Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11'li hece ölçüsü

Ḫaṭırına düşüp ṣorarsa ḥâlim
Kirpikleri siyâh ḳalem ḳaşlı yâr
Zikri fikri çıḳmaz dilimden dâ’im
Anadan gülmedik ġarîb başlı yâr

In English

1. O beloved with black lashes and brows as fine as if drawn with a pen, should I come to your mind and you ask how I fare, know that your name and the thought of you never leave my tongue; I am one with a forlorn head who has not laughed since my mother bore me, O beloved.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The quatrain is the beginning of a koşma on page 43 of the cönk. The lines have eleven syllables with a caesura after the sixth; the syllable count is ours. The second and fourth lines share the redif "yâr" (beloved), with "kaşlı" and "başlı" carrying the rhyme. The first and third lines rhyme as well, in "hâlim" and "dâ'im". Since the rest of the koşma is not given in the article, it is not known with which rhyme the following stanzas continued.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain opens with an address recalling the beloved's beauty. Black lashes and a pen-drawn brow are formulas used by both aşık and divan poetry to describe the beloved; a "pen brow" is a brow as fine and even as if drawn with a calligrapher's pen. The pair "zikir and fikir" in the third line belongs to the language of Sufism: zikir is remembrance on the tongue, fikir reflection in the heart. The lover says he remembers the beloved without pause, as a dervish remembers God. The fourth line can be read in two ways. If the epithet "forlorn-headed, not having laughed since birth" belongs to the lover, he presents himself as a friendless man whose face has not smiled since his mother bore him; if it belongs to the beloved, the beloved too appears unlucky and forlorn. The wording of the previous lines and common usage in aşık poetry make the first reading more likely; this assessment is ours. Forlornness is a theme that also matches Dertli's life spent away from home.

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