Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11'li hece ölçüsü

Bir yere cem‘ olmuş birkaç ‘âşıḳlar
İnler birbirine meydân iderler
Mest-i elest olmış ḳalb-i ṣâdıḳlar
Muḥabbet sırrını nihân iderler

In English

1. A few aşıks have gathered in one place; moaning, they open the field to one another and match their words. Those of faithful heart have become drunk at the gathering of Elest; they keep the secret of divine love hidden.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The quatrain is the first stanza of a koşma on page 36 of the cönk; the rest of the poem is not given in the article. The lines have eleven syllables with a caesura after the sixth; the syllable count is ours. The second and fourth lines end in "meydân iderler" and "nihân iderler"; "iderler" is the redif (refrain word) and "meydân" and "nihân" carry the rhyme. The first and third lines also rhyme, in "âşıklar" and "sâdıklar", so that the whole stanza shows a cross rhyme pattern.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain describes a gathering of aşıks. "Meydan etmek" here means the minstrels opening the field to one another, meeting each other with saz and word; in the aşık tradition such contests were held in coffeehouses and mansions. In the second half the gathering takes on a Sufi meaning. "Mest-i elest" means drunk at the gathering of pre-eternity in which God asked the souls "Am I not your Lord?" and the souls answered "Yes"; the scene is based on verse 172 of the sura al-A'raf in the Qur'an and is regarded in Sufi poetry as the beginning of divine love. The gathered aşıks can thus be read both as minstrel poets and as lovers of God. "Keeping the secret of love hidden" in the last line recalls the principle of not revealing the secret to those unworthy of it. Dertli's closeness to the Bektashi lodges is known, and the language of the stanza agrees with the idiom of that milieu.

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