fourth lines rhyme in "mübtelâsıdır" and "belâsıdır"; "hoşlanır" and "ateşlenir" in the first and third lines also echo each other. It is not known to whom the poem was addressed.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain gives the words of a lover bewildered by the changing moods of the beloved. The first two lines are built of questions following one another: what makes the beloved sweet, what pleases her, what is she taken with. The lover does not know the answers and says so openly. In the third line the gaze turns from the beloved to the lover's own heart. "Sögünür" is a dialect form of the verb "sönmek" (to die down, to be extinguished), which also appears in the cönk in a line by Fethî as "söyünmez"; the heart now dies down, now catches fire. A fire thought to be out that blazes up again is a common image for love that continues beyond the lover's will. The last line closes this helplessness with surrender: the affliction of love must be borne, for there is no other way. The plain language together with Arabic loanwords such as "mübtelâ" and "belâ" suits the manner of nineteenth-century minstrels, who joined popular speech with the vocabulary of divan poetry.

Historical Context

The koşma is recorded under the name Dertli in the Merzifon Cönkü. Metin Hakverdioğlu, who published the cönk, counts Dertli among the well-known minstrels who stopped in Merzifon, which shows that he identifies the Dertli of the cönk with the nineteenth-century Dertli of Bolu. Since we could not compare the poem with the editions of Dertli's divan, the attribution rests on the record in the cönk. The poet's life and his link with Amasya are in the article Dertli.

Bibliography

Online sources